I hadn’t read a Stephen King novel in a great while. There was a time when that was exceedingly unusual for me. I’d read all of his novels starting from Carrie up through It, including the first 3 installments of his The Dark Tower epic. I’ve also read a bunch of his Richard Bachman books. I think I just got burnt out on his storytelling. I remember starting The Tommyknockers, but I was never able to finish it; possibly the only time I’d ever started and not finished any book. That was many years ago and the last time I’d picked up one of his books.
The Wife got me Under the Dome for Father’s Day. At over 1000 pages long, it was a heckuva way to jump back into King’s world. I finished it up last night and I have to say, it was a story on par with his stuff I’d read and enjoyed so much.
The pacing is fast. King has a way for breathing life into a character all in the name of setup. He’ll spend 10 pages telling the life story of a woman taking flying lessons on a beautiful fall day in Maine, and then destroy her in 2 pages of gory detail. King used this technique throughout the book and I was almost always able to recognize what he was about to do. In fact, the entire book does that for King’s town of Chester’s Mill. Even so, I couldn’t look away because he had brought his good stuff to the story.
The story itself is about what happens to a town that is cut off from the world by a force shield, the Dome. It’s a simple concept that’s been done before. And in the mind of Stephen King, it takes about the shape his readership would expect. He quickly sets up his main antagonist, whom spends most of the book manipulating events to his benefit. The good guys aren’t so much set against him as they are simply trying to survive him. Being a King novel, I don’t think I’m giving much away when I say that most of them do not succeed.
Ostensibly, the book is about the cruelty people can visit on one another. Chester’s Mill is a small town and King does not spare it a dark and seedy underbelly (not that we’d expect him too). The Dome serves to amplify and draw out that cruelty as the story moves along. Atrocities both large and small are committed and King spares the reader little in terms of the depravity that such a situation can draw out.
However, I’d be careful to conclude that King’s story is a definitive narrative on what happens “under the dome.” King has a story to tell, and anyone familiar with his work should know that there are givens to where his mind will take the reader. But to read his story and try to generalize it to the point of saying “Yep, he nails exactly what would happen under these circumstances” is to go too far. The blend of characters and circumstances King weaves are believable enough, but are clearly contrived towards telling a certain kind of story. From the ego maniacal 2nd selectman and his enablers to the Iraqi vet and his cadre of like minded citizens to the drug maker addicted to his own product, the story is laced with characters so King can tell the story he wants. To think that every small town in the country has the same basic makeup gives King too much credit.
Under the Dome is a story, and an immensely enjoyable one at that. As far as Stephen King stories are concerned, I’d say it’s an example of his work at its best, though I’d rank any one of a number of his other stories as superior (The Shining, The Stand, Pet Semetary, Salem’s Lot– to name a few). It is as fast a read as can be for a 1000 page story. I’d recommend it to anyone interested.
But that said, don’t look to Under the Dome for larger messages on humanity or ideas about people. Ultimately, it’s just a story.