Hearts in Atlantis - Softcover

"Wonderfully wicked." -- Carol Memmott, USA Today

"King is as sharp and versatile as ever." -- Erica Noonan, Boston Globe

"Quietly dazzling." -- Ted Anthony, Associated Press

"King continues to be dedicated to giving his readers a luxuriant experience, the basic pleasure of getting lost in a book." -- Charles Taylor, New York Times Book Review

"King lets the reader put the book down at night after one story, knowing another horrific treat awaits the next day." -- Amanda St. Amand, St. Louis Post Dispatch

"King is as sharp and disgusting as ever... Haunting." -- People magazine

"King reminds us again of his power to unhinge with a single line or image. A master of the storytelling craft, he gets his ghastly fingernails right beneath the skin." -- John Marks, Salon.com

"In these 13 newly collected stories, we see a master craftsman at the top of his game and clearly enjoying himself.... Each story is a treat not just for King fans but for any fan of good fiction." -- Salem Macknee, Charlotte Observer

"A master storyteller... Haunting." -- Karen Sandstrom, Cleveland Plain Dealer

The classic collection of five deeply resonant and disturbing interconnected stories from #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King.

Innocence, experience, truth, deceit, loss, and recovery are at the core of these five interconnected, sequential tales—each deeply rooted in the 1960s, and each scarred by the Vietnam War, which continues to cast its shadow over American lives, politics and culture.

In Part One, “Low Men in Yellow Coats,” eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield discovers a world of predatory malice in his own neighborhood. He also discovers that adults are sometimes not rescuers but at the heart of the terror.

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.

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.

And 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.

Full of danger and suspense, full of heart, this spellbinding fiction will take some readers to a place they have never been...and others to a place they have never been able to completely forget. Nearly twenty years after its first publication, Hearts in Atlantis is powerful and astonishingly current.

“You will see Stephen King in a new light. Read this moving, heartfelt tragedy and weep—weep for our lost conscience.” —BookPage