Where were you during the Sixties? 

Whether you served, marched, or missed it all, something in this major new work by Stephen King will put a lump in your throat. Guaranteed. He may be known best by average folks as the King of Horror, but his real talent has always been describing the horror people perpetrate on each other. Sure, he often uses the supernatural as a catalyst, but King's best work tends to be about people who remind us of ourselves because they sound like us and think like us, even when at their worst. There's no need to list King's works. In our field, even the least of them stands proudly above the mundane. 

Structured as two novellas and three short pieces, this current work is nevertheless a novel in which some strangeness - what King refers to as "the Ray Bradbury kind of childhood" - makes an appearance and leaves its mark, but can barely rival the strangeness the Sixties and the Vietnam War wrought on an entire generation. 

Eleven-year-old Bobby, Carol, and Sully-John grow up and grow apart in startling ways during the summer of 1960, helped along toward their destinies by a trio of bullies, a slightly eerie older man named Ted, and the "Low Men in Yellow Coats" who hunt him. Bobby wants nothing more than a bike for his birthday, but his secretive, vindictive mother - single, resentful, and slightly desperate - won't oblige him even though she could. Ted, who introduces Bobby to Golding's LORD OF THE FLIES, pays Bobby to watch for lost pet signs and strange hopscotch games chalked on sidewalks, but their friendship will lead to
an inevitable confrontation that leaves no one untouched. The Low Men will find Ted - and the fabric of the universe as we know it will slip just a bit, for a moment. Meanwhile, Carol will face the bullies and undergo her own change, one she'll take into the turbulent decade to come. "Low Men in Yellow Coats" is an unforgettable story of lost innocence, true friendship, and love torn asunder by something looming, something out of our realm of understanding — exactly the way Vietnam itself intruded on our idyllic and innocent days of youth. It is the perfect start to the emotional keening wail that King captures in the pages of this loose-limbed novel. 

"Hearts in Atlantis" begins with hearts you can break, moves on to a ruthlessly destructive card game which turns its obsessed players into sheep, and finally wraps around again to flesh-and blood broken hearts. Pete Riley tells how knowing Carol for a short time changed him from a kid with a Goldwater bumper sticker to a gassed-out peacenik. And what it does to Carol the activist, whom he loves and loses in a few short weeks during this time of social upheaval. Trapped in the spiral of a game that leads many students to the most grotesque lesson of all - because flunking out could get you drafted - Pete comes face to face with the cruelty some of his fellow students will take with them to a far-off place in the jungle. 

The two opening novellas form the bulk of the book, and its emotional center. For the rest of his painful portrait, King returns to the short form with two stories and a coda.  In "Blind Willie," one of Carol's bullies - now a Vietnam vet - finds a certain penance in his bizarre daily ritual that both embraces and overturns the greed of the Eighties. "Why We're in Vietnam" follows the third of the trio from the first novella, Sully-John, through the dark and surreal remains of the war, to his death in the present day. And "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling" is the coda which brings the book full-circle with an understated emotion that will take you by surprise and wring out your heart with its sad inevitability.

Having finished this powerful story cycle on the very day Woodstock 99 erupted in senseless rioting, and only weeks after ultra radical activist Kathleen Ann Soliah's apprehension after a lifetime of running, made for a personal (70s childhood) bittersweet irony impossible to ignore. Some critics insist on pointing out that the evil elements in "Low Men" seem cartoonish and out of place. Of course, these elements form a connection to other King novels, such as THE REGULATORS, DESPERATION, and THE DARK TOWER, but their value lies in their symbolism, for these references represent an evil from outside Bobby's world — from out of his experience - and are therefore a perfect metaphorical description of the Vietnam War's influence on the average person, not to mention a child. LORD OF THE FLIES forms a connecting thematic link between these stories, as it mirrors the horrific fever of mob rule and what happens to perfectly "normal" people in certain circumstances. In the same way, King's introduction of the "Low Men" becomes indispensable to the book's message. 

Whether or not you've enjoyed his work in the past, you will see Stephen King in a new light. Read this moving, heartfelt modern tragedy and weep - weep for our lost conscience. 

(Note: A version of this review was previously published in BookPage and at www.bookpage.com . This version appears here by permission of ProMotion,Inc.)