“When someone dies you think about the past.”
Five stories, of very varied length but with recurring characters and a common theme; the Vietnam war. Very few pages of story take place in the actual war, however. This book is about how it affected people, not only those who fought, but those who protested against it or applauded it in the states, and how, somehow, a entire nation was seemingly changed by it, though not a second of actual battle was fought there. Atlantis is, obviously, King’s metaphor for an America that sunk into oblivion and now seems like a myth or legend, the America of the 60’s. He doesn’t romanticise it, but seems to feel a genuine grief over the loss of that mentality. This would be a good book to offer one of those few lingering people who still insist that King is ‘just a horror writer’.