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Stephen King, whose
first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before
the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first
hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that
war -- and the protests against it -- had flooded America's
living rooms for a decade. 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
remarkable book's denouement, Bobby returns to his hometown
where one final secret, the hope of redemption, and his
heart's desire may await him.
Full of danger, full of suspense, most of all full of heart,
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. |
