(Despite a career as a journalist and a degree in English, I haven't written a book review in a really long time. Bear with me.)
When I was 11 years old, I outgrew the authors of my childhood - Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, Laura Lee Hope, and numerous others - and jumped impatiently into the racy romance and suspense novels lining my grandma's bookshelves - Sidney Sheldon, Judy Collins, Danielle Steele, and numerous others. Through the local library, I found other writers, including Stephen King. It was 1983 and he offered a plethora of things to scare the hell out of a girl: pet cemeteries that spit out homicidal zombies, classic cars that showed far too much affinity for their owners, possessed St. Bernards, people who lunched on their own body parts for survival, and monsters human and supernatural and terrible not for being impossibly cruel but for being all too accessible on an everyday level.
I stuck with King until I was in college; his books took a decided turn for more navel-gazing as he approached middle age, and I didn't relate much to it. I don't blame him; he made his fortune writing what he undoubtedly had found interesting at 15 but perhaps not so much in his 30s. Because I haven't read a book of his in almost two decades (except for the stories in "Four Past Midnight" again after "Secret Window" the movie came out, to remind myself), I don't know if he's changed his focus in that amount of time yet again, or if I just like something different at 38 than I did at 19.
"Under the Dome" is a monster of a book; I listened to the audiobook because I had it, and only because my sister had downloaded it for me into her old Zune she gave me last year. Unabridged, it clocks in at just over 35 hours - by contrast, "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," which was extremely detailed, was 15 hours unabridged. "Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers" is less than 9 hours, and it's about the size of an average sci-fi pulp paperback.
On its surface, the basic non-spoiler plot of "Under the Dome" goes like this: One Saturday morning in late October, the residents of Chester's Mill, Maine, discover their town has been put under a glass-like dome whose edges conform exactly to the town's legal boundaries - it extends upward 9 miles, down deep into the bedrock under the town, and the glass is indestructible yet marginally permeable. This is not a clean encasement; plenty of people and other creatures were, as you might expect, going about their business around the town's edges: driving, flying, walking, gardening. The dome stops all this activity in its tracks, as obviously and suddenly as slamming down a glass, upside-down, over a swarm of ants. Over the next week, there are several subplots in this book, all of which serve two larger plots - trying to discover and disable the source of the dome, and what happens to a few thousand people when they are captive to a few others with too much power and not enough compassion.
( Cut for length and a few spoilers, though nothing about the end )In conclusion, I liked this novel even though I do have a few minor problems with it. It's classic King, putting the reader on edge and keeping them there with a seemingly-unending escalation of horror and ill circumstance. If you were a fan of Dubya, you may not want to read this book; though Big Jim is never outright identified as Republican (the editor is the only character factually identified with a party, in contrast with the name of her fourth-generation newspaper,
The Democrat), it's disingenuous to pretend King didn't intend the reader to assume he's an extreme conservative. However, if you can put aside political allegory and just read this as a speculation on humans both descending to their basest level and rising to challenges, you too - to quote a friend - may not mind getting a hernia trying to open this novel.
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