Lots of emotion with this one.
Right off the bat, I love Stephen King and IT is my fav book of all time. I prefer his stories to go as batshit crazy as they can and this has been delivered with books like IT and Misery and Pet Sematary but then there are his other works, like 11/22/63 and Hearts in Atlantis which seem to be much more grounded and calm because their main focus is just normal people.
So can Stephen King tell a good story when there’s no undead pets or clown monsters? Absolutely. Hearts in Atlantis is a solution of five stories taking place from the 60s to '99 that are interconnected to some degree.
It would be worth it to talk about those different stories in detail but I don’t wanna give away the discovery aspect of this book though I will say that I probably liked the first story most since it had that little children dealing with magic sort of charm which was very reminiscent of IT. Even had an old man wanting to give a suckjob to a kid so it was very similiar (Poor Eddie)
Other stories are more focused on Vietnam and the American war there. I’ll admit, I don’t know much about that part of history, I’m not from any western country and you just don’t read about stuff like that in schools. I think I picked it up casually through years of just reading books
Anyways, that whole Vietnam experience is here. We get to be there, running away from the heat of fire, camping and being drunk, and then back home trying to adjust to a normal life and trying somehow to forget and be forgiven for all the bad things we did there while trying to live a normal life. It’s presented very well though I will say some of the stories do get a little too smart-ass sometimes. It’s not something I would take out of the book but it is a little immersion breaking when you feel a character making a pointed speech about something that reads like a statement by the author.
Overral, I gave this book a solid 4 out of 5 and I think it has honestly helped me come to terms with King’s more “normal people” books. I had tried to read 11/22/63 but gave up because I was sort of expecting something more edgy but I think I’m ready to make peace with it after Hearts in Atlantis
“There is a Tower, he thought. It holds everything together. There are Beams that protect it somehow. There is a Crimson King, and Breakers working to destroy the Beams… not because the Breakers want to but because it wants them to. The Crimson King.” - Hearts in Atlantis, Low Men in Yellow Coats, Chapter 10
I think the beam is referenced a lot in IT but had no idea what it meant since I haven’t been to the Tower yet.
“Before removing the mote in thy neighbor’s eye, attend the beam in thine own” - IT (drawing on it from memory so might be a little different)
The metaphor in the Dark Tower books is imagine a clock face. If you draw a line between two opposing numbers, 12 to 6, 1 to 7, etc. they all cross in the center. That’s where the tower is.
Each line is a beam and each end of the beam has a guardian. The turtle in It is one of them. So was the bear in the 2nd Dark Tower book.
The Crimson King is trying to tear down the beams, if he succeeds, the Tower will fall.
So you mean the DT universe is so massive that the literal creator of the universe where Earth is is just one of the guardians?
Yup! Think of it as a King Multiverse. All* of his books are connected to it.
"May not always be explicitly stated, but for practical purposes, “All”. 😉
I used to write a FAQ on this back in the 90s. The 3rd book came out in, oh, '92 or so, and ended in a huge cliffhanger. There was a 5 year gap before book 4 would come out, and I got tired of seeing “Hey, when does book 4 come out?” so I put together a FAQ.
It’s still out there in places. Hasn’t been updated in, oh, forever?
https://www.geocities.ws/jordanlund/dtfaq1.htm
That’s so cool dude, I’ll check it out when I start the DT books
Keep on the lookout for the 3rd Talisman book this year as well. Talisman did not directly tie in, but the sequel, Black House, puts a Dark Tower shaped pin in the plotlines running from Insomnia and Hearts in Atlantis.
I have more than a few of his books on my reading list but have been spacing them out between other ones. Bought The Stand, The Shining and Eye of the Dragon too
Another good one that is similar in feel but not directly tied is Fairy Tale. Good read!
I don’t think the beams are lateral and equidistant, I think they basically serve to bind the Stephen King literary universe together. The turtle beam runs through Derry (from IT), the bear beam runs somewhere else, and I’m not sure what the others are.
Whole thing’s kind of figurative anyway. What the tower actually is/does is only revealed at the end of The Dark Tower (the seventh book in the Dark Tower series).
11/22/63 is a good book that is not directly connected to the Tower, but helps explain it. Derry briefly features in it (and that’s its connection to the Dark Tower, via IT). 11/2263 starts out in our world (or at least as close to our world as one can really get — all King’s books not confirmed to be in the same world are in parallel worlds) but then the main character goes back in time, which puts him in another world. Maybe it’s Derry’s/IT’s world, I’m not sure. But there is a portal to his world in it… which implies that if the kids from IT could get to where the main character lives/is from and they go through the portal… maybe IT wouldn’t be able to get them. We’re not sure if it can cross into other worlds.
In one of the latter Dark Tower books, however, Roland Deschain actually does travel to our world — and meets Stephen King. That whole bit of fuckery alone makes the Dark Tower saga worth reading, but it’s not one of the better parts. By that time, it’s already blown your mind like half a dozen times. My favourite parts are the doors on the beach (Drawing of the Three, the second book), Roland’s backstory in Wizard and Glass (fourth book), the journey through Roland’s world’s version of New York (third book), Roland’s later upbrining (first book), and whatever happened in Wolves and the Calla (fifth book). Book 4.5, Wind Through the Keyhole, isn’t necessary at all, but it’s a nice break after the shit that goes down in the fourth book.
Spoilers!