Hi, I'm John, and I have a confession to make. I've never read a Steven King book before. Oh sure, I've read the occasional King short story (Battleground is simply amazing), and who hasn't seen a movie based upon one of his novels by now? But to sit down and read a full length King novel? No, I've never done that.
I made up for that, though, (and with a vengeance), when I decided to read King's latest epic, Under the Dome. At 1088 pages, this monster seemed to be several books all rolled into one, and would surely either make or break the author for me. The concept looked interesting enough. And although friends would tell me it sounded like something from a Simpson's movie (not true, King envisioned the basic concept decades ago but never got a round to writing the full novel).
On a fine fall day in an undetermined year, drifter Dale Barbara (known as Barbie to his friends) is hiking out of the small western Maine town of Chester's Mill. Barbie is looking for greener pastures after a run-in with the son of the local First Selectman, James "Big Jim" Rennie. Barbie sees the writing on the wall. It is a small town after all, and although well liked at the diner where he works, Barbie is still an outsider.
Problem is, Barbie isn't going to make it out of Chester's Mill. Before he can escape city limits, an impenetrable, invisible dome clamps down over the exact confines of the town's border with the outside world. Nobody knows this, of course, not even Barbie, until planes, cars, and trucks slam into the dome, marking it's borders, or some of them anyway.
Everyone is a loss to explain what's going on. The military quickly cordons off a perimeter around the town, diverting air traffic and keeping folks away from the outside border. Those inside Chester's Mill can't get out, and those outside can't get in, and still, nobody knows why. The dome isn't all that harmful to approach, though it does generate a field effect that causes electronic gadgets to explode if brought too closely. The best scientific minds at the Government's disposal seem to think it's a force field set in place by Extraterrestrials.
With that in mind, Colonel James Cox, an old friend of Dale Barbara's from his military days, assigns him the mission of finding the dome's generator and destroying it. There's just one problem: Big Jim Rennie. Big Jim doesn't like the idea of Barbie having any kind of authority at all, and in fact seems to like the idea of the dome. After all, it allows him to assert control over Chester's Mill in a way he has never been able to before.
But strange things are going on under the dome. People are committing suicide at an unusually high rate just days after the dome clamps down. Children are having seizures and nightmares of falling stars and the world on fire. That means Barbie will have to locate the generator (if it exists) before Rennie does. Because if Big Jim gets to it first, he might just keep it in place. And that would be extremely bad for Chester's Mill in general and Dale Barbara in particular.
Although Under the Dome clocks in at well over 1000 pages, the reader will hardly know it. That's because King keeps us fed with a constant stream of action, intrigue, and suspense. At first, we wonder just what the dome is, where it came from, and why it's there. Is it mystical? Is it alien? King weaves in aspects of both the supernatural and the extraterrestrial to keep us wondering.
After a while, though, we get so caught up in the characters (mostly the machinations of Big Jim Rennie and the exploits of Dale Barbara) that the dome itself starts to fall by the wayside, at least as far as plot is concerned. It's what's going on under the dome that really piques our interest. And how could it not? With serial killings and political power grabs, attempts to break out and to break in, and a number of folks just trying to survive and subdue the fear that grips them all.
King's characters are well fleshed out, and even our protagonists (like Barbie) are not without personality flaws. This, of course, makes them more real. But even the lesser characters are well-detailed and believable, though it's best not to get too attached to them in a Stephen King novel. It's those characters that make the book so enjoyable, however, and the author uses them to craft a case study in human nature and behavior.
Take a small town, already a microcosm in and of itself, and cut it off from the rest of society, and you'll see the best and worst of humanity emerge in short order. That's the essence of Under the Dome, an action packed, well-paced read worth checking out. It's one flaw is the semi-anticlimactic, rather drawn out ending. But once we've gotten that far, the ride has been such fun we hardly even notice.
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