Is Stephen King on Drugs?
Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King
I'm starting to think that Stephen King must be on drugs. I just finished reading Hearts in Atlantis and feel like I took a trip without ever leaving my recliner chair. The book is kind of a cross between King's traditional horror writing and his very odd Gunslinger days published initially in pieces as mini books. The very best I can figure is that he took a heap of his short stories, put them in time order, and tossed Carol in several stories to get some sense of continuity.
The first story in the book set in 1960 is about a kid who becomes friends with an old man who moves upstairs. This is not a "normal" old man. He comes from some other parallel universe and is running from some bad guys called the low men. The low men catch up with the kid and the old guy, and the kid has to decide whether he wants to go on over to this other world. He decides not to go, but the old man promises to keep in touch.
Skip forward to 1966 and to a college. Carol who was the kid's first love in the earlier novella becomes involved in the anti-war movement as her boyfriend comes close to flunking out of college due to a card addiction. The boyfriend pulls it together at the last minute, and Carol runs off with a militant anti-war group after accidentally bombing a college building and killing some people.
In the 1983 chapter, a Vietnam vet called "Blind Willie" scams people by pretending to be blind and making oodles of money panhandling. He thinks a lot about the war and way back to when he helped beat up Carol when she was a kid. He also thinks he better kill the cop who is putting the squeeze on for more pay-off and has threatened to follow him and find out the truth.
By 1999, some of the boys who went to Vietnam including boys from the college card group and from the playground group in the first novella are thinking back on the war. They are all mostly dead or troubled. One guy who was Carol's boyfriend for a while goes back for a funeral and then gets stuck in traffic. All this random furniture begins to fall out of the sky including a ball glove from the early story.
The last story has the kid from the first story back home for the funeral of the friend who died in the flying furniture episode. His girlfriend Carol also turns back up finally under an assumed name. The old guy from the beginning played some part from the world beyond in making sure they both come full circle back to town where they leave the ball glove there on the ground.
If all those stories don't make much sense, then you have a perfect idea of what this book is like. Though it's billed as a tribute to the 60s generation, it's just a jumble of stuff with little "ah-ha" moments where you think you're getting on track but get run over by the next train coming down the track.
King puts out a lot of books. I will give him that. His earlier horror pieces were terrific and came out when I was young. No. They weren't great literature. They were great stories and fun to read. All this current parallel world stuff doesn't appeal to me near as much, and I guess I'm getting tired of all the clichés and run on sentences in King books. There are times I read a sentence a couple of times before I figure out his "trying to be way cool" rhyme schemes or alliteration which seemed kind of musical way back but kind of tired these days.
Hearts in Atlantis is definitely not one of King's better books. In fact, I started it a year ago and only finished about one-fourth of the book. Last week at the beach with no TV and a couple rainy days, I started again from the beginning and finished it up.
