As a gift I got Stephen King’s Under the Dome, his latest mega-book* filled with a cast of thousands. This was the hardcover edition so it was heavy enough to double as a weapon to bludgeon with. It proved too unwieldy for my daily commute so I picked it up in ebook form and started in, hooked by the simple yet undeniable high concept of “What would happen if an essentially impenetrable invisible dome suddenly cut off a small town from the rest of the world?” If you guessed “very bad things” you would be correct!
King is adept at handling a large cast of characters and in Under the Dome he does a good job of giving the various characters distinct personalities that you will like, hate or just plain loathe. Especially loathe.
Spoilers ahead without spoiler tags. If you haven’t read the novel and plan to, read on at your peril!
Overall I liked it. For a big fat book the pace moves along quickly. In fact, the pace also seems too swift, with with everything in the quaint burg of Chester’s Mills going to hell in just a few days. I kept flipping back and forth between thinking it was unrealistic that civility and social norms would collapse so quickly and accepting that this is exactly what would happen. Shorter: people suck. King plays on that big time.
For the citizens of the town it doesn’t help that their corner of Maine is under the thumb of second selectman Jim Rennie, as vile a villain as King has ever written. At times almost cartoonishly evil, Rennie is perfectly rotten to the core and many a reader may find themselves distracted mulling over the horrible end King has in mind for him, because surely someone as evil as this man (who has gotten away with murdering his wife before the story begins and finds murdering people who get in his way kind of like eating a bag of Lay’s) is going to come to a fitting end.
Ah, the end, the bane of so many otherwise outstanding King stories. On the one hand the ending of Under the Dome works well enough and King certainly doesn’t try to pull a fast one on the reader. Quite to the contrary, the ending is heavily foreshadowed and is the ultimate Very Bad Thing that happens to the hapless people caught under the big bubble. But it also feels a bit like a cheat because it deliberately subverts and destroys nearly everything that has happened in the story up to that point. All of the machinations of Rennie and his cronies literally go up in smoke (and lots of fire), which is convenient in terms of bringing events to a conclusion but I am left wondering if the story would have been better served by letting the dome persist and have the battle between Rennie and his opponents play out over weeks or months rather than a mere four days.
Still, this is a case where the journey is still worth it even if the destination isn’t entirely to your taste. Some of the science is wonky and certain plot points are a inconsistent or little too convenient (people become very bad shots at the worst times) but none of this bothered me, not even Chester’s Mill–a town of less than 2,000–being home to the largest meth lab in the U.S. Hey, why not?
Under the Dome may have its flaws but it’s still an interesting, if depressing, take on how tenuous our civilized world is.
* distinct from his other books, which weigh less than four pounds