Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King cast, one man's musings on the works of Stephen King.

Each week I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King and the chronological order of publication.

And this week I will review the 1999 novella collection, Hearts in Atlantis.

As you know, at least once a decade, King publishes a collection of novillas, a tradition

which began with 1983's different seasons.

The collection that included the body, apt pupil, and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.

In 1990, King released an examination on the malleable nature of time with four past midnight,

and now, published right before we entered a new millennia, King released a series of stories

looking at the Baby Boomer Generation.

Unlike each of the previous novella collections, Hearts and Atlantis is a series of interconnected

vignettes,

linked together through characters who bump up against each other.

Each story examines a different viewpoint of their lives, with the first and the last stories

focusing on Bobby Garfield, first as a child and later as an adult.

Because these stories are so interconnected, this review is going to look different from the reviews of the previous novella collections.

In different seasons and four past midnight, I devoted an episode for each of the stories within.

But because the novellas included here are so woven in and out of each

other, I just think it makes more sense to keep this together as a singular piece. Now, before

I get into the story-by-story reviews, I mean, let's just kind of look at this as a whole for a second. To make a long

story short, hearts in Atlantis allows King to reflect upon his generation, the baby boomer

generation, specifically the failure of the baby boomer generation to live up to the potential

of their idealistic young selves. And I think that

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