When “Hearts in Atlantis,” Stephen King’s latest work, came out in September, it was immediately labeled “the Vietnam book.” True enough. A collection of five stories — two novellas, two short stories, and a postscript — “Hearts” anticipates, exemplifies and even glorifies the era of bell-bottom jeans, Saigon, long hair, long tokes and short draft cards.

Apparently, this book was a while in the making for King, himself a child of the ’60s and a graying hippie. Although he never served in the Vietnam War (for a myriad of medical reasons), King absorbed the fiery world around him as a college student at the University of Maine in the late 1960s and, mostly to please himself, began writing about it. Eventually, he had enough to fill more than 500 fat pages that he thought his children would get a kick out of. As a result, there’s a history lesson lurking within this pop-culture bildungsroman.

In addition to being called the Vietnam book, “Hearts” has also been earmarked as a masterpiece and applauded for emotional heft. You’ll cry, one reviewer warned. So bring tissue. The reason is that King reaches deep into a consciousness, confusion, and shame shaped by American leaders and then pounded by dissenters during the Vietnam era.

The opening novella, “Low Men in Yellow Coats,” unwinds in 254 pages (close to half the volume) about Bobby Garfield’s struggles with life at 11. His father has died, his mother is overburdened, and Bobby’s just a little guy who wants the Schwinn in a store window of his small Connecticut town. These are Nancy Drew and “Lord of the Flies” days, and Bobby gets a sense of mounting danger and adventure through a mysterious boarder in the upstairs apartment.

With supernatural forces and shards of suspense and horror, the plot of “Low Men” resembles King’s more recent novels such as “Desperation” and “Insomnia.” Although the churning underbelly of the 1950s pumps toward the 1960s in this story, “Low Men” is finally more about a boy’s fantasies and fixations.

“Hearts in Atlantis” — the actual story — is simply a college-age version of these same infatuations, this time set in the full-blown 1960s. It’s fun to read because the landscape is recognizable (even though much of King’s version of UM is fictional). The hearts in this story are both a card game that keeps students from their studies and the ones that break because of passion — about love and against war. But, as with “Low Men,” the story feels longer than a semester of bad classes — even if they are livened up by chirpy characters. For me, the book really took flight on page 411, with the short story “Blind Willie,” about a Vietnam vet working out survivor guilt with a peculiar twist in the 1980s. My favorite of all King’s works is another short piece, “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” which was published in the 1982 collection “Different Seasons.” “Blind Willie” takes a powerful place beside “Rita Hayworth” for showing off King at his writerly best. King may rightfully be remembered as the world’s best horror writer, but his literary gifts are never more apparent than in the short story form.

“Sorry is a full-time job,” Willie Shearman, the title character, says as he walks into the ghoulish penance he performs on the streets of New York City, where his blindness is overshadowed by the metaphoric blindness of New Yorkers shopping at Saks and hearing Mass at St. Patrick’s. In a slice of Willie’s routine on a day near Christmas, we peer intimately into the private world of a man touched by trauma and pathologically committed to salvation. King presents Willie poetically, as if he were an elegant holiday symphony in the midst of conventional capitalist cacophony.

“Why We’re in Vietnam,” which takes place at the 1999 funeral of a vet, is equally provocative. Sully, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, goes to his friend’s funeral and takes a mental trip into the past. The slow unfolding of his memories expertly and frighteningly evoke the sound of the choppers and the smell of burning huts. As Sully relives the final horrors of the war, he also faces his own chilling fears, represented by the ghost of a Vietnamese woman he saw bayonetted by a buddy.

The postscript, “Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling,” picks up on the adult life of Bobby Garfield from “Low Men.” Forty years have passed, and King answers the question left unaddressed at the end of the original work: What happened to Bobby?

By this time, however, it’s more satisfying to hear news of Carol Gerber, who, like many of the characters in this book, float in and out of several of the stories. Carol is Bobby’s first girlfriend, his first kiss in “Low Men.” In “Hearts,” she teaches Petey the narrator about sex and then drops out of school to become a radical activist before disappearing off the face of the earth. “Heavenly Shades” more or less gives the goods on her, but it raises another question about King’s depiction of women. Violence toward women — whether in language or action — is prevalent. The women get raped, beaten up, stabbed, objectified and blown up. It’s a wearisome shortcoming in a book that draws its other characters so fully.

Although the stories may, at times, contain extraneous information and uneven writing, “Hearts in Atlantis” asks us to look back in time to a legendary era swallowed up by an earthquake of disillusionment. Love and peace equal information, King scribbles with hand-drawn symbols. That’s the make-love-not-war simplicity of nostalgia at work. If you can get around that, then King has a worthwhile tale to tell about living free in America and wearing chains forged by the Vietnam War.