I’m reading/listening to “Hearts in Atlantis” by Steven King. I didn’t see the movie, so I don’t know which of the 5 short stories the movie is about. I presume it’s about the title story.

The first story in the collection – “Low men in yellow coats” – is literature worthy of the best writers of the 20th century. As Steven King gets older, I am progressively more impressed with his writing. Each age has their few really great writers, and in our age, I think that King and Bradbury are certainly two of them. “Low men” is remarkable for its depths of literary allusion, as well as its gut-wrenching descriptions of how darned hard it is to be an 11-year-old. I gathered, right at the end, that there’s a strong tie-in to some other King books that I haven’t read yet, and this gave me renewed interest in reading them. Like my reading list needs to be any longer …

While I know that a lot of people hold King in scorn due to his early horror books, and so will never read anything he ever writes, I think that this is their loss. Yeah, I enjoyed Carrie and Salem’s Lot and It, but I recogize that they are not the same quality of literature as Bag of Bones and Hearts in Atlantis. Great writers are entitled to write a little bit of trash before they write their great stuff. I can only hope that some day I can write as well as King’s trash.