Fiction Review: "Hearts in Atlantis" by Stephen King (Part 1 - 1960:Low Men in Yellow Coats)

1960:

It was his first real kiss, too, and Bobby never forgot the feel of her lips pressing on his his - dry and smooth and warmed by the sun. It was the kiss by which all the others of his life would be judged and found wanting.

1999:

"Sometimes a little of the magic sticks around," Bobby said. "That's what I think. We came because we still hear some of the right voices. Do you hear them? The voices?"

Hearts in Atlantis can be considered his writing on his own generation, the one that came of age in the 1960s. Being born in 1971 I have to confess to not having any personal connection to the 1960s. But, one of King's greatest strengths is in his characters - they are real people with real wants and needs. I think that is what makes his addition of the supernatural to his stories so effective - even in the face of the supernatural we are still dealing with real people.

Hearts in Atlantis is a collection of novellas and short stories. I'll be breaking this into reviews of one or two stories each, depending on the length of the tales. Only the first of the tales is strong in the supernatural but the events that take place there have reverberations over the decades.

There will be some spoilers I'm certain but I'll try not to give away endings - though given the stories are chronological that to some degree may prove difficult.

1960: Low Men in Yellow Coats

The first of our tales takes place in the  town of Harwich, Connecticut, a fictional suburb of Bridgeport. This was something that grabbed my attention having spent the bulk of my childhood my early adulthood in a town just about half an hour away from Bridgeport up Route 8. Under King Harwich is a very real town with the diner popular for parents and kids to go to - the Colony Diner, shades of the Farm Shoppe that later became a Friendly's in my hometown.

Our protagonist is Bobby Garfield who turns eleven on the day the story begins, towards the end of the school year. He is the son of Randall and Liz Garfield. His mother has nothing kind to say about Bobby's father who had the audacity to die of a heart attack eight years previous. That is not an exaggeration - she is indeed very bitter and angry about his dying and in so doing, leaving them. Your father didn't exactly leave us well off.

Bobby is madly in love with a Schwinn bicycle and is engaged in saving up for it. His best friends are John "Sully-John" Sullivan and Carol Gerber. Bobby and Sully are avid baseball players. Carol is madly in love with Bobby, to which he is of course, oblivious, accepting her for a less gushy than normal girl.

To this mix is added a wild card, an elderly man by the name of Ted Brautigan, who moves into the 3rd floor apartment of the house the Garfields live in. Liz Garfield takes an immediate dislike to him, not trusting a man who carries his possessions in paper bags. However, Ted and Bobby become very close, Ted being impressed by the adult library card Bobby received as a birthday gift from his mother.  He latter gives Bobby the gift of William Golding's novel The Lord of the Flies which Bobby becomes convinced is the best book he ever read.

The descent of the boys into savagery becomes a recurring theme in both this novella and the later tales in the volume.

"Why'd you do that?" Bobby yelled at the boy in the motorcycle belt, and as the words came out of his mouth it was as if he had heard them a thousand times before. All of this was like a ritual, the stuff that got said before the real yanks and pushes began and the fists began to fly. He thought of Lord of the Flies again- Ralph running from Jack and the others. At least on Golding's island there had been jungle. He and Carol had nowhere to run. 

He says "Because I felt like it." That's what comes next.

Ted is not a normal person. He is clearly a telepath of some sort. Moreover his telepathic ability can temporarily rub off on others after physical combat. Bobby becomes the beneficiary of this on a day he goes to the beach and nearby amusement park on the first Saturday of summer vacation with Carol, her mom, Sully-John and several others. It allows him to win at three-card monte and to share his first kiss with Carol.

Ted quickly evolves into a father figure for Bobby. He also hires Bobby to keep an eye out for "Low Men" - Ted is on the run from people who desire his abilities. These Low Men go on to play a major role in the final three books of The Dark Tower Series, as does Ted.

Ted tells what signs to look for of the Low Men. But in so doing he unwillingly puts Bobby into an adult conundrum. Bobby begins seeing those very signs. What should Bobby do? For most of the book Bobby is half convinced Ted is nuts in his fear of the Low Men. He knows he should tell Ted. But he knows if he does Ted will almost certainly leave and Bobby has come to love the old man.

The book reaches its climax with Bobby isolated from his mother and Sully-John. His mother, the secretary at a real estate office, has gone to a seminar with her boss and two agents. But she should have known better, should have known the lack of character of the men she was going with. The same type of men who would chase a boy/pig through the woods armed with spears in Lord of the Flies. She'd normally leave him with Sully-John but Sully-John has won a trip to a camp near Storrs, CT. (A place where I spent five years of my life as an undergraduate.) Liz hesitantly leaves him in the care of Ted.

Bobby is quite happy at this development but it also becomes clear that Ted is not imagining the Low Men. As Ted makes preparations to leave the stress begins to rip Bobby apart, bringing him to Carol for comfort. However, Bobby and Carol soon have a confrontation with the older and dreaded "St. Gabe's Boys". They manage to escape with adult assistance but the next day they take out a horrible vengeance on Carol, beating her with baseball bats and dislocating her shoulder. Things spiral into a horrible disaster ending with betrayals, a confrontation with the Low Men, and Bobby's final farewell to Ted.

In the aftermath of these events, Bobby is not the boy he had been. His friendship with Sully-John is not what it was. He has turned very violent, the first use of this being to exact vengeance on the boy who beat Carol with a baseball bat and dislocated her shoulder. We quickly follow him through his next years as he descends deeper and deeper into self-destruction.



I'm hoping I've not given away too too much. There is of course so much more than what I've written. This is in many ways a coming of age story but for Bobby this is an exceedingly unpleasant coming of age. He finds himself confronting adult conflicts and adult fears. He learns that adults do not have the answers. Ted tells Bobby about what Golding said of the ending of Lord of the Flies - to paraphrase, it is very well that the adults rescue the children, but who is it who will rescue the adults?

However, it's clear that Bobby cannot stay a child forever. And Ted brings him into a wonderful world. Ted is a supreme bibliophile, introducing Bobby to a larger world and has many conversations with Bobby. The tragedy is the two of them cannot stay together. Would Bobby have been better off had they never met? Probably not, but he would have been far better off if Ted could have stayed.

While Bobby's childhood is firmly set in the sixties, it is certainly a childhood I can relate to. That possession you just have to have. Parents you love but whom you realize aren't perfect or have all the answers. Easy friendships that you'll never know the like of again. That feeling of unlimited possibility that becomes limited by every choice you make.

This is the most "fantastic" of the tales in Hearts in Atlantis. We've got Ted with his telepathic powers, the frightening Low Men, and references to the Dark Tower. But King is adept at suggesting more than he shows. We really don't fully understand the Low Men nor do we understand Ted fully. More will be revealed in the Dark Tower series but in this work Bobby is our viewpoint character (and, to a lesser extent, Carol). In readin this we become reawakened to the world of children. As an adult I can watch how my children can make a huge deal over something small to adults. But it is easy for us as adults to pass that judgement, having lived through our own childhoods, King reminds us for a child how real and immediate other concerns can be. "This too shall pass" means less to someone for whom there has not yet been such a thing as an "average year".

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Stephen King's The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger

Cover art to the revised edition of the Gunslinger

"The man in black crossed the desert and the gunslinger followed." 

- Opening line to The Gunslinger

"You want to know about death. I left him a word. That word is NINETEEN. If you say it to him his mind will be opened. He will tell you what lies beyond. He will tell you what he saw. 

The word is NINETEEN.
Knowing will drive you mad.
But sooner or later you will ask,"

- Letter form the Walter o'Dim to Allie, The Gunslinger

"My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee, that purs’d and scor’d
Its edge, at one more victim gain’d thereby." - Opening lines of "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning

I first encountered The Gunslinger in my junior year of high school, in spring of 1988. I borrowed it from a friend though in short order I obtained my own copy from the local Waldenbooks as well as a copy of the only other Dark Tower book, The Drawing of the Three. It was in that year of school that I first discovered Stephen King, working my way through books like Pet Sematary, The Shining, and The Stand. I began reading It though truth to tell its thousand+ page length defeated me. Interestingly when I first tried reading It I was only a few years older than the protagonists were in the sections that featured them as children while when I finally read it again and in full I was about the age of the protagonists in the sections that featured them as adults.

But let us talk about The Gunslinger. It is a bit different from the other Dark Tower books which followed. While the other books in the series were all full novels The Gunslinger is a collection of five novellas dealing with the titular Gunslinger, far more often referred to as his title rather than his name, Roland, pursuing his nemesis, the man in black, Water o'Dim, a sorcerer who once served his father. There are two versions of The Gunslinger, the original (released in limited edition in 1982 and as a trade paperback in 1988) and the revised edition, released in 2003 to address inconsistencies in it with other books in the series. While there certainly were inconsistencies, I have a slight preference to its original version, though to be fair that may be due to its connection to my childhood.

For this review, I am going to discuss the individual novellas. I'll do my best to avoid spoilers and paint the plot in very broad strokes. One of the things I take away from The Gunslinger is its feel, its atmosphere.


"The Gunslinger"
Originally published in the October 1978 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

The novella "The Gunslinger" is notable in the way it handles things in a reverse chronological order. It begins by introducing us to the gunslinger, pursuing the man in black across the desert - though really at this point we are at the fringes of the desert - still quite arid and dry, but not as deadly as the true desert which will follow. We don't know yet why he is following the man in black. He can't quite see the man in black but he does see signs that he is still on his trail - remnants of campfires for example.There was something appealing to me in visualizing the gunslinger in his pursuit. We don't know just how long he has been pursuing the man in black, Walter o'Dim, at this point, but we feel it has been a while. I picture the gunslinger a a very stolid figure at this point, trudging along, almost like one of the Terminators from the James Cameron movies. We can sense this is a man who does not give up early.

The gunslinger works his way to the hut of a farmer at the fringes of the true desert who had encountered the gunslinger's quarry. They talk and the gunslinger tells the tale of his passing through the town of Tull. In this tale he talks with the owner of the saloon in Tull, Allie, who in turn tells him of Walter o"Dim's visit to Tull.

His tale told, the gunslinger picks up his pursuit of the man in black.

As I mentioned above, the tales in The Gunslinger are for me about how they feel. This story feels very much like an American Western. We don't know much about the gunslinger beyond he is pursuing the Man in Black and he is quite deadly with his guns. We're getting hints of his world. It is a world that has "moved on". None of the characters he meets are able to give good estimates as to when any given event has taken place. Two weeks ago? Six weeks ago? Time is funny. There are hints of some disaster - we get suggestions of mutant animals people. There are suggestions that things were certainly better. There are hints this might be our world or somehow connected to it, with music that can be heard as well. And we get to see examples of magic, courtesy of the flashbacks to Walter o'Dim.


"The Way Station"
Originally published in the April 1980 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction


The gunslinger continues his pursuit of the man in black, nearly dying in the desert, barely making it to an abandoned way station. Though not so abandoned, as he encounters Jake Chambers, a boy from our world. The gunslinger learns of how Jake made the passage from our world to his own.

We also learn through flashbacks of the gunslinger Roland's childhood, as he and his friend Cuthbert made their first steps towards manhood.

This story is notable for establishing the first definitive link from Roland's world to our own, though there were hints of it in the previous tale. With this story our gunslinger seems a little bit human, someone with a past and a childhood.

We also learn more about Roland's world. We get the sense of how advanced the technology once was, with an "atomic slug" being used to power a water pump.

For those of us who are gamers "The Way Station" offers an excellent depiction of a ruin - the way station where the gunslinger meets Jake is very, very old. It is not sturdy and it has dark secrets that are revealed gradually. The way station itself is not very large but nevertheless we see how to get a lot of mileage out of a small location.


"The Oracle and the Mountains"
Originally published in the February 1981 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

We finally leave the desert behind, entering into green lands for the first time in this book. We see more hints of magic as the gunslinger consults with an oracle demon and learns where he is headed. The oracle's prophecies give hints as to what is to occur in the next novel and, in the newer version of The Gunslinger, later.

Armed with prophecies we continue our journey in pursuit of the man in black.


"The Slow Mutants"
Originally published in the February 1981 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

This is a tale which gave me the creeps as a teenager and still can put a shiver up my spine. The pursuit of the man in black takes us into tunnels underneath mountains. Days and days or darkness. It is an overused title, but King is indeed a master of horror and his skills are put to use here. I remember reading this in bed late at night. The light was bright above my bed but despite that I could feel the oppressive darkness.

Reading this book in the light I nevertheless found myself yearning for light.

And of course the darkness the gunslinger journeyed into was not empty.

During this tale we have more flashbacks where we learn more of Roland's childhood and how and why he faced his rite of passage to become a gunslinger.


"The Gunslinger and the Man in Black"
Originally published in the November 1981 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as "The Gunslinger and the Dark Man"

Not to give anything away, but after an entire novel of pursuit the gunslinger reaches his quarry. This is one I cannot say much about without spoilers. It will suffice that we begin to understand just why the gunslinger was pursuing the man in black and we begin to understand what the "Dark Tower" is.


Overall Impressions

Most fans of the Dark Tower series consider this book a somewhat weak introduction to the series. I'm probably in something of a minority it that it is one of my favorite books, period. Don't get me wrong - the entire series is, in my opinion, well worth your time and the later books are clearly better written. The original version of The Gunslinger is very raw, written by a young man at the start of his career, one who while brilliant has not yet mastered his craft. The revised edition cleans it up a little but King felt, wisely in my opinion, that it was important to respect voice of the young man who began this series.

Did this book influence early D&D? No, it came to late for that? Did it influence my gaming? Most certainly. As someone who has only recently began deliberately seeking out books in the 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide bibliography, it illustrated how to effectively tell a take on multiple words and with artifacts and people from one world crossing over into another.

In the previous fiction reviewed, Andre Norton's Witch World, we see similar concepts explored. There are several early  TSR products I can think of which embraced connections between the world of D&D and with our word and others. The 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide featured rules for making crossovers with Gamma World and Boot Hill. The famous Expedition to Barrier Peaks featured a spaceship, a smaller cousin of Metamorphosis Alpha's Warden. The World of Greyhawk featured the wizard Murlynd who bore a pair of Colt revolvers. Later books in the Dark Tower series deal with the importance and "reality" of fictional tales while AD&D featured adventures taking place in Lewis Carrol'ls Wonderland.

Beyond the connections between worlds introduced in The Gunslinger the atmosphere alone is worth taking note of, especially in The Slow Mutants. As we game in well-lit rooms it is easy to lose sight of what exploring a dark and hostile underworld labyrinth must be like. The Slow Mutants makes for great reading for anyone wanting to experience a depiction of a true descent into the depths of the Earth.

Does The Gunslinger bring anything new to the ideas I've mentioned above? I will preface my answer with my agreement with those who feel that the challenge in good fiction, whether for a novel or a game, is not in coming up with good ideas. It is in implementing those ideas. People had told westerns before, people had told tales of parallel worlds before. What King brings to the table with The Gunslinger is his unique mixture ideas and what he did with them. A lonely world that has moved on. A hero who, truth to tell, should frighten us at least a little. Horrors in the darkness. No one but King could have produced this tale.

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