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.