Hearts in Atlantis (1999) is a collection of three novellas and two short stories by Stephen King, all connected to one another by recurring characters and taking place in roughly chronological order.

One day, Bobby finds his friend Carol has been beaten by three bullies with a baseball bat and left in a grove of trees.

After leaving Harwich with his mother and twice being put in a juvenile detention facility, Bobby receives an envelope from Ted filled with red rose petals.

Willie Shearman is a Vietnam veteran who lives in Connecticut but sits in a particular sidewalk location in downtown New York City each day.

He believes that his blindness and begging is a form of penance for his involvement in the childhood beating of Carol (from Low Men in Yellow Coats) and continuously writes apologies to her in notebooks that he carries around.

Two veterans, John Sullivan (another childhood friend of Bobby Garfield's) and a man named Dieffenbaker reunite at the funeral of a third.

When he is airlifted out of combat, he sees the old woman who had been stabbed ("mamasan") sitting in the chopper with him, a hallucination that has continued in perpetuity.

A recurring theme of the conversation between Sullivan and Dieffenbaker is the growing sense between the two men that the various characters of their youths "sold out" in various ways to the allure of materialism and conformity.

Evidently hallucinating, he begins to see things fall from the sky: cordless phones, a grand piano, appliances, and a long yellow coat like the "low men" wear.

Bobby reveals that he had come because Sullivan's probate lawyer sent him his old Alvin Dark fielder's mitt with his current address in Ted's handwriting.

Charles de Lint praised Hearts in Atlantis as "the Great American Baby Boomer Novel", saying that, "when he's at the top of his form, as he certainly is here, he [King] can be as provocative and inspired as .

"[2] Low Men in Yellow Coats and "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling" formed the basis[3] of a 2001 film entitled Hearts in Atlantis, starring Anthony Hopkins as Ted Brautigan, Anton Yelchin as Bobby Garfield, Mika Boorem as Carol Gerber and Hope Davis as Liz Garfield.

In addition, all the references to the Dark Tower were removed and the final destinies of the characters, revealed in the latter stories of the original novel, are excluded.

A further consequence of the changes is that the film's title is completely impenetrable to those unfamiliar with the novel, although a snatch of dialogue attempts to remedy this: Ted remarks that childhood is a lost city like Atlantis.

Raymond Fiegler, who is identified near the novel's end as leader of an activist group when he prevents Carol Gerber from retrieving an unexploded bomb on a college campus, is very likely another alias of Randall Flagg, a recurring villain in many of King's works.