Mike’s Reviews > Under the Dome > Status Update

King has no sense of restraint, in terms of characterization. Everyone, except maybe Barbie, is an over-the-top caricature.

The people here are going crazy way faster than the people in Gone did. I mean, in just the last 30 pages, we've had murder, rape, and necrophilia. And the border's only been up for two days.

For all this book's flaws, I guess Big Jim is a pretty compelling character.

I think the characters are the real place this novel fails. None of them are distinct enough for me to connect to - they all just read the same to me, and there are too many of them to keep track of.

This should be entertaining. Why is it boring? Is it because there are too many characters? Is it because I'm unfairly comparing it to Gone? I have no idea why this doesn't work for me.

There are a lot of potentially interesting plot threads going on, and I don't know why I'm not really latching onto any of them. Maybe there are just too many of them, and they don't relate very much.

I liked this better when there were no adults, and the kids had superpowers, and Michael Grant wrote it.

SPOILERS:

Okay, King, you did not just write a lesbian character and kill her on the first appearance. I dearly hope that it turns out she's just injured and not dead, because otherwise, King really sucks. Man, this isn't nearly as good as I thought it would be.

This prose is really distancing. This jumping around from character to character can work, but it only really works well when the characters have distinct personalities we can latch onto immediately. That's why it was never hard to keep track of the characters in Gone, because they were too distinct to get mixed up. Here... everything just kinda blends together for me.

I'm kinda lukewarm about this so far. The writing is kinda rough - some of the stylistic choices are kinda weird, and King seems to be relying on telling us details rather than showing them.