Jennie read and liked Kemper's review of Under the Dome: A Novel:

"Here’s a nightmare scenario. A mysterious disaster occurs. The area is completely cut off from any outside help. Resources are limited. People are confused and scared. And Dick Cheney is in charge….

That terrifying idea is what ma...more Here’s a nightmare scenario. A mysterious disaster occurs. The area is completely cut off from any outside help. Resources are limited. People are confused and scared. And Dick Cheney is in charge….

That terrifying idea is what makes Under the Dome one of the best books King has done.

The town of Chester’s Mill, Maine, is a typical Stephen King small town, filled with people both good and criminally insane. One fall day, a force-field crashes down around the area, causing a fair amount of carnage and disaster. The Dome, as it is quickly called, is quickly found to be impenetrable, and while the townspeople can communicate with the outside world via cell phones or wireless internet, they’re essentially on their own. If the situation wasn’t bad enough, the town is now in the hands of Big Jim Rennie.

Forget about Randall Flagg or Annie Wilkes or the Crimson King or Pennywise the Clown. Big Jim, a used car salesman and town selectman, is King’s scariest villain ever. Why? Because America lived through a Big Jim-like reign after 9/11, and it’s all too easy to picture how much worse it could have gotten while reading this book.

King isn’t very subtle in the allegory here. Chester’s Mill is the stand-in for America, and Big Jim is obviously based on Cheney, a corrupt political weasel hiding behind the dim-witted first selectman of the town as a front to cover up his shenanigans. He doesn’t drink or smoke and talks about his love for Jesus, but Big Jim is utterly ruthless about destroying his enemies. And to Big Jim, just disagreeing with him makes you an enemy.

Big Jim has spent years refusing to spend money on needed town improvements while involved in all kinds of criminal enterprises. While he demands total power and authority, he’s actually completely incompetent at leadership except for placing blame and manipulating people. When the Dome comes down, his first concern is covering up his criminal activity, but he quickly realizes that with the outside world at bay, he can create his own little dictatorship inside the bubble. And of course, he’s doing it for the good of the town.

A small group of people realize what Rennie is doing and try to stop him, but they vastly overestimate what the threat of eventual punishment from the outside will do. They just can’t believe that anyone would actually go as far as Big Jim is prepared to do, and while the federal government tries in vain to assert its authority, Big Jim is all too happy to thumb his nose at them and continue to consolidate power even as the air inside the Dome is getting awfully stale.

King’s always been terrific at depicting the strengths and weaknesses of a small town in books like ‘Salem’s Lot or Needful Things, but this is something different. He claims that he’s had the idea for this book since the mid-70s, but never completed it because the science of what would happen within the Dome was beyond him. Delay may have been a blessing, I don’t think this would have been the same book if it wasn’t for the Bush/Cheney administration after 9/11.

It’s being routinely pointed out in various reviews that the plot here is eerily similar to The Simpson’s Movie where the government puts a giant dome over polluted Springfield. I’ve read an interview where King claims that he had no idea about this until the book was written and someone told him. I’m going to cry bullshit on that. He writes a column about pop culture for Entertainment Weekly and has played himself on the show. I find it really hard to believe that he somehow missed The Simpson’s Movie having a giant dome in it. It’s very weird that none of the people within the Dome ever mention the movie since King has never been shy about incorporating pop culture references before.

But that’s nitpicking and doesn’t change the fact that this story and Big Jim scared the crap out of me. (I grew up in a small town, and I could easily think of some of the locals who would have tried to take over after a crisis if left unchecked, and some of them probably would have been worse than Big Jim and his crowd of hand-picked bullies.) Although this is a huge book and King has been bad about over-writing in the past, this one flies by and I actually found myself wanting a little more detail about some of the people since many of them don’t get much of a wrap up. I was a shade disappointed in the eventual explanation to the cause of the Dome, and how it is resolved, but overall, this is going to end up being one of my favorite Stephen King books.
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