I have already done a post about my love of Stephen King's writing. I won't say it's hard for me to be objective about his work, but I am more likely to defend it than I am to dismiss. I always expect a new book by King to be wonderful, and even the less than wonderful ones are still startingly unique. "Under the Dome," to put it simply, was like a macabre version of the play "Our Town." If asked to name the main character upon whom the story revolved around, I would have to say the fictional town of Chesters Mill, Maine, assuming of course that a town can serve as both the setting and the main character of any story.
"Under the Dome" is about a small town (Chesters Mill) that is one day encircled with a seemingly impenetrable clear dome. The dome covers the entire town, and once in place no one can get in and no one can get out. The town literally becomes isolated from the rest of the world. Within about the course of a day, panic sets in and the townspeople only have one thing on their mind: survival. It doesn't help that the man who holds the most power in town, Big Jim, is a manipulative used car salesman who is consequently the driving force behind the largest meth lab in the country (which also happens to be secretly located in Chesters Mill). As tensions rise and days pass without any sign of the dome being penetrated, Big Jim wields the town into a frenzy with disasterous consequences.
This book has a lot of characters. Essentially, the entire town is used in this story, which means there are a lot of names to keep straight. This initially made it difficult for me to keep names and characters straight, but once I started getting deeper into the story it was effortless. King has always done an admirable job of being able to set characters apart from one another, so that even in a book with 20 plus people to keep track off there is no dobut about who is who and how they are integral to the storyline.
I think critics everywhere have already done their fair share of picking this book apart. I have read reviews saying that King is using this book as a platform to bash organized religion, to push his liberal viewpoints about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that he has created a cast of overly stereotypical characters assist him in criticizing the military and the government. You'll have to read the book for yourself in order to identify these correlations because I don't have the time nor the energy to delve into everything in this blog post. Personally, I never really take much stock into what these so-called professional critics say, because that's just what they are: critics.
At its core "Under the Dome" gives readers a terrifying glimpse into the effects of isolation, propaganda, and small town politics. Imagine an entire town with cabin fever, everyone suspicious of everyone else, and you get a grasp of one of the disturbing undertones of this novel. The story itself doesn't ever take a time out. There is no happy introductory period, no huge build-up before the action and the conflict begins. We are thrust into disorder as soon as the gates open, and things get a lot more complicated before they get better. I loved the pace of this book. There was never a chance for the reader to grow bored.
The ending. It can be hard to end stories sometimes. Then other times it just happens naturally, and you know that everything has been summed up and there's literally nothing more to say. I love good endings, and I crave great endings. This one fell somewhere in the mediocre pile. It felt forced and just incomplete. I mean, the story was definitely over, but I still had questions and couldn't quite grasp what had actually taken place to bring everything to conclusion. Maybe I just need to go back and do a closer read, but I had my hopes up (always a mistake) for something great and was a bit disappointed.
To sum it up, "Under the Dome" probably hasn't claimed the title of my favorite Stephen King novel, but it was one hell of a book nonetheless. If you are a regular peruser of King's work I would recommend you check this out, but if you're new to his writing I would start with some of his earlier stuff as a warm-up.
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