Under the Dome - A Review

Under the Dome by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


After reading this book, you may never step on an ant again. That's right, an ant.

Consider, for a moment, an ant farm. The clear, plastic housing enables one to observe the ants' behavior. Suppose the ants were given human egos? Suppose it was humans trapped in the ant farm instead of ants?

I present to you Stephen King's mammoth 2009 novel, "Under the Dome." At 1,074 pages, it is his longest and most ambitious book since his 1986 masterpiece, "It." When an invisible force field inexplicably falls over Chester's Mill, residents of the small Maine town find themselves cut off from the outside world. No one knows where this "dome" came from or why it's there. The dome is impenetrable--Air Force missiles do not put a dent in it. The force field extends far underground and reaches thousands of feet into the sky.

Characters like Dale Barbara, a retired Iraq War vet, are trapped inside the dome and ultimately left to fend for themselves. Barbara, the main protagonist in this tale, is pitted against a power-hungry politician named James Rennie, or Big Jim, who I envisioned as an overweight Fred Thompson. Barbara, who works as a short order cook, has and makes during the course of the story many friends in town--people like Rose Twitchell, owner of the local diner; Julia Shumway, owner of the town newspaper; Rusty Everett, a town doctor. Rennie has friends too, many of whom are in his pockets. These include most of the Chester's Mill Police force. There are so many characters in this book that I would need an Excel spreadsheet to list them all. That Mr. King can invent, work with, and keep track of such an ensemble speaks to his creative genius. His peripheral characters have backstories, like Piper Libby, a church reverend who doesn't believe in God; or Andrea Grinnell, the town's Third Selectman, who is trying to kick a drug habit.

King's genius sometimes gets him in trouble. There are parts of this story that drag like a wet towel. "Under the Dome" is in many ways an enormous pot of water that takes forever to come to boil. I have a suspicion that King had a lot of fun writing this--that he himself didn't know what was going to become of some of his characters until pivotal moments leading to their demise or triumph. I got the impression that he "lived in the moment." That is often the best method of storytelling (and typically the most rewarding, from a writer's perspective).

Two days trapped under the dome become four, and then six. The air becomes hot and stale. People start showing up dead under Jim Rennie's thumbprint. Alliances form--the good side and the bad. Dale Barbara and his friends must not only survive Rennie and his evil army, they must also figure out where the dome is being generated and how to stop it.

"Under the Dome" is a long, long, long book. And because I don't wish this to become a long, long, long review, I'm going to stop here. King fans won't be wowed by this one, but neither will they be disappointed.

And they'll likely never step on an ant again. Four stars.







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