Under the Dome: A Novel

A small New England town is suddenly, inexplicably cut off from the rest of the world, trapping a large cast of characters inside (or outside) a huge, clear dome. As the emergency escalates, various heroes (and villains) emerge to play a part in the drama. What is the dome? Why is it there? Will the town survive? This is the premise of Stephen King's big, long, thoroughly fascinating new novel.

King has rarely written a book as ambitious as this. As I was reading, I was constantly wondering about the motives behind the deceptively simple story. As with the best of horror and science fiction, it isn't just about a monster on the rampage. What clearly interests King--and us, the readers--is the reaction of the "ordinary" people of Chester's Mill, Maine, who are placed in this extraordinary situation. In the struggles of these heroes, villains, lovers, and fools, we can all see ourselves. And that is the mark of a great work of art, isn't it?

I've been reading Stephen King for 35 years now--I read his first 3 novels in college--and I've always been impressed by his work. But UNDER THE DOME is in a small group of King stories that go far beyond merely being entertaining fiction. This novel will inevitably be compared to The Stand because it deals with the horrors of the world around us. Forget ghosts and vampires and space aliens--there's nothing as horrifying as what humans are capable of doing to one another. Stephen King knows that: it's the reason his stories are so effective. In his long, distinguished career, he's rarely been as effective--or as entertaining--as he is here. UNDER THE DOME is a fast-paced modern horror story, and it's also an amazingly perceptive modern novel. Highly recommended.

Stephen King, no novice at penning lengthy tomes, turns in another 1,000-plus-page behemoth with Under the Dome, a book he started writing in 1976 but abandoned for more than three decades. More than 30 years later, with one of the most remarkable literary careers in history under his belt, he tackled the project again, this time completing a story that plumbs the depths of human wickedness.

The town of Chester's Mill, Maine, is a pretty typical-seeming smallish New England community. It has a diner, a used car dealership, a couple of churches, a supermarket, a newspaper, and a religious radio station. Most of its 2,000 or so residents are good, honest people who genuinely care for each other and for their town.

The scene changes abruptly when a mysterious and invisible barrier materializes out of nowhere, completely cutting the town off from the rest of the world. Within minutes, the death toll begins to rise. A plane smashes into the barrier followed by a number of cars. As scientists and government and military officials scramble to find a way to break through the barrier, those inside the dome have to quickly adjust to their new reality. And with Stephen King manning the controls, it's just a matter of time before that reality turns sinister.

Within days, Chester's Mill turns into a depressing cauldron of murder, corruption, conspiracy, and increasing fear. The town's police fall under the control of a vicious town selectman with dictatorial ambitions. Resources are seized. Vocal dissenters are jailed--or worse. Soon the air quality inside the dome begins to change. Illnesses increase. Children begin to have seizures and frightening visions. Fear leads to anger, and people start to do things they wouldn't have dreamed of just days earlier. As tension mounts, the stage is set for a final cataclysmic showdown between those who will stop at nothing to enforce their agenda for the town and those who believe the town's increasingly dangerous leaders must be stopped at any cost.

On some levels, Under the Dome is almost allegorical. The town's blossoming dictatorship is reminiscent of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, with a charismatic leader ruling by force, police who operate outside the law, and "police solidarity" armbands for citizens. The worsening environment inside the dome could be a picture of climate change. The fact that the villains are all right-wing fundamentalist Christians (extremely hypocritical Christians at that) is probably a statement of some sort, and there are a few references to Falujah that some might see as antimilitary. In any case, whether or not the author intended to send a message through the story, the book absolutely illustrates the tendency of power to corrupt and the inherent wickedness of the human heart.

Under the Dome is not an easy book to read, and not only because of its size. Readers familiar with King's work will be unsurprised to find foul language and sexual content, some of it disturbing (most notably a gang rape scene and hints of necrophilia). There's plenty of violence, quite a bit of drug use, and lots of examples (very nearly too many, in fact) of people treating each other in all kinds of horrible ways. Though the dome is the reason the townspeople are in their predicament, the real conflict in the book is not people vs. the dome but people vs. each other. This book could just as easily have been titled The Worst-Case Scenario because on page after page, just when it seems the forces of good might be about to catch a break, King pulls the rug out from under them yet again. There's very little in the way of a redemptive message.

Yet all this is offset by King's trademark brilliance in character development and plot pacing, and much of the prose is beautifully crafted. King utilizes an antiquated but effective technique in his narration, slipping into present tense and addressing the reader directly at times to draw attention to a particular item of interest in a scene or to explicitly foreshadow some coming tragedy. Careful readers will find a few references to other Stephen King books peppered throughout.

When he wants to, Stephen King is capable of writing stunningly beautiful stories championing the human spirit in the face of extreme adversity (Duma Key is an example). Under the Dome is not such a book. This is a story about human ugliness, and it's all the more uncomfortable because it rings true. Even so, the brilliance of King's writing is evident on every one of the 1,074 pages. Fair warning: don't start this book unless you have some time on your hands. Uncomfortable though the book may be, it's compelling and suspenseful, and once you start reading, it quickly becomes very difficult to put down.

Me: Huge King fan. I have five bookshelves with nothing but King -- not just books BY King but books ABOUT his books. Hardcover firsts, special limited editions, graphic novels, and some books I bought only because King wrote the introduction. I've read him from the beginning and have been repaid with hundreds of hours of enjoyment. Anyone else remember the Castle Rock newsletter put out by his secretary?

I was enthralled with the first couple hundred pages of Under the Dome. Clear, concise language, vivid images, a well-paced story, and some characters who looked like they were going to be interesting. When the characters failed to develop and it became apparent that most of them were introduced just so we could watch them die in various ways, my interest flagged. Pretty soon I was reading just to get it all over with.

Now it's over. With the best books, you have the sense that the characters lived before you met them and that they will live on when you close the book. Stu Redman is still with me. So is Annie Wilkes. Jack Torrance. But the people of Chester's Mill never came alive -- they're just characters in a novel, thinly drawn pawns that King played with for awhile, moving them here and there without much thought or care.

Specific complaints -- unrealistic expository dialogue, an almost-cartoonish villain, too much foreshadowing that someone was going to die (sometimes King spoils his own books), and a few unbelievable and contrived spots where if you know anything at all about how things really work, you're taken right out of the story.

Maybe if I hadn't been looking forward to this book for so long, it wouldn't have been so disappointing. I hyped it up in my own mind. I'll never do that again.

From the moment I heard the premise of Under the Dome, I couldn't wait to read it. Here it is in a nutshell: On a perfectly ordinary fall day, an invisible, impregnable barrier surrounds the small town of Chester's Mill, Maine. Nightmare ensues. And I do mean nightmare. Uncle Stevie isn't playing around. This isn't one of his tall tales filled with imaginary monsters and buckets of gore. The monsters here are human, and they are terrifying.

Okay, as an editor, when I see a 1,000+ page novel, my first thought is, "Does it really need to be this long?" Maybe not. I'm sure a few pages could have been trimmed. But I will tell you this... The deeper I got into this novel, the quicker I turned pages--right up until the end, when I was in a veritable page-turning frenzy. It reminded me, right from the start, of the fine work he did in the 70's, when as a child I devoured each new novel upon publication. King hasn't lost his touch with character, and he remains a consummate storyteller.

Under the Dome is epic. The time span is short, but the novel deals with the lives of more than 2,000 people trapped in a combustible hothouse. These are truly terrifying and incomprehensible circumstances. Things in Chester's Mill are bad, and hour by hour the situation got so much worse I didn't want to believe it. But I did. I believed it all. And THAT is Stephen King's genius.

Warning: There are some spoilers in this review. If you continue to read, you may feel some important plot twists are given away. That having been said . . .

I just finished the new novel, Under the Dome, by Stephen King, and I enjoyed it, overall. Even though it ended not with a bang, but a whimper, and was ultimately disappointing, just the process of reading (or, as in this case, listening to) a King novel can be most enjoyable.

I say that ahead of time, because it's going to sound like I'm being very critical of Stephen King here, and I am, but I'd still say that, if you like Stephen King, the book is definitely worth the read. It's a long novel full of Stephen King's rich prose, and that in itself is worth the price of admission.

There were several problems for me, however. The primary problem was the nature of the dome itself, and the final resolution of the problem. It made absolutely no sense, not even in the context of the story, and was ultimately unsatisfying. Unlike the Superflu of The Stand, it made no sense. It might have been better if he had handled it the way he had with From a Buick 8--clearly, it was an alien device, had something to do with playing with humans, but really no explanation.

A transplanted defense shield from an alternate reality or the future would have made more sense, and some sort of determination made about when the shield would expire working against the ambitions of the bad guys would have made for a more engaging story. And the resolution to the problem wouldn't have been any worse. As it is, the actual resolution--spoiler alert!--that the resident "Republican to the Core" newspaper editor begs some alien intelligence to let them go, and then it does, is one of those "Huh?" moments that could disappoint the Constant Reader who slogs all the way to the end.

The other thing that is ultimately unsatisfying is the end of the Machiavellian, seemlingy unstoppable bad guy. Big Jim Rennie, after persisting with Jason Voorhees-like tenacity, bumbles himself to death and dies of a heart attack. King might as well have written, "Then the bad guy falls down and dies. The end."

After all the build up, the pages and pages of Big Jim's hypocritical justifications and tirades and excuses and murderous escapades, not to mention his general, malevolent indulgence and nurturing of man's inhumanity to man, he just dies. Oops.

Which brings me to the other thing. King has given us all these characters before, only in better, less-tedious forms. And the left-leaning politics are more overblown, and work more actively against the story, than in most of his previous works.

All the bad guys, and the just-badly-stupid guys who help to enable to bad guys, are Christians. The drug lords ruining the main countryside with crystal meth? The Born Again Christian bad guy, Big Jim Rennie, and the pastor Lester Coggins. The good preacher from the good, reasonable church? She doesn't believe in God! The one good Republican, editor of the local paper, The Democrat? She shows no signs of actually being conservative to, you know, make her more likable, and to what degree she might have some secret conservative leanings, she implies that recent circumstances have helped her "learn and grow", like John McCain or Olympia Snow or Arlen Spector. Or maybe Colin Powell.

There are lots of military guys in the novel, and they are generally treated respectfully, although the few that express any sort of political opinion show that they, too, reflect King's left-leaning political views. And Lieutenant Dale Barbara, the ostensible hero of the piece, is haunted by his memories of his troops randomly beating and shooting innocent Iraqi's in Falujah, with an implication that that was pretty much business as usual with the American military in Iraq . . . so, I suppose, what the King giveth, the King taketh away.

One could be forgiven for thinking, after reading Under the Dome, that the lesson to be drawn is that conservative politics and Christian fundamentalism are married at the hip, and that the two naturally lead to drug dealing, drug addiction, gang rape, police brutality, violent murder, insanity, and eventually the death of two thousand people in a horrific firestorm. None of the bad guys in this book have any political opinions that lean leftwards. None of them are angry about the environment or justify a murder they commit because of their opposition to the war in Iraq. It might be interesting if King--a very good writer when he challenges himself--tried to write a Michael Crichton style novel, like State of Fear, which--to be fair--showed about the same nuance and subtlety in it's characterizations of environmentalists that King does in Under the Dome regarding conservative Christians.

The other thing that stuck in my craw--other than all the Christians being evil drug-addicts and murderers, and the numerous plot threads that never went anywhere--is his consistently low opinion of humanity. Jim Rennie was able to easily manipulate the town into a violent, bloody riot at the grocery store. Okay. I can go with that. History is full of mobs behaving badly. But almost every person, except for our few heroes, follow the worst possible motives. Almost no one seems to really come to their senses later on. All the new recruits for the police force are all automatically bad actors, and like to beat folks up and rape the women. And almost all do so without any apparent concern for the idea that (a) the victimized might seek revenge or (b) the dome, only a few days old, may not be a permanent fixture of life.

And, after the dome comes down, it takes four days for civilization to essentially disintegrate, and a week before almost everyone is burned alive. I realize fiction often operates on a compressed time scale, but, really?

The other thing that bugs me that, as an ex-military guy, Dale Barbara should have been a little more Jason Bourne and a little less Ghandi, more of the time. If you're going to completely blow believability, the hero should, in places, kick some serious butt.

And, of course, as is typical with King, most of the people you root for end up dead. Not a bad strategy, and it worked well in The Stand--who wanted to see Nick Andros bite it, or any of the good guys? But it just worked. And, I do confess, the largely apolitical evil of the bad guys in The Stand made for a more inclusive, more expansive saga than the knee-bent, Jesus-praising bad guys with the word "Republican" tattooed on their fat, sweating, pro-capitalist, tax-cutting, budget-minded foreheads that populate Under the Dome.

I could go on about how tediously repetitive the Crazy Christian is in King's work, but I won't. They've popped up in King's work since the beginning. But I only remember one of them in Cell. I don't think there was even one in Duma Key. There was a fairly dominant one in The Mist, some various crazy religious people in Storm of the Century, and numerous other novels and short stories. But I don't remember them being so many and so vocal. I mean, wow. It got exhausting. I guess if you hate, or are at least deeply suspicious of, anybody with a profound religious faith, you'll like it, and the more the better. It got tiresome for me

Ah, well. Uncle Stevie gotta eat. Hopefully, he's got the two-dimensional characterizations of stupid, evil Christians out of his system and can come up with something a little more compelling, along the lines of Duma Key (which I really enjoyed) or Bag of Bones, which was even better.