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Hearts In Atlantis Audio Cassette – Unabridged, September 1, 1999
Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that war -- and the protests against it -- had flooded America's living rooms for a decade. Hearts in Atlantis, King's newest fiction, is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.
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 thier 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 haunted -- as their own lives.
And in "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," this remarkable audiobook's denouement. Booby returns to his hometown where one final secret, the hope of redemption, and his heart's desire may await him.
Full of danger, full of suspense, most of all full of heart, Stephen King's new audiobook will take some listeners to a place they have never been...and others to a place they have never been able to completely leave.
- Print length21 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 1999
- Dimensions2.5 x 4.25 x 7 inches
- ISBN-100671582356
- ISBN-13978-0671582357
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From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
-Kristin M. Jacobi, Eastern Connecticut State Univ., Willimantic
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hearts in Atlantis
By Stephen KingSimon & Schuster Audio
Copyright © 1999 Stephen KingAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780671582357
Excerpt
I. A Boy and His Mother. Bobby's Birthday.
The New Roomer. Of Time and Strangers.
Bobby Garfield's father had been one of those fellows who start losing their hair in their twenties and are completely bald by the age of forty-five or so. Randall Garfield was spared this extremity by dying of a heart attack at thirty-six. He was a real-estate agent, and breathed his last on the kitchen floor of someone else's house. The potential buyer was in the living room, trying to call an ambulance on a disconnected phone, when Bobby's dad passed away. At this time Bobby was three. He had vague memories of a man tickling him and then kissing his cheeks and his forehead. He was pretty sure that man had been his dad. Sadly missed, it said on Randall Garfield's gravestone, but his mom never seemed all that sad, and as for Bobby himself...well, how could you miss a guy you could hardly remember?
Eight years after his father's death, Bobby fell violently in love with the twenty-six-inch Schwinn in the window of the Harwich Western Auto. He hinted to his mother about the Schwinn in every way he knew, and finally pointed it out to her one night when they were walking home from the movies (the show had been The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, which Bobby didn't understand but liked anyway, especially the part where Dorothy McGuire flopped back in a chair and showed off her long legs). As they passed the hardware store, Bobby mentioned casually that the bike in the window would sure make a great eleventh-birthday present for some lucky kid.
"Don't even think about it," she said. "I can't afford a bike for your birthday. Your father didn't exactly leave us well off, you know."
Although Randall had been dead ever since Truman was President and now Eisenhower was almost done with his eight-year cruise, Your father didn't exactly leave us well off was still his mother's most common response to anything Bobby suggested which might entail an expenditure of more than a dollar. Usually the comment was accompanied by a reproachful look, as if the man had run off rather than died.
No bike for his birthday. Bobby pondered this glumly on their walk home, his pleasure at the strange, muddled movie they had seen mostly gone. He didn't argue with his mother, or try to coax her - that would bring on a counterattack, and when Liz Garfield counterattacked she took no prisoners - but he brooded on the lost bike...and the lost father. Sometimes he almost hated his father. Sometimes all that kept him from doing so was the sense, unanchored but very strong, that his mother wanted him to. As they reached Commonwealth Park and walked along the side of it - two blocks up they would turn left onto Broad Street, where they lived - he went against his usual misgivings and asked a question about Randall Garfield.
"Didn't he leave anything, Mom? Anything at all?" A week or two before, he'd read a Nancy Drew mystery where some poor kid's inheritance had been hidden behind an old clock in an abandoned mansion. Bobby didn't really think his father had left gold coins or rare stamps stashed someplace, but if there was something, maybe they could sell it in Bridgeport. Possibly at one of the hockshops. Bobby didn't know exactly how hocking things worked, but he knew what the shops looked like - they had three gold balls hanging out front. And he was sure the hockshop guys would be happy to help them. Of course it was just a kid's dream, but Carol Gerber up the street had a whole set of dolls her father, who was in the Navy, had sent from overseas. If fathers gave things - which they did - it stood to reason that fathers sometimes left things.
When Bobby asked the question, they were passing one of the streetlamps which ran along this side of Commonwealth Park, and Bobby saw his mother's mouth change as it always did when he ventured a question about his late father. The change made him think of a purse she had: when you pulled on the drawstrings, the hole at the top got smaller.
"I'll tell you what he left," she said as they started up Broad Street Hill. Bobby already wished he hadn't asked, but of course it was too late now. Once you got her started, you couldn't get her stopped, that was the thing. "He left a life insurance policy which lapsed the year before he died. Little did I know that until he was gone and everyone - including the undertaker - wanted their little piece of what I didn't have. He also left a large stack of unpaid bills, which I have now pretty much taken care of - people have been very understanding of my situation, Mr. Biderman in particular, and I'll never say they haven't been."
All this was old stuff, as boring as it was bitter, but then she told Bobby something new. "Your father," she said as they approached the apartment house which stood halfway up Broad Street Hill, "never met an inside straight he didn't like."
"What's an inside straight, Mom?"
"Never mind. But I'll tell you one thing, Bobby-O: you don't ever want to let me catch you playing cards for money. I've had enough of that to last me a lifetime."
Bobby wanted to enquire further, but knew better; more questions were apt to set off a tirade. It occurred to him that perhaps the movie, which had been about unhappy husbands and wives, had upset her in some way he could not, as a mere kid, understand. He would ask his friend John Sullivan about inside straights at school on Monday. Bobby thought it was poker, but wasn't completely sure.
"There are places in Bridgeport that take men's money," she said as they neared the apartment house where they lived. "Foolish men go to them. Foolish men make messes, and it's usually the women of the world that have to clean them up later on. Well..."
Bobby knew what was coming next; it was his mother's all-time favorite.
"Life isn't fair," said Liz Garfield as she took out her housekey and prepared to unlock the door of 149 Broad Street in the town of Harwich, Connecticut. It was April of 1960, the night breathed spring perfume, and standing beside her was a skinny boy with his dead father's risky red hair. She hardly ever touched his hair; on the infrequent occasions when she caressed him, it was usually his arm or his cheek which she touched.
"Life isn't fair," she repeated. She opened the door and they went in.
It was true that his mother had not been treated like a princess, and it was certainly too bad that her husband had expired on a linoleum floor in an empty house at the age of thirty-six, but Bobby sometimes thought that things could have been worse. There might have been two kids instead of just one, for instance. Or three. Hell, even four.
Or suppose she had to work some really hard job to support the two of them? Sully's mom worked at the Tip-Top Bakery downtown, and during the weeks when she had to light the ovens, Sully-John and his two older brothers hardly even saw her. Also Bobby had observed the women who came filing out of the Peerless Shoe Company when the three o'clock whistle blew (he himself got out of school at two-thirty), women who all seemed way too skinny or way too fat, women with pale faces and fingers stained a dreadful old-blood color, women with downcast eyes who carried their work shoes and pants in Total Grocery shopping bags. Last fall he'd seen men and women picking apples outside of town when he went to a church fair with Mrs. Gerber and Carol and little Ian (who Carol always called Ian-the-Snot). When he asked about them Mrs. Gerber said they were migrants, just like some kinds of birds - always on the move, picking whatever crops had just come ripe. Bobby's mother could have been one of those, but she wasn't.
What she was was Mr. Donald Biderman's secretary at Home Town Real Estate, the company Bobby's dad had been working for when he had his heart attack. Bobby guessed she might first have gotten the job because Donald Biderman liked Randall and felt sorry for her - widowed with a son barely out of diapers - but she was good at it and worked hard. Quite often she worked late. Bobby had been with his mother and Mr. Biderman together on a couple of occasions - the company picnic was the one he remembered most clearly, but there had also been the time Mr. Biderman had driven them to the dentist's in Bridgeport when Bobby had gotten a tooth knocked out during a recess game - and the two grownups had a way of looking at each other. Sometimes Mr. Biderman called her on the phone at night, and during those conversations she called him Don. But "Don" was old and Bobby didn't think about him much.
Bobby wasn't exactly sure what his mom did during her days (and her evenings) at the office, but he bet it beat making shoes or picking apples or lighting the Tip-Top Bakery ovens at four-thirty in the morning. Bobby bet it beat those jobs all to heck and gone. Also, when it came to his mom, if you asked about certain stuff you were asking for trouble. If you asked, for instance, how come she could afford three new dresses from Sears, one of them silk, but not three monthly payments of $11.50 on the Schwinn in the Western Auto window (it was red and silver, and just looking at it made Bobby's gut cramp with longing). Ask about stuff like that and you were asking for real trouble.
Bobby didn't. He simply set out to earn the price of the bike himself. It would take him until the fall, perhaps even until the winter, and that particular model might be gone from the Western Auto's window by then, but he would keep at it. You had to keep your nose to the grindstone and your shoulder to the wheel. Life wasn't easy, and life wasn't fair.
When Bobby's eleventh birthday rolled around on the last Tuesday of April, his mom gave him a small flat package wrapped in silver paper. Inside was an orange library card. An adult library card. Goodbye Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Don Winslow of the Navy. Hello to all the rest of it, stories as full of mysterious muddled passion as The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Not to mention bloody daggers in tower rooms. (There were mysteries and tower rooms in the stories about Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, but precious little blood and never any passion.)
"Just remember that Mrs. Kelton on the desk is a friend of mine," Mom said. She spoke in her accustomed dry tone of warning, but she was pleased by his pleasure - she could see it. "If you try to borrow anything racy like Peyton Place or Kings Row, I'll find out."
Bobby smiled. He knew she would.
"If it's that other one, Miss Busybody, and she asks what you're doing with an orange card, you tell her to turn it over. I've put written permission over my signature."
"Thanks, Mom. This is swell."
She smiled, bent, and put a quick dry swipe of the lips on his cheek, gone almost before it was there. "I'm glad you're happy. If I get home early enough, we'll go to the Colony for fried clams and ice cream. You'll have to wait for the weekend for your cake; I don't have time to bake until then. Now put on your coat and get moving, sonnyboy. You'll be late for school."
They went down the stairs and out onto the porch together. There was a Town Taxi at the curb. A man in a poplin jacket was leaning in the passenger window, paying the driver. Behind him was a little cluster of luggage and paper bags, the kind with handles.
"That must be the man who just rented the room on the third floor," Liz said. Her mouth had done its shrinking trick again. She stood on the top step of the porch, appraising the man's narrow fanny, which poked toward them as he finished his business with the taxi driver. "I don't trust people who move their things in paper bags. To me a person's things in a paper sack just looks slutty."
"He has suitcases, too," Bobby said, but he didn't need his mother to point out that the new tenant's three little cases weren't such of a much. None matched; all looked as if they had been kicked here from California by someone in a bad mood.
Bobby and his mom walked down the cement path. The Town Taxi pulled away. The man in the poplin jacket turned around. To Bobby, people fell into three broad categories: kids, grownups, and old folks. Old folks were grownups with white hair. The new tenant was of this third sort. His face was thin and tired-looking, not wrinkled (except around his faded blue eyes) but deeply lined. His white hair was baby-fine and receding from a liverspotted brow. He was tall and stooped-over in a way that made Bobby think of Boris Karloff in the Shock Theater movies they showed Friday nights at 11:30 on WPIX. Beneath the poplin jacket were cheap workingman's clothes that looked too big for him. On his feet were scuffed cordovan shoes.
"Hello, folks," he said, and smiled with what looked like an effort. "My name's Theodore Brautigan. I guess I'm going to live here awhile."
He held out his hand to Bobby's mother, who touched it just briefly. "I'm Elizabeth Garfield. This is my son, Robert. You'll have to pardon us, Mr. Brattigan - "
"It's Brautigan, ma'am, but I'd be happy if you and your boy would just call me Ted."
"Yes, well, Robert's late for school and I'm late for work. Nice to meet you, Mr. Brattigan. Hurry on, Bobby. Tempus fugit."
She began walking downhill toward town; Bobby began walking uphill (and at a slower pace) toward Harwich Elementary, on Asher Avenue. Three or four steps into this journey he stopped and looked back. He felt that his mom had been rude to Mr. Brautigan, that she had acted stuck-up. Being stuck-up was the worst of vices in his little circle of friends. Carol loathed a stuck-up person; so did Sully-John. Mr. Brautigan would probably be halfway up the walk by now, but if he wasn't, Bobby wanted to give him a smile so he'd know at least one member of the Garfield family wasn't stuck-up.
His mother had also stopped and was also looking back. Not because she wanted another look at Mr. Brautigan; that idea never crossed Bobby's mind. No, it was her son she had looked back at. She'd known he was going to turn around before Bobby knew it himself, and at this he felt a sudden darkening in his normally bright nature. She sometimes said it would be a snowy day in Sarasota before Bobby could put one over on her, and he supposed she was right about that. How old did you have to be to put one over on your mother, anyway? Twenty? Thirty? Or did you maybe have to wait until she got old and a little chicken-soupy in the head?
Mr. Brautigan hadn't started up the walk. He stood at its sidewalk end with a suitcase in each hand and the third one under his right arm (the three paper bags he had moved onto the grass of 149 Broad), more bent than ever under this weight. He was right between them, like a tollgate or something.
Liz Garfield's eyes flew past him to her son's. Go, they said. Don't say a word. He's new, a man from anywhere or nowhere, and he's arrived here with half his things in shopping bags. Don't say a word, Bobby, just go.
But he wouldn't. Perhaps because he had gotten a library card instead of a bike for his birthday. "It was nice to meet you, Mr.
Continues...
Excerpted from Hearts in Atlantisby Stephen King Copyright © 1999 by Stephen King. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
From AudioFile
Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster Audio; Unabridged edition (September 1, 1999)
- Language : English
- Audio Cassette : 21 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0671582356
- ISBN-13 : 978-0671582357
- Item Weight : 1 pounds
- Dimensions : 2.5 x 4.25 x 7 inches
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His first crime thriller featuring Bill Hodges, MR MERCEDES, won the Edgar Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award. Both MR MERCEDES and END OF WATCH received the Goodreads Choice Award for the Best Mystery and Thriller of 2014 and 2016 respectively.
King co-wrote the bestselling novel Sleeping Beauties with his son Owen King, and many of King's books have been turned into celebrated films and television series including The Shawshank Redemption, Gerald's Game and It.
King was the recipient of America's prestigious 2014 National Medal of Arts and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for distinguished contribution to American Letters. In 2007 he also won the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his wife Tabitha King in Maine.
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Top reviews from the United States
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So, an interesting fact about this book is that the movie with Anthony Hopkins, which was pretty decent, is based on the first story in this collection of stories. The first story is titled "Low Men in Yellow Coats" which makes absolutely no sense until you read the Dark Tower series, because this book was basically written during a much needed hiatus after he lost his mind in the wild west with that Susan Delgado nonsense that he eventually made the main story. You can imagine they could not have possibly called the movie that because it would have been confusing to most people, and simply not as catchy and dreamy as "Hearts in Atlantis".
Anyway, the first story is about a young boy that the older man kind of mentors while the boy watches out for him as well as he seems to suffering some kind of mental issue where he goes into trances and talks what sounds like gibberish, which again is better understood when you know about the grander story this one takes place in. For instance, he keeps saying "They draw west now..." Certain informed readers know exactly who he's talking about.
At the same time, some unseen threat is closing in on the boy that the older man is protecting him from. Everything that's happening is overtly in the context of the most evil actors in The Dark Tower metauniverse. It is meant to satisfy devourers of the longer series as well as be a set of good short stories on their own, and they more than satisfy.
The second adventure is simply wonderful and is indeed the titular story that actually has to do with the card game of Hearts. As you read it, you can tell that it was probably based on true-ish events that the author experienced in college. All the stories are meant to be period pieces that immerse you in that time so you learn how much things cost and what people were listing to, watching, and talking about in that time, namely the 60s, which this book wants to convince you really happened.
The later stories recount adventures of other characters in the first story. There is a very intriguing one that is a PS on one of the first story's antagonists who seemed to be in a very powerful position in his youth and maintains a similar kind of cliquish power later in life, but at what cost?
Beautiful prose lies within.
Bobby's two closest young friends are Carol and Sully John who also are drawn into Ted's wierd and mysterious circle of influence. Before he is captured by the low men Ted uses his abilities to help heal the injured Carol when Bobby carries her home after she is beaten by the neighborhood bully boys with a baseball bat.
In the later short stories tied into this book so smoothly by the King, Bobby and Carol are reunited during their college years after being separated following Ted's capture when Bobby's mother abruptly leaves the neighborhood for a new town and a new job after she was horribly attacked and sexually assulted by her boss and 2 of his croonies at a real estate convention where the ambitious and not so gullible mother has manuvered herself leaving Bobby in Ted's care while she is gone.
Bobby's life in the college dorms is a nostalgic trip for those of us who entered college during the Viet Nam era, and his passing reunification with Carol has a striking resemblance to the ships-passing-in-the-night relationship between Forest Gump and the love of his life. The beginning and ending of this book involves Bobby's return to the old neighborhood to attend Carol's funeral.
For those who are Dark Tower junkies like me, the timing of this book fills in some vital facts about what is wrong with the Tower which King has not yet revealed in the Tower series books. You can also pick up more insights regarding the cause of the problems with the tower in Insomnia, and Black House.
In all this is another great story by the master story-teller of our time with magically vivid characters and richly described worlds for them to live in. NOBODY but King could take 5 short stories and tie them together so smoothly while revealing as yet untold details for an entirely different series of Books which he has been creating over the last 30+ years. Amazing.
Top reviews from other countries
All five stories are linked by a group of kids growing up in the 60s and also how the Vietnam war has a direct or indirect effect on their lives. William Hurt narrates three and Stephen King the middle two. I've noticed that Mr. Hurt's delivery seems to be a bit Marmite, but I liked his slower, considered style.
The 1960-set first story is the possibly the only one with a supernatural element. It has links to The Dark Tower series, but you don't need to know all about that to enjoy it (I'm not much of a fan). It's been made into a film, though inexplicably given the 'Hearts In Atlantis' title when that refers to the second story.
Talking of which, there is an element of fatalistic horror in the title story as you hear about college kids flunking out over addiction to a card game and the birth of protest againt the Vietnam war. The kids that are kicked out get drafted and one loudmouth in particular turns up later. We also learn how Carol Gerber - a sweet, intelligent girl who runs through all five stories - becomes radicalised.
Stories three and four are about two related characters decades later, who served in Vietnam and the horror of what happened to them there. One is literally haunted by it and the other is making an unconventional living from it. Though it's become something of a US cinematic cliche, they bring a new perspective on the conflict and war in general. It's a credit to King that he manages to write with such convincing authority when he wasn't involved himself.
The fifth is beautiful, when two of the main characters are re-united - older, wiser and bearing mental and physical scars. I'm older now than when I first read it and it hits home more. The audiobook ends with The Platters song of the same name and you might have something in your eye.
The recurring themes and musings on fate that link all five stories together make this a writing masterclass. For me one of King's best.
I was furiated by the portrayal of the character Ted Brautigan ( my fav character) . But in middle of the reading (after 300 th page and starting of the new chapter) I was getting angry at Stephen King as I didn't want anymore characters , I want my fairy godfather Ted 😭. But later on I found out that their is more things yet to uncover in the book
( but what about Ted 😢 ). After all it was a rollercoaster of emotions .
I wish I could say Stephen to write an entire series of Ted Brautigans life.
He is truely a te-ka.
This book gets more interesting after the motion picture of my (he's only mine😤) Anthony Hopkins as Ted .
-Yours Jadu
:3
Reviewed in India on July 12, 2022
I was furiated by the portrayal of the character Ted Brautigan ( my fav character) . But in middle of the reading (after 300 th page and starting of the new chapter) I was getting angry at Stephen King as I didn't want anymore characters , I want my fairy godfather Ted 😭. But later on I found out that their is more things yet to uncover in the book
( but what about Ted 😢 ). After all it was a rollercoaster of emotions .
I wish I could say Stephen to write an entire series of Ted Brautigans life.
He is truely a te-ka.
This book gets more interesting after the motion picture of my (he's only mine😤) Anthony Hopkins as Ted .
-Yours Jadu
:3