stephen king hearts in atlantis first edition

Hearts in Atlantis traces several characters from childhood through college and into adulthood.

'About this title' may belong to another edition of this title. 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. The most intense Hearts player, Ronnie Malenfant ('evil infant'), perpetrates a My Lai-like atrocity a nice Harwich girl becomes a radical bomber. The characters and stories are crisscrossed with connections that sometimes click and sometimes clunk. The kids discover sex, rock, and politics, become war heroes and victims, and spend the '80s and '90s shell-shocked by change. 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.

Vietnam is the otherworldly horror that haunts the remaining four stories. 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.' 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. 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.

They close in on Ted and Bobby, just as a gang of older kids menace Bobby and his girlfriend, Carol. Unfortunately, Ted is being hunted by yellow-jacketed men-monsters from King's Dark Tower novels who take over the shady part of town. 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.'īobby's mom takes in a lodger, Ted Brautigan, who turns the boy on to great books like Lord of the Flies. But his widowed mom is impoverished, and so bitter that she barely loves him.

The best is 'Low Men in Yellow Coats,' about Bobby Garfield of Harwich, Connecticut, who craves a Schwinn for his 11th birthday. Stephen King's collection of five stories about '60s kids reads like a novel.

Stephen king hearts in atlantis first edition