Under The Dome – Stephen King

Book Review

Title: Under The Dome

Author: Stephen King

Genre: Horror/Thriller/Paranormal

Rating: * * *

Review: Under the Dome opens with a signature Stephen King moment: a woodchuck, foraging for food, hides from a passing human—and is chopped in half as an impenetrable dome appears around the city limits. At the same instant, a plane crashes into the dome above him.

“The Seneca exploded over Route 119 and rained fire on the countryside. . . . A smoking forearm . . . landed with a thump beside the neatly divided woodchuck.”

In seconds Chester’s Mill has transformed from your typical small town to a closed-off stage where the worst and best of human nature will be displayed. This is King’s longest novel in more than a decade—not as big as monsters like It and The Stand, but with a cast of hundreds and an epic scale. What’s really impressive is that for all its brain-bashing size, Under The Dome goes by in a flash. In Misery, King’s novel about the power of fiction, the author hero talks about the “gotta,” the mystical compulsion to find out what happens next. After years of clunky exposition and muddled, intermittently moving character studies, Under The Dome is a rush of blackly comic delight, a poison-pen letter to the small towns on which King has spent so much ink in the past, and a sincere paean to the need for basic decency. Most importantly, the sucker moves. First, about that dome. We’ll be stuck under it with the residents of Chester’s Mill, Maine, for most of the thousand-plus pages of Stephen King’s impressive new novel, so a few facts may be handy. For starters, it is invisible and impenetrable — a force field, really, sci-fi flick allusions included. So its sudden manifestation one autumn day causes many bad things to happen. A plane crashes into the dome, some cars and a truck crash into it, flocks of birds crash into it and die. People die too. And King handles these initial catastrophes as he will handle much of the mayhem ahead: with a grim yet almost jocular kind of matter-of-factness. The most significant thing about the dome is that it prevents anyone from entering or leaving a small town that feels suddenly much smaller. Forget that some kids’ parents are out of town, or that most of the fire department happens to be away. The big problems stem not from what’s stuck outside, but from what’s stuck inside. Is this your average New England village? The home town pride, neighbourly generosity and petty rivalries are unmistakably genuine. But Chester’s Mill seems to have extra room in its budget for dark secrets, religious and moral hypocrisy, and latent but powerful human malevolence. In other words, it’s a Stephen King kind of town (just up Route 117 from Castle Rock, for those keeping track). So the stage is set for an old-fashioned battle between good and evil, of the scope and intricacy King first achieved with 1978’s “The Stand.” Under The Dome gets a lot of mileage out of a simple premise: on October 21, a force field encloses Chesters Mill, Maine. In the days that follow, the locals deal with rising temperatures, increased air pollution, the threat of dwindling supplies, and the power this sudden estrangement from consequences gives the town’s less morally inclined citizens. Chief among these is Big Jim Rennie, used-car salesman and local politician, who sees the Dome as a chance to upgrade his small-time power grabs to something far greater. Against him is ex-military man Dale Barbara, newspaper owner/editor Julia Shumway, and a minuscule group of concerned citizens. But Jim has a crazy son and an army of thugs to back him up—plus, as the days pass with no sign of relief, the whims of an easily led populace. The good guys include Dale Barbara, a drifter who served in the Iraq War and is haunted by memories of something that went terribly wrong in a gymnasium in Fallujah. On his side are a physician’s assistant, the editor of the local paper and a computer-literate kid and his skateboarding pals. As for the bad guys? Nowhere in sight is King’s perennial antagonist, Randall Flagg, who apparently couldn’t bust through that dome either. But who needs the embodiment of evil when you have folks like Big Jim Rennie, owner of the local used-car lot and the town’s second select man? Born-again Big Jim never utters a curse word (“clustermug,” “cotton-picking” and “rhymes-with-witch” are among his favourite turns of phrase), but he has the darkest of secrets to protect, as well as an insatiable hunger for power and control that needs only a nudge — or in this case, the isolation afforded by an inexplicable force field — to be kicked into high gear. The worst comes in the form of Big Jim Rennie, a politician who takes advantage of the police chief’s demise to consolidate power and deputize a motley crew of thugs—including his disturbed son—to police the town. Throw in an unbalanced meth addict and some seriously stale air (the dome is impermeable not only by weapons, but also by clean air), and Chester’s Mill is well on its way to becoming a chaotic police state. An Iraq war vet, a newspaper publisher, a physician’s assistant and a couple of spunky teens (among the novel’s most engaging characters) try to foil Big Jim’s plans while the world watches—at least, at first. Though their situation draws TV crews from around the world, once the novelty fades, other news stories take top billing despite the residents’ increasingly desperate state, recalling tragedies like Hurricane Katrina. When that happens, and when a resistance rises up in opposition to his power grab, the result is a vivid and harrowing tale, expertly constructed, intensely moral and often thrilling, related with the masterful ease we have come to expect from its author. That Rennie is the real star of the show says a good deal about King’s intentions. Rennie’s command comes from his ability to manipulate and his willingness to capitalize on the fear of others. “Fearful people need strong leaders,” he reflects, and the dome, he wants them to believe, is the result of a terrorist plot. Naturally, anyone opposing him must be in league with the plotters. The atrocities pile up fast as King describes with lucid prose and chilling precision the genesis of a fascist regime. It’s rendered on a miniature scale but is all the more terrifying for the claustrophobia induced by the setting. There are ecological problems to be reckoned with and questions of food and propane supplies. The story is overtly informed by certain contemporary horrors — flashbacks to that gymnasium in Fallujah are especially fraught. But let’s not call this political allegory. Let’s say instead that King is interested in portraying the everyday outrages that result when reason is abandoned for fear and panic, and that he knows where to look for examples. Little wonder that the crime most consistently highlighted in “Under the Dome” is that of complicity. When you’re in the grips of a good book, King seems to say, it’s OK to sink in and enjoy the story. But when real human evil takes hold and the powers that be are transformed into the powers that shouldn’t, it is not all right to sit back and watch. There is a tipping point in this novel. When things get so bad that the struggle between Rennie and his foes ceases to matter, the focus shifts, perhaps necessarily, back to the dome itself. Which is unfortunate, because the dome is significantly less interesting than what it inspires its captives to do. By this point, however, King already has us. “Under the Dome” is the work of a master storyteller having a whole lot of fun, and he makes it hard not to join in. King’s usual mannerisms are in evidence. The protagonists aren’t anywhere near as interesting or complex as the misfits and bastards who fill the rest of the town, and the large cast means that some characters become interchangeable. Thankfully, there are enough inspired caricatures to make up for the occasional chunks of well-meaning Styrofoam. And it can’t be stressed enough: this is King’s best paced novel in ages, and well-plotted to boot. Under The Dome spends the majority of its time on the increasingly ugly things decent people do in a crisis, and in giving his attention to relatable concerns, King does what he does best, creating a community and then tearing it apart. Sometimes the sense of place gets lost in the rush to the end, but the narrative is held together by a “worst choice possible” aesthetic, and an utter ruthlessness. It’s brutal, bloody, and an undeniable blast.

As in his epic novel, The Stand, King uses his characters’ predicament to address major questions about human nature. The emphasis here is on compassion—or, sparing that, pity. What makes us stop seeing people as people, and why? These deeper themes combined with King’s trademark suspense and folksy charm keep the almost 1,100 pages turning and make Under the Dome a novel readers will relish. I knew what I was getting into. Everyone said that modern Stephen King isn’t nearly as good as classic Stephen King, and I accepted this. If you read The Shining and Doctor Sleep within a couple of weeks of each other, you’ll be shocked at how much his writing style has changed over the years, forgoing prose in favour of a more simplistic, verbose style that prefers details — however mundane — over eloquence. And that can be fine. We evolve as writers over time, and even Doctor Sleep, which wasn’t that great, had some surprisingly touching and insightful moments — unsurprisingly, the best parts were the ones that felt the most personal. What interested me the most about Under the Dome was the idea that, with longer King books, you often get a leisurely paced but thrilling journey with strong character development and great bursts of intensity laced throughout. Books like The Stand and It and Needful Things have all given the reader incredibly satisfying journeys, while the destination — or climax — leaves a bit to be desired. It’s as if King doesn’t really know where the story is headed and writes himself into a corner, then he just writes in some aliens or goblins and uses the power of childhood imagination or mystical intervention to undermine evil and the day is saved. So maybe I should have known better going into this? I guess in that sense, Under the Dome is a King classic, but I should have seen where it was headed. Under the Dome isn’t a bad book or poorly written, and — as with most of King’s work, I had a hard time putting it down. There are plenty of female characters and they are prominently featured, smart, and serve a great purpose other than existing as wives and girlfriends. There’s a rape scene, but it serves to illustrate what happens under the control of a nefarious dictatorship that deploys its own method of “law enforcement.” It’s tragic and heartbreaking. King goes to lengths to show that women are more opposed to this new authority than men, and wiser, too, and unfortunately that’s the reason why so many of them die so often: because they dare to stand up and say “No.” Where the book loses me is this: a major plot point is a meth factory, controlled in part by the town’s new dictator, Big Jim Rennie, and his lackeys. The source of the dome is a mystery for the majority of the book’s pages, and after a time, I started to wonder — and sort of worry — if the dome wasn’t caused by some mutated form of Super Meth. While that would be kind of dumb, it might allow for some of King’s wackier ideas, like maybe there would be some weirdo meth gremlins or something. But no. The dome exists because of aliens. Of course it does. And even worse: alien children, who have placed the dome around the town of Chester’s Mill as some twisted otherworldly video game, their own virtual entertainment. I still held out hope that maybe King would at least revive his stupid but amusing shit weasels from Dreamcatcher, but no. The alien kids don’t feel anything for us or understand that our lives have value, and this all ties together to the Reverend Piper Libby, who’s lost her faith in God. King provides an eye-roll-worthy moment when Libby remarks that all this time she’s been praying to someone who wasn’t there, when these beings were controlling our fate all along. Couple this with a paramedic’s story about trying to stop his friend from burning ants to death with a magnifying glass, and King’s inspiration for Under the Dome becomes agonizingly evident: that silly idea that God is an overgrown kid with a magnifying glass, and we’re the ants; or the more modern incarnation, that God is playing a video game, and we’re the characters. Jesus Christ, indeed. The climax is written in a frenzied, convoluted style that feels like a missed opportunity to pause and embrace the elegance of its intention: a last ditch desperate attempt at begging empathy. One of our main characters, Julia Shumway, forms a mental link with a solitary alien girl, and shows the alien being her own childhood suffering as well as a harrowing incident in Iraq involving fellow Dome survivor Colonel Barbara, illustrating humanity’s capacity for cruelty and its capacity for pain, in an attempt to show them that maybe our kind and their kind are not so different. Not everyone is capable of empathy. The best some can offer is pity, and sometimes that’s enough. I get it. But it’s so hastily written and tacked on, with no real denouement after over 1,000 pages of an extensive journey with all of these people. Then again, that’s King for you, I guess.

Buy it here:

Paperback/Hardback: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Under-Dome-Stephen-King/dp/0340992581/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1440094540&sr=8-1&keywords=stephen+king+under+the+dome

Kindle Edition: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Under-Dome-Stephen-King-ebook/dp/B0031LJ4IO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1440094540&sr=8-1