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A
collection of five stories about kids growing up during the
1960's.
The Short
Stories
Low Men in Yellow
Coats
Hearts in Atlantis
Blind Willie
Why We're in
Vietnam
Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling
Synopsis
King's fat new work
impressively follows his general literary upgrading begun with Bag of
Bones (1998) and settles readers onto the seabottom of one of his most
satisfying ideas ever. Set in fictional Harwich and semifictional
Bridgeport, the story weaves five Vietnam-haunted small-town New England
stories into a deeply moving overall vision. The five are: ``Low Men in
Yellow Coats,'' set in 1960 and at about 250 pages the longest; ``Hearts
in Atlantis,'' set in 1966; ``Blind Willie,'' set in 1983; ``Why We're in
Vietnam'' and ``Heavenly Shades of Night Are Failing,'' both set in 1999.
The umbrella title fits well, with King showing us the lost, time-sunken
continent of the late Eisenhower era, as hearts from the deep sea of that
Hopperesque time slowly rise to the tormented surface of the present-day.
Whether his characters are stock or not, its impossible not to enjoy Kings
gentle ways of fleshing them out, all the old bad habits and mannerisms
gone as he draws you into the most richly serious work of his career.
Elderly Ted Brautigan, who may seem a bit like Max von Sydow, moves into a
house occupied by Bobby Garfield, age 11, and his hard-bitten mother, Liz,
a secretary for real-estate agent Don Biderman, with whom shes having an
unhappy affair. Brautigan hires Bobby to read the paper aloud, gives him
Lord of the Fliesand also strange warnings about low men in yellow coats
and posters about lost dogs. Report any sighting of these! Ted also has
attacks of parrot pupilitis, the pupils opening and closing as he stares
at other worlds. Although some characters wander in from King's inferior
occult Western Dark Tower series, their cartoony, computer-graphic effects
making them seem in the wrong novel, this minor lapse fades before King's
memory-symphony of America during Vietnam. Page after page, a truly mature
King does everything right and deserves some kind of literary rosette. His
masterpiece. -- Kirkus
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