
When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good.

Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. After his father left them when Stephen was two, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Stephen Edwin King was born the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. 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, 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.

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. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War. Hearts in Atlantis, King's newest fiction, is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Images from that war - and the protests against it - had flooded America's living rooms for a decade. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. Five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999.
