Our theme for the month of March is “monsters.”

During this season of open-ended days, I’m catching up on some of the media I’ve missed out on over the years. I finished The Good Place and finally saw the ever-relevant Groundhog Day. I started watching Breaking Bad (anyone heard of it?). And, while ignoring my vast collection of unread nonfiction books, I’m getting into Stephen King.

Beyond just being a master of horror, King fills his stories with heartfelt, sometimes brutal explorations of human nature. These themes shine in Hearts in Atlantis, a 1999 collection of novellas and short stories connected by a few luminous recurring characters. The first novella contains trace elements of the supernatural, but the book is primarily an examination of the baby boomer generation and the dark legacy of the Vietnam era. This lesser-known collection is a captivating proof of King’s insight into an era he believes is as lost as the city of Atlantis.

“Low Men in Yellow Coats,” the first novella, is a myopic story about the boyhood of eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield in 1960. Though Bobby’s tale is self-contained—the movie adaptation, starring Anthony Hopkins, ignores the book’s other stories—it establishes the greater themes for the rest of the collection. Bobby lives with his cold-hearted mother and yearns for a father figure. When Ted, a 60-something man with a keen ability to read people, moves in upstairs, Bobby latches on to him as a friend and mentor. 

Bobby’s sweetness is heartwarming as he and Ted spend many afternoons together drinking root beer and reading the newspaper. Eventually, Ted asks Bobby to keep an eye out around town for the mysterious monsters he fears might be following him: low men in yellow coats. The low men shouldn’t be dangerous to Bobby, but Ted has a magic about him that they want for themselves. 

The low men communicate using secret signals around town. They draw chalk crescent moons near hopscotch games on sidewalks. They drive “loud, vulgar” cars and hang lost pet signs upside-down. Bobby watches for these signs, but he also enjoys the freedom of summertime with his best friends, Carol and Sully-John. He doesn’t realize this will be the last summer of his childhood and innocence.

When he reads Ted’s copy of Lord of the Flies, Bobby learns, first in abstraction but soon in his own life, about people’s capacity for savage cruelty. He begins feeling the dark presence of Ted’s enemies in town. He sees kids hurting other kids and adults taking advantage of each other. His mother takes out her pain on Bobby and Ted, leading to a final confrontation with the low men in yellow coats. 

The reader’s heart breaks for Bobby as he learns that adults won’t always protect you. That truth is relative, and there are monsters in the world that confuse what’s real and what’s good. Bobby, much like his country, will not be the same after the harsh lessons learned in the 60s. “Adulthood is accretive by nature,” the narrator observes, “a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps.” 

What happens to Bobby, Carol, and Sully-John that summer guides the choices they make for the rest of their lives, even as they drift apart. The following four stories follow them as they grow up under the monstrous shadow of the Vietnam War.

The titular novella that follows, “Hearts in Atlantis,” is an enchanting story that immerses the reader in a freshman dorm at the University of Maine. Pete Riley knows he’s supposed to care about his classes, especially since being a college student is his only ticket out of getting drafted. But his grades slip when he becomes addicted to betting on games of Hearts with his dormmates. Their kitchen competitions drown out everything else going on at school—just as college life easily distracted from what was going on in Vietnam in 1966.

Pete meets Bobby’s childhood friend Carol, a blossoming activist who challenges him to look beyond their own slice of the world. As Pete searches for romance, meaning, and the unlucky queen of spades, he ponders where his life is leading. But in a shocking moment of Hearts-induced hysteria, Pete and his friends laugh at their disabled classmate as he slips in a puddle during a rainstorm. The story hinges on this prolonged moment of humiliation and cruelty as Pete must decide what kind of person he is going to be. 

An older and wiser Pete narrates the story, piecing together the feelings that led to that moment. College life, just like that era of the 60s, was a lost time, a vanishing existence soon to be clouded by darker realizations. “You see how jumbled it all is in my mind?” he says. “It was Atlantis, that’s all I know for sure, way down below the ocean.” 

These two novellas take up three-quarters of Hearts in Atlantis and are followed by three short stories. “Blind Willie” is about an acquaintance of Bobby and Carol’s who never gets over what he did that summer of 1960, despite showing heroism in Vietnam where he fought with Sully-John. It’s the strangest story of the bunch, but it sets the stage for the truly gripping one that follows. 

“Why We’re in Vietnam,” the most explicit piece of cultural commentary in the book, follows Sully-John as he connects with his old lieutenant a few decades after the war. They recount the unspeakable violence they experienced in the jungle, replaying what happened overseas and how their generation has dealt with it since. Their identities fractured as they left behind parts of themselves in Vietnam. 

In America today, they’re consumers. They get divorced, drink, move to the suburbs. But back then, they faced horrors that others can’t understand. During a particularly harrowing memory of Vietnam, tension builds between Sully-John’s battered platoon and a local village, until friendly fire becomes an inevitability to prevent a My Lai-style massacre. Ever since that day, a dead Vietnamese villager has returned to Sully-John as a hallucination.

After he says goodbye to the lieutenant, Sully-John gets stuck in traffic. The story ends in a truly spectacular scene of surreality, as he steps out of his car and sees consumer goods falling from the sky: a microwave, a cordless phone, a grand piano, all symbols of his generation’s “selling out” after the war. 

The final story is titled “Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling,” a nod to the Platters song “Twilight Time” that recurs throughout the book. More of an epilogue, it gives us a last look at a few of our beloved characters, who return to Connecticut to regain something of what was lost after their childhoods and country were forever changed.

King takes the simple premises of these stories and builds an incredible world out of them, guiding the reader through a version of America they can never truly understand. “Although it is difficult to believe,” King writes, “the Sixties are not fictional. They actually happened.” Each part stands well enough on its own, but together, the sum of these stories make for a magnificent whole. Readers today, living through another century-defining period politically and culturally, will remember these stories long after turning the last page.

2 Comments

  1. Shirley Diederich

    I am glad you have discovered Steven King. I love his writing. It grows more meaningful as the years go by.

    Reply
  2. Kyric Koning

    I’m always on the fence about whether I want to read Stephen King or not. Even after this glowing, enchanting review, I am still on that fence. Like, I get that he’s a good writer and has some great works, but most of the stuff he writes doesn’t interest me. I don’t know. Perhaps I’m too particular when it comes to that stuff.

    Reply

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