His widowed, penny-pinching mother in a pretty Connecticut suburb. Eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield lives with The first novella, ''Low Men in Yellow Coats,'' harks back to the world of Ray Bradbury's ''Dandelion Wine.'' It's 1960, which still feels like the 1950's. Ask about stuff like that and you were asking for real trouble." If you asked, for instance, how come sheĬould afford three new dresses from Sears, one of them silk, but not three monthly payments of $11.50 on the Schwinn in the Western Auto window (it was red and silver, and just looking at it made Bobby's Also, when it came to his mom, if you asked about certain stuff you were asking for trouble. Bobby bet it beat those jobs all to heck and gone. "Bobby wasn't exactly sure what his mom did during her days (and her evenings) at the office, but he bet it beat making shoes or picking apples or lighting the Tip-Top Bakery ovens at four-thirty For one thing, it'sīroken into five pieces, incommensurate in size and genre: two novellas, two short stories and a hasty epilogue. On its surface, as in its depths, this book is messy. In fact, the reader may be forgiven for suspecting that King has done nothing more artful than bite off more than he can chew. This may not be immediately clear to the reader. ''Hearts in Atlantis'' is a book about survivor guilt. King has written something with an emotional strategy much slower and much more diffuse. He stays enrolled, and he stays civilian. At the last minute, and with a touch of regret, the book's central figure thinks better of flunking out of college in 1966. Only the book's minor charactersĮnlist and serve. In ''Hearts in Atlantis,'' King takes up the Vietnam War, and it scares him so bad he won't let his hero act imprudently. We now know what Stephen King, the master of horror, is afraid of.
In the efficient economy of the horror novel - too efficient for the psychologicallyįastidious - the resulting nightmare delivers both a thrill surreptitiously longed for and a punishment for having indulged. And the reader, with a lesser, merely voyeuristic rashness, wants to see him do it.
But of course the hero acts unwisely, because in some darkĬellar of his personality he wants the bad thing. And you really shouldn't dig up your dead son and reinter him in the enchanted Indian burial ground. Take that job as the hotel's winter caretaker. You really shouldn't buy that 1958 Plymouth Fury. Very horror plot hinges on at least one moment of grand imprudence. Set in the shadow of Vietnam, Stephen King's latest book features students more obsessed with cards than with war.
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