King warns readers that his essay may contain “half-truths, screwy chronology and maybe a few outright lies.” He started working on it, he says, expecting to undergo a sort of auto-hypnosis similar to what he experienced when writing about his childhood in It. He observes that his works from that period have no sense of play in them.

He channeled most of his fury into his writing. He remembers being angry most of the time-although that view is not echoed by the people who knew him during that period. They picketed, staged sit-ins, participated in marches, boycotts and blockades, and found ways to rile up the staid administration-most notably in an “event” known as the Great Chicken Crisis (mentioned by several contributors and immortalized in a photograph). Read this moving, heartfelt tragedy and weep-weep for our lost conscience.King adopted some of the conventions of the anti-establishment (long hair, shaggy beard) and became involved with socially active organizations on campus. “You will see Stephen King in a new light. Nearly twenty years after its first publication, Hearts in Atlantis is powerful and astonishingly current. 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.Īnd 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.įull of danger and suspense, full of heart, this spellbinding fiction will take some readers to a place they have never been.and others to a place they have never been able to completely forget.

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. He also discovers that adults are sometimes not rescuers but at the heart of the terror. In Part One, “Low Men in Yellow Coats,” eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield discovers a world of predatory malice in his own neighborhood. Innocence, experience, truth, deceit, loss, and recovery are at the core of these five interconnected, sequential tales-each deeply rooted in the 1960s, and each scarred by the Vietnam War, which continues to cast its shadow over American lives, politics and culture.

The classic collection of five deeply resonant and disturbing interconnected stories from #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King.

Stephen king hearts of atlantis