
How does King explore the maturation process? In King's fiction, what distinguishes childhood from adulthood? In becoming adults, what do we lose? What do we gain? Does the book suggest that "growing up" means something unique to each generation?Ģ. Hearts in Atlantis traces several characters from childhood through college and into adulthood. Reading Group Guide: Discussion Questionsġ. Read this moving, heartfelt tragedy and weep-weep for our lost conscience.” - BookPage Reading Group Guide “You will see Stephen King in a new light. Nearly twenty years after its first publication, Hearts in Atlantis is powerful and astonishingly current. 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 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. 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. 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. The classic collection of five deeply resonant and disturbing interconnected stories from #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King.
