Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King was my Chloe’s Choice Challenge book for January.  My youngest daughter, who is choosing one book a month off our shelves for me to read, chose the book because she liked the title and the cover and because, “It has been on the shelf ever since I can remember.”  Honestly, I think that I have had this book since long before she was born in 2007.

The narrative is five interconnected stories that share a common theme—how group behavior can affect people in a negative fashion.  The first two stories, “Low Men in Yellow Coats” and the title story, “Hearts in Atlantis,” are by far the longest (I would call them novellas) and introduce the reader to all of the main characters who will pop up in the stories.  Both main stories are set in the 1960s, with subsequent stories being spaced out chronologically until 1999.  Group behavior, first in small town childhood and then in college, sets the tone of these first two stories and gives the reader insight into what is looming on the horizon for these kids (Vietnam) and how their crowd mentality, learned in childhood and adolescence, will adversely affect their future actions.

A common question with Stephen King books is whether or not it is a horror novel.  The only thing that comes close is the first story, “Low Men in Yellow Coats,” but even that is more a sci-fi vibe than horror.  “Hearts in Atlantis” has a psychological element to it.  “Blind Willie,” the third story, was, in my opinion, the weakest story; it almost has it’s own theme, with its emphasis on the morality of the choices made by a Vietnam vet after his return from the war, but you do see the group behavior element quite strongly in Willie’s flashbacks.  The premise of the story was great, but I just felt that it lacked emotional punch and thus was a missed opportunity.  The last two stories, “Why We’re in Vietnam” and “Heavenly Shades of Night are Falling,” have a very slight magical realism element to them.

Overall, I enjoyed this book.  Structurally, the book succeeded in that the short story format allowed for large jumps in time and diverse settings.  Watching the characters evolve made for excellent character development, both through the individual stories and then through time into subsequent revelations in later stories. 

What cost this book a fifth star was continuity.  The character element was the only area where I felt like every story flowed smoothly into the next.  In the sci-fi/magical realism area there wasn’t any continuity, and its lack made the stories feel disjointed despite their common characters.  The first story was sci-fi, the second psychological, the third had no supernatural elements, the fourth had a ghost, and the fifth wrapped things up for two main characters with a baseball mitt that traveled mysteriously through several stories.  There were just too many different supernatural elements for there to be flow in that regard, and it was enough to cost the book a fifth star from me.

Despite my feelings about the supernatural forms being inconsistent, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and would absolutely recommend it.  My only caution would be for readers who won’t read books with any profanity.  Two of the main plots in the stories involve college boys and soldiers in Vietnam, so yes, there is some profanity.  If you can get past that, this book will make you really think about group behavior—how it affects individuals and society and the role it has probably played in the decisions you have made in your life.

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

As is no doubt obvious from my less than stellar rating, I didn’t find as much to appreciate in Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists as some reviewers.  The author chose an interesting premise: four children go to a fortune teller who tells them the exact days on which they each will die.  The rest of the book is divided into four sections, one for each of the kids—Simon, Klara, Daniel, and Varya—that, with the exception of Varya, cover the span of their lives.  I did find the premise of the book enticing and kept going because I wanted to know what became of the characters.

One of my major complaints about the book—and one I noticed put off many readers to the extent that they dropped the book in its first section—was the very graphic homosexual sex scenes in Simon’s story.  Literary fiction is not erotica.  In my experience, readers of literary fiction do not want graphic sex scenes, be they heterosexual or homosexual, in their novels.  And before you go off and call me homophobic, I invite you to look on my blog, Lit in the Last Frontier, where you will discover that my number one novel of 2017 was The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne.  I understand that Chloe Benjamin was trying to show Simon’s tumultuous experience in 1970s and 80s San Francisco, but she needs to learn the value of the literary “fading to black” and letting the readers fill in the rest from their imaginations.  There are other places in the book where she inserts odd, needless sexual references.  In all of these cases the graphic portrayals neither further the plot of the novel nor flesh out its characters in a way that couldn’t be accomplished in a more literary fashion.

The other three sections cover the other characters, with each one being given a time frame: Klara from 1982-1991, Daniel from 1991-2006, and Varya from 2006-2010.  Unfortunately, this format doesn’t do the premise any favors.  Such large segments of Daniel’s and Varya’s lives are jumped over that the author has no opportunity to develop their characters, and, as a result, the things that both characters do seem very out of character for the people they were when we last spent any pages with them.

I found the plotting rather weak in places, making it easy to tell how the characters are going to die.  For instance Simon’s story—that of a gay young man who tells his siblings that the fortune teller told him he would die “young”—in early 1980s San Francisco, is pretty easy to predict.  To give Ms. Benjamin her due, where a crystal ball isn’t necessary to know where the plot arc is taking us, the emotion with which the stories are told carries the reader through.

This book almost got two stars from me for the above reasons.  However, Chloe Benjamin writes beautiful prose, worthy of the literary genre.  She just needs to perfect her intimate scenes to bring them more in line with what literary readers want from their novels.

I also felt that the separate, almost interconnected short story format didn’t work for the premise of the book.  The reader really needs the opportunity to see how the characters develop year by year as a result of knowing how their days are numbered.  Jumping large time segments robbed Ms. Benjamin and her readers of the opportunity to explore the entirety of her characters’ development.  A compellingly successful example of interlinked short stories comes from the book I read just, Hearts in Atlantis.  In this 800 plus page novel, Stephen King uses the same format but takes the time (and the pages) to flesh out his all of his characters.  Perhaps the 300 plus pages in which Ms. Benjamin tries to tell her story were simply not sufficient to the task.

Overall, this book is a solid three stars.  It has issues that I know some readers will find extremely off-putting.  For those who are either unbothered by the first section’s sex scenes or are willing to scan over them in order to get to the heart of the book, I think you will find, as I did, that the premise is interesting, the prose is lovely, and the characters engaging enough to keep you turning the pages.