‘Time passes and everything gets bigger except us…’
The release of Hearts in Atlantis, a Stephen King collection featuring three novellas and two short stories, was overshadowed somewhat by the fact that the author was involved in a near fatal car crash on the eve of the book’s release. As a result, it only spent 16 weeks on the bestseller chart and has become one of the more lesser known books in King’s bibliography. Don’t let that fool you, however, as with nearly all of King’s work, there is loads of excellent stuff here…
The stories featured here are essentially about a trio of childhood friends, Bobby Garfield, Sully John and Carol Gerber, and how they are shaped by events from their childhood and the onset of the Vietnam War. ‘Low Men in Yellow Coats’, the first and longest story in the collection, sees Ted Brautigan, a prominent character from King’s Dark Tower series, move in the apartment above Bobby and his controlling mother. ‘Hearts in Atlantis’, confusingly the second story in the collection, centres around University of Maine freshman, Peter Riley, and how his entire dorm room becomes addicted to playing the card game, hearts (at the expense of their studies). ‘Blind Willie’, the third and least successful story, is a bizarre tale of attrition from the point of view of one of Carol’s childhood bullies from the first story. ‘Why We’re in Vietnam’, the penultimate story, reveals the fate of Sully John, and ‘Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling’ the final entry, little more than an epilogue really, offers a glimmer of hope for Bobby and Carol.
Aside from ‘Blind Willie’ which I did not enjoy at all, this is another strong collection that is anchored by the titular story, and the novel sized ‘Low Men in Yellow Coats’. The latter may have moments that are incomprehensible for anyone not familiar with the Dark Tower series, but the story is ostensibly about loss of innocence. Bobby’s relationship with Ted is the other side of the coin to the dark association shared between Todd Bowden and Arthur Denker in Apt Pupil. This time, the older gentleman is kind and generous, while Bobby, like King, is a sweet kid with a literary bent. The depiction of the low men, featured only briefly in the Dark Tower, also helps to add a little more weight to them, a little more meat around the bone. As a result of this, they are much more terrifying here than in the series from which they first spawned.
In my early twenties, I lived in a shared house with two other people, and one day, we just decided to start a poker game. None of us had really played much before, but it seemed like fun. Within a week we were playing most nights, within a month, every weekend the house was full of people all playing poker until the early hours of the morning. While hearts is used in Hearts in Atlantis as a way to demonstrate how desperate the boys are to escape the reality of potentially being drafted into the Vietnam War (and perhaps also as a metaphor for addiction more generally), I identified with the feeling of getting swept up in something that appears innocent on the surface but eventually turns more sinister. King doesn’t have many stories set in a dorm room (he drew directly from his own experiences for this one), and the combination of nostalgia and reflections on what it meant to grow up in the shadow of war is a heady one.
The other stories are really just table dressing to the two novellas, but they do add some texture and help to provide the feel of a proper collection rather than a pair of stories that are only thematically linked (save for Carol Gerber who is the only character to feature prominently in every story).
Hearts in Atlantis is destined to become one of King’s lesser lights, but anyone who likes the idea of King rejecting genre fiction entirely will find plenty to enjoy here – ditto fans of the Dark Tower series.