Stephen King's collection of five stories about '60s kids reads like a novel. The best is "Low Men in Yellow Coats," about Bobby Garfield of Harwich, Connecticut, who craves a Schwinn for his 11th birthday. But his widowed mom is impoverished, and so bitter that she barely loves him. King is as good as Spielberg or Steven Millhauser at depicting an enchanted kid's-eye view of the world, and his Harwich is realistically luminous to the tiniest detail: kids bashing caps with a smoke-blackened rock, a car grille "like the sneery mouth of a chrome catfish," a Wild Mouse carnival ride that makes kids "simultaneously sure they were going to live forever and die immediately."

Bobby's mom takes in a lodger, Ted Brautigan, who turns the boy on to great books like Lord of the Flies. Unfortunately, Ted is being hunted by yellow-jacketed men--monsters from King's Dark Tower novels who take over the shady part of town. They close in on Ted and Bobby, just as a gang of older kids menace Bobby and his girlfriend, Carol. This pointedly echoes the theme of Lord of the Flies (the one book King says he wishes he'd written): war is the human condition. Ted's mind-reading powers rub off a bit on Bobby, granting nightmare glimpses of his mom's assault by her rich, vile, jaunty boss. King packs plenty into 250 pages, using the same trick Bobby discerns in the film Village of the Damned: "The people seemed like real people, which made the make-believe parts scarier."

Vietnam is the otherworldly horror that haunts the remaining four stories. In the title tale, set in 1966, University of Maine college kids play the card game Hearts so obsessively they risk flunking out and getting drafted. The kids discover sex, rock, and politics, become war heroes and victims, and spend the '80s and '90s shell-shocked by change. The characters and stories are crisscrossed with connections that sometimes click and sometimes clunk. The most intense Hearts player, Ronnie Malenfant ("evil infant"), perpetrates a My Lai-like atrocity; a nice Harwich girl becomes a radical bomber. King's metaphor for lost '60s innocence is inspired by Donovan's "sweet and stupid" song about the sunken continent, and his stories hail the vanished Atlantis of his youth with deep sweetness and melancholy intelligence. --Tim Appelo


Amazon.com Audiobook Review
With his idiosyncratic blend of patrician airs and boyish charm, narrator William Hurt provides a wonderful complement to this wildly imaginative collection of short stories by author Stephen King. Hurt carefully weaves the disparate elements into a cohesive whole, embracing the subtle complexities of each character; one moment a wizened sadness leaks into his voice as a haunted old man, pursued by demons, asks his 11-year-old lookout, "You know everyone on this street, on this block of this street anyway? And you'd know strangers? Sojourners? Faces of those unknown?" Then, in a profound yet almost imperceptible switch, he exposes the boy's naive enthusiasm, "I think so." Right about here your neck hairs will stand at attention. Hurt's peculiar vocal style is in perfect pitch to King's dark, surreal vision of growing up amid the monsters of post-Vietnam America. (Running time: 21 hours, 16 cassettes) --George Laney


From Publishers Weekly
This collection of five thematically linked short stories dwells on the legacy of the 1960s. They share a collective moodiness, a feeling of depressed hangover coming after youth has been lost and the nation has suffered troubled times. Read aloud, this pungent atmosphere is especially strong. A-list actor Hurt stylishly performs the lengthy opener, "Low Men in Yellow Coats," in which 11-year-old Bobby Garfield falls under the spell of an older man his mother has taken in as a boarder (a father figure who introduces him first to literatureALord of the FliesAthen to supernatural phenomena). Hurt skillfully evokes pathos from the story's fine detailing: its sense of small-town place and Bobby's child's-eye-view of the evil characters around him. King reads the title story, "Hearts in Atlantis," about Maine college students who mindlessly play cards instead of studying while the Vietnam War rages in the background. The author's modest, reedy voice rings with autobiographical truthAas the protagonist is a young would-be writer, na?ve to the ways of the world. Taken together, at 21 hours' listening, however, King's shining moments too often give way to fatigue: the stories are repetitious, full of plot rehashings and meaningless asides. Also available on CD. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
YA-An intricate and compelling tapestry of the '60s and those who came of age during that turbulent decade. Readers first meet 11-year-old Bobby Garfield in suburban Connecticut in 1960. He and his friends, Sully John and Carol, come to the end of their collective childhood during that summer when violence, rage, guilt, shame, and heroism break up their close-knit relationship. The second story begins six years later on the University of Maine campus. A card game, Hearts, threatens the college future of a group of freshmen. Outside, the Vietnam War and its concurrent rebellion are raging. Pete, the protagonist, offers a firsthand view of the craziness of the time. The link to the first story is Carol, Bobby's childhood friend, with whom Pete falls in love. The next two stories each follow another figure from the summer of 1960: Bobby's friend Sully John and a member of a trio that assaulted Carol. Both young men are Vietnam vets, each one crippled in his own way from his war experience. The final story finds middle-aged Bobby returning to Connecticut, coming full circle with the events of his life. This is a very long book; however, after reading a few pages, most teens will be hard-pressed to put it down. The characters are compelling and well drawn, the action is ingeniously interwoven from story to story, and the feel of the 60s, and the baggage carried into later decades, is vivid, harsh, and absolutely true.Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Whether you got the book for the holidays and you are finally catching up on your reading, or you meant to read it but didn't buy it yet--go for the unabridged audio version of King's 1999 blockbuster. King shares reading the five loosely interwoven stories with William Hurt. These vignettes are not typical King horror per se but the prose of a creative mind. Hurt's voice grasps the sf aspects of "Low Men in Yellow Coats" with distinction. In the first story, we meet 11-year-old Bobby Garfield during the summer of 1960, when he is befriended by an odd, strange, and single elderly man who employs Bobby to be his eyes and ears and ever watchful of peculiarly specific signs in the neighborhood. King relates the title story about some boys in a college dorm who are addicted to a card game, and the life lessons that they learn on campus over the year. The audio production includes musical interludes, which detract when intrusive but enhance when on the mark. Highly recommended, especially where King is in demand.-Kristin M. Jacobi, Eastern Connecticut State Univ., Willimantic Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Caleb Crain
We now know what Stephen King, the master of horror, is afraid of. In Hearts in Atlantis, King takes up the Vietnam War, and it scares him so bad he won't let his hero act imprudently.


From AudioFile
HEARTS IN ATLANTIS offers five novellas, each examining both childhood and the Vietnam War. William Hurt opens the series with a quirky and riveting account of a summer in the lives of three Connecticut children and the adults who influence them. His odd pauses and rushing narrative clearly portray the images of childhood, and the unsettling ways of grown-ups, as well. King takes over for the title story, about a game of cards in a college dorm. No one else could bring to life the University of Maine like this alum, and no one else could better vocalize the deep woods accents of some of its students. The author falls short, however, in his narration of "Blind Willie." Believable in Maine, he doesn't cut it in New York City. But Hurt is back for the closing segments, "Why We're in Vietnam" and "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," notably more subdued in these accounts of adult pain and longing than in his exuberant telling of childhood tales. Well-chosen musical sound bites punctuate all five stories. R.P.L. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
King's fat new work impressively follows his general literary upgrading begun with Bag of Bones (1998) and settles readers onto the seabottom of one of his most satisfying ideas ever. Set in fictional Harwich and semifictional Bridgeport, the story weaves five Vietnam-haunted small-town New England stories into a deeply moving overall vision. The five are: ``Low Men in Yellow Coats,'' set in 1960 and at about 250 pages the longest; ``Hearts in Atlantis,'' set in 1966; ``Blind Willie,'' set in 1983; ``Why We're in Vietnam'' and ``Heavenly Shades of Night Are Failing,'' both set in 1999. The umbrella title fits well, with King showing us the lost, time-sunken continent of the late Eisenhower era, as hearts from the deep sea of that Hopperesque time slowly rise to the tormented surface of the present-day. Whether his characters are stock or not, its impossible not to enjoy Kings gentle ways of fleshing them out, all the old bad habits and mannerisms gone as he draws you into the most richly serious work of his career. Elderly Ted Brautigan, who may seem a bit like Max von Sydow, moves into a house occupied by Bobby Garfield, age 11, and his hard-bitten mother, Liz, a secretary for real-estate agent Don Biderman, with whom shes having an unhappy affair. Brautigan hires Bobby to read the paper aloud, gives him Lord of the Fliesand also strange warnings about low men in yellow coats and posters about lost dogs. Report any sighting of these! Ted also has attacks of parrot pupilitis, the pupils opening and closing as he stares at other worlds. Although some characters wander in from King's inferior occult Western Dark Tower series, their cartoony, computer-graphic effects making them seem in the wrong novel, this minor lapse fades before King's memory-symphony of America during Vietnam. Page after page, a truly mature King does everything right and deserves some kind of literary rosette. His masterpiece.(Book- of-the-Month Club main selection; Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Bentley Little has made his name as one of the newer masters of the horror tale, in both novel and short form (You missed The House? The Ignored? The Store? Catch up on 'em now!) He's written a superb and incisive review of Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis , originally published in Hellnotes: The Newsletter for the Horror Professional, and we just had to reprint it because we loved it so much.

Now, on to Bentley Little's take on Hearts in Atlantis...

Bentley Little says:

Thank God for Stephen King.

When Robert McCammon decided to prove to the world that he was a serious writer, he put out Boy's Life, an overrated amalgam of recycled Ray Bradbury, strained magic realism, and a rather lame mystery that was similar in tone (too similar, some thought) to the 1988 Frank LaLoggia film, Lady in White. A virtual renunciation of his horror past, the novel jettisoned his strengths and highlighted his weaknesses, making it hard to believe that the same author who had penned the brilliant and darkly literary Ushers's Passing had turned out this nice, tame, Mor coming-of-age story.

Stephen King has no such chip on his shoulder, no burning desire to disassociate himself from the field that made him famous. King realizes where his strengths are and also recognizes that there is nothing intrinsically demeaning about horror fiction, that it is in fact the most literary of genres.

He proves this without a doubt in the brilliant Hearts in Atlantis.

Consisting of two novellas and threeshortstories, all connected and all set between the years 1960 and 1999, Hearts in Atlantis concerns itself with the '60s, their fallout, and the lost boomer generation that they spawned. And while it's not possible to make a definitive statement about that complex and turbulent decade, King here comes pretty damn close.

The opening piece, "Low Men in Yellow Coats," is the book's best, a dizzying mix of fantasy, horror, and domestic drama that is, at its core, a heartfelt paean to the power of love. In it, 11-year-old Bobby Garfield develops a summer friendship with the mysterious old man who rents an apartment on the third floor of his building, and what he learns during the course of that summer forever sets him apart from his best friend, Sully John, his nascent girlfriend, Carol Gerber, and, indeed, the rest of the world. Extremely original and populated with the type of realistic, sympathetic characters that have become King's trademark, the story references both The Regulators and the Dark Tower books and ingeniously ascribes fantastic origins to mundane city sights, managing to make even sidewalk hopscotch squares threatening. A truly impressive achievement.

If "Low Men in Yellow Coats" is the standout, coming in a very close second is the title story, "Hearts in Atlantis." Narrated by a college student whose awakening social conscience coincides with the escalation of the Vietnam War and his exposure to the herd mentality of his fellow dorm buddies, "Hearts in Atlantis" is a piece of mainstream fiction that finds freshman Pete Riley at a crossroads in his life. Unable to resist the siren's call of an endless card game that has caused more than one student to flunk out and thus be eligible for the draft, Pete is also becoming aware that the thoughts, opinions, and worldview he once took for granted do not necessarily serve him in these changing times. Constancy is nowhere to be found, and even his conservative mother is touched by the vicissitudes of the age. Salvation is offered to Pete through Bobby's old girlfriend, Carol Gerber, who is a member of the burgeoning peace movement and with whom he becomes emotionally involved.

Along with the '60s, Carol is the thread that ties all of these stories together. Although she doesn't appear in the next piece, "Blind Willie," the chronicle of a suburban man with a haunted past and a double (or triple) life, she is at the crux of this tale, as she is in "Why We're in Vietnam," where Bobby's childhood friend, Sully John, looks back from the vantage point of 1999 at the war that forever changed him. The last and shortest story, "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," brings everything full circle in a way that is both satisfying and unbearably sad.

The stories that make up Hearts in Atlantis are connected not only to each other but to the rest of the King canon as well. In this latest and strongest bid to become the Faulkner of the fantastique, King has managed to incorporate elements of earlier works into these pieces as part of an evolving overarching mythology. While some of his past efforts to weave the threads of disparate novels into a single tapestry sometimes seemed awkward and obvious, in 1997's Wizard and Glass and now in Hearts in Atlantis, he has found a way to smoothly integrate these elements that is not only consistent but seems natural and predetermined. There is also a strain of melancholy that links these two books, a sweet sadness that suffuses the narratives and reveals a writer at the top of his form.

A deft, assured work, Hearts in Atlantis addresses a generation's loss of innocence, and its observations about childhood and growing up make those found in King's earlier It seem clumsy and simplistic by comparison. Taken in toto, the stories here offer a powerful argument against groupthink and the madness of crowds, while reaffirming the importance of individuality, love, and friendship.

According to all of the publicity at the time, Bag of Bones was King's bid for legitimacy, his calling card to the reviewers who had previously dismissed his fiction out of hand because of its subject matter. Bag of Bones was a strong novel, but it did not have the depth or scope of Hearts in Atlantis This is the one that is going to wow the critics (or should, if there is any justice in the world). A book of heart, wit, intelligence, and moral reflection, it is one of Stephen King's very best.

—Bentley Little
>Bentley Little is the author of tons of short stories as well as the bestselling horror novels The House, The Ignored, The Store, and many others. He lives in southern California. This review was reprinted with permission from Hellnotes: The Newsletter for the Horror Professional.

ANNOTATION

In Hearts in Altantis, King mesmerizes readers with fiction deeply rooted in the Sixties, and explores -- through four defining decades -- the haunting legacy of the Vietmnam War.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Hearts in Atlantis, King's newest fiction, is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.

In Part One, "Low Men in Yellow Coats", eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield discovers a world of predatory malice in his own neighborhood. He also discovers that adults are sometimes not rescuers but at the heart of the terror.

In the title story, a bunch of college kids get hooked on a card game, discover the possibility of protest...and confront their own collective heart of darkness, where laughter may be no more than the thinly disguised cry of the beast.

In "Blind Willie" and "Why We're in Vietnam", two men who grew up with Bobby in suburban Connecticut try to fill the emptiness of the post-Vietnam era in an America which sometimes seems as hollow—and as haunted—as their own lives.

And in "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling", this book's denouement, Bobby returns to his hometown where one final secret, the hope of redemption, and his heart's desire may await him.

Stephen King's new book will take some readers to a place they have never been...and others to a place they have never been able to completely leave.

SYNOPSIS

By "Atlantis", Kang means the 1960s, that otherworldly decade which, like the fabled continent, has sunk into myth. Here, in five interconnected narratives that span from 1960 to 1999, King draws a stunning portrait of American life after the Vietnam War.

FROM THE CRITICS

Trudi Miller Rosenblum - Billboard

This thoughtful, insightful book is riveting, with King's characters fully realized and fully believable.

Newsweek

...[T]houghtful and scary tales...

Library Journal

Whether you got the book for the holidays and you are finally catching up on your reading, or you meant to read it but didn't buy it yet--go for the unabridged audio version of King's 1999 blockbuster. King shares reading the five loosely interwoven stories with William Hurt. These vignettes are not typical King horror per se but the prose of a creative mind. Hurt's voice grasps the sf aspects of "Low Men in Yellow Coats" with distinction. In the first story, we meet 11-year-old Bobby Garfield during the summer of 1960, when he is befriended by an odd, strange, and single elderly man who employs Bobby to be his eyes and ears and ever watchful of peculiarly specific signs in the neighborhood. King relates the title story about some boys in a college dorm who are addicted to a card game, and the life lessons that they learn on campus over the year. The audio production includes musical interludes, which detract when intrusive but enhance when on the mark. Highly recommended, especially where King is in demand.--Kristin M. Jacobi, Eastern Connecticut State Univ., Willimantic Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Esquire

...[D]eeply felt...a primer on how to write a story.

Newsweek