It was a strange time to grow up, the 1970's were, especially in a conservative Southern city like Shreveport, Louisiana. In Shreveport, even in the 1970's, everything was about desegregation. In 1970 a court finally dismantled the city's segregated school district and ordered all city pools and facilities desegregated. In response, white flight began in earnest. In ten short years, the neighborhood where my father ran his barber shop went from being a vibrant mid-city neighborhood with grocery stores and drug stores and restaurants and hospitals and hotels and little shops to being a deserted ruin that looked like it had been bombed. Rather than run city parks "for the benefit of niggers", the city government instead withdrew almost all money from the parks and recreation department, closed almost all city recreation facilities that might possibly have a "nigger" cross its portals, and abandoned all efforts to keep its downtown vital and alive because "there are too many niggers hanging around the neighborhood". Large national companies based in Shreveport, disgusted by local attitudes, began moving their headquarters elsewhere, mostly to Houston and to Dallas. My father lost half of his customers when United Gas alone left Shreveport, and that was only one of the many companies that jumped ship. In short, the people of Shreveport committed collective suicide in order to spite the Federal government, and even today Shreveport has not recovered from that decade of hate.

Yet the generation that had fought Jim Crow was not dead, not by any means. They had simply moved upward and onward. We of my generation learned their ideals as if via osmosis, as older brothers and sisters taught their younger siblings, and young idealistic teachers infused their teachings with talk about brotherhood and love. Yet the world outside was not like that. It was white people talking of "niggers" and moving to the suburbs to "get away from niggers", it was neighborhoods dying, it was South Vietnam falling when its army ran out of bullets because its corrupt officers and government officials had embezzled whatever meagre funds Congress had allocated to buy bullets, Cambodia and Laos following soon afterwards, it was Russia invading Afghanistan and the Iranians seizing the American Embassy and the Nicaraguans throwing out a corrupt Somoza government in favor of a Communist insurgency, it was Arab sheiks holding the world's economies hostage with their oil, it was an honest and sincere but naive Jimmy Carter wringing his hands ineffectively and plaintively asking "can't we just all be friends?" in response to the violence and hatred that seemed to be overtaking the world, and yes, the draft was finally gone (to the immense relief of all boys of my generation, who at least in Shreveport weren't afraid of dying for a cause, but who wanted it to at least to be a voluntary thing rather than something forced by a draft card), but the whole rest of the world seemed to be going to hell. And that Sixties generation, who we had looked up to in our innocence, spent this time in pursuit of the almighty dollar rather than in putting the words they'd spewed into action, betraying our trust in the power of love and of ideas. A few bullets at Kent State, a long bout of drug-addled euphoria in San Francisco, the elimination of the threat of the draft, and the promise of a prosperous life was all it took. They all settled down to be comfortable cogs in the corporate machine that they supposedly had despised only a few short years earlier.

Is it any wonder that my generation was amongst the earliest and most enthusiastic supporters of Ronald Reagan? Reagan was a father figure who promised to make everything right, who promised to make the world a more understandable place for us. In Reagan's world, there were none of these confusing uncertainties. There was right, and there was wrong. There was freedom, and there was communism. There was hard work and prosperity, and there was welfare. It was a child's dream, but we were children, and confused children at that. Our heros had deserted us, our ideals, sucked from their leavings, seemed naive, though we could not purge them from our hearts, and there seemed no choice but to do as our elders had done and join the machine, live the futile but comfortable life of the average American, and then die, having accomplished nothing more than filling space while the world slowly wound down as resources exhausted and one continent after the other disintegrated into anarchy and death. After all, our heros had tried to change the world, and all they'd managed to do was get themself fucked on acid and drugged on narcissism. Why should we think we could do any different? We were not heros, we were confused children, and we dutifully set forth to make ourselves acceptable to the corporate grind, everybody for himself, rah rah and all that jazz. As the years go on, a strange thing is happening... our generation, a generation that embraced Ronald Reagan with such desperation, is slowly growing more giving, more caring, more "liberal" if you will, a topic for another essay. And our children... our children, a pragmatic and mercenary bunch who share little of the child's outlook that we had as the last generation of children who were really children... yet they still embrace many of those ideals of freedom and justice deep within their hearts of hearts. Unlike those who believe that America is dead, that the dream of America is dead, I hold a slim hope that some day, somehow, we shall have the nation that America could have been, should have been, if only our older brothers and sisters had not abandoned the dream in terror and confusion.

So now we come to Stephen King's book Hearts in Atlantis.

Stephen King was one of those older brothers and sisters. Hearts in Atlantisis an intertwined series of stories set amongst his generation, a set of stories that work as a tribute to Phil Ochs and to William Golding's The Lord of the Flies, images from which permeate the stories. Hearts in Atlantis is another step along Stephen King's journey through the nightmares of the human soul, a journey which has taken him from the horror schlock of his early days to the more thoughtful works of the past ten years, a journey which has taken him from a desperate wanna-be writer with young kids and fear of being drafted to a time where his children are grown, things past are coming back to haunt him, and he has the time to be thoughtful and reflective and find the real nightmares, the real horrors, not the ones that need mutant psychos or killer cars to bring to life. Hearts in Atlantis is powerful in the way that characterises all of Stephen King's works, even the most schlocky, and brought me to tears at times. Hearts in Atlantis is also deeply flawed, both by its own internal construction problems (being basically four stories under one roof), and by some of the plot devices that King borrows from other books (the Dark Tower series in particular).

Yet in the end, those flaws do not matter. Hearts in Atlantis is, in the end, about those nightmares which are most terrifying, those nightmares which are of the heart and not of mind or body. It is about people finding out the truth about who they are and what they are capable of doing and what they have done in their life, it is about pain and finding courage and finding the limits of courage, it is about seeing a dream, and flinching back from the cost of that dream, it is, in short, the story of Stephen King's generation. And, peripherally, the story of my own generation, since my generation spent its youth in confusion about how our older brothers and sisters could do what they did yet, in the end, give up their ideals and give up their dreams in pursuit of the almighty dollar.

I recently visited Shreveport and visited many of the sites of my youth. Alas, almost all of them are now weedy vacant lots with concrete slabs. I saw the slab of the P&S Hospital where I was born. I saw the decrepit remains of the Mid City Motor Hotel at the corner of Jordon and Line, which family friend Don S. managed during part of my youth, a hotel whose 50's exuberance has since faded and turned into yet another shabby transient destination. I saw the vacant slab where the Tic-Toc Grill had once lived, where my father often took me and my brother for burger and hash browns when my mom was working late and would not have dinner for us. I saw the parking lot where Doc Stamper's mansion once stood, the same Doc Stamper who had built the P&S Hospital and then built the Mid City Motor Hotel to house the relatives of patients who were hospitalized there, the house where Don and Marion and their son Tom lived while they managed Doc's hotel (by that time Doc had moved to a penthouse suite in his hotel), the house where I first plunked a few notes on an old out-of-tune piano (Doc never removed all his furniture) and fell in love with the idea of music. I saw the vacant lot where my grandfather's house on Creswell had once stood. The two-story turn-of-the-century commercial building at the corner of Lousiana and Jordon streets that my father's barber shop once was in is still there, boarded up, waiting for better days that never came, but the drug store next door burned down long ago and is a concrete slab, as is the dry goods store that was two doors down (note to city historian of Shreveport: the dry goods store and drug store were never contained in that 4-square building, they were seperate but attached buildings, which are now concrete slabs, what was in the 4-square building was the grocery store, a bar & grill that had closed down by the time I was old enough to know, my father's barber shop, and in the add-on that served as the back porch for the living quarters above, Mr. Lanning's TV and radio repair shop). Louisiana Cleaners, which once had its cleaning plant in the row of shops on Louisiana Street behind, is now gone, and that building remains boarded up and decaying. The city, in a failed attempt at urban revitalization, placed sidewalks on raised curbs so that the parking for that commercial building was cut off from the street, so even if someone wanted to, it would be difficult to do anything but tear these buildings down and build a more "modern" facility. In another failed attempt at urban revitalization, they closed Louisiana Avenue at the railroad tracks (so that whistles wouldn't be blowing through downtown Shreveport all the time, scaring off the downtown residential developers they're hoping to attract), turning the segment of Louisiana Avenue where my dad once had his shop into a cul-de-sac that nobody could get to even if they really did care to do "urban revitalization".

And so do dreams die and decay, as does our childhood. That, alas, is something that Stephen King understands all to well, and shows us far too well in Hearts in Atlantis. For the true horror horror is not some boojum that springs out of the closet at night. The true horror is what happens when our dreams die or turn to lies. The true horrors are in our hearts and souls, and Stephen King evokes them in his recent works as well as anybody since William Golding and Joseph Conrad.