Under the Dome By: Stephen King

This damn book has been haunting me for years. Which is saying something as it is one of his more recent works, written around 2013. I picked up this book at the Littlerock Library (California guys, not Arkansas) and read probably 500 pages (and destroyed it) before I realized it was 2 weeks over due and had to return it. Around 6 months later I bought it at a thrift store in Lancaster (still California folks) for like, I don’t even know…2 dollars?, and then promptly lost it. FINALLY, I found a brand-spanking-new copy at the Community Thrift Store, here in San Francisco, and six months later, actually read it to its entirety. (and yet again, destroyed it)

As a 1076 page book, it is pretty intimidating. As is the majority of his work.

It’s always a wonderful feeling when you actually finish a book this large, but as with the other few Stephen Kings books I have read, I am always sad that they are over.

The book starts off with a horribly doomed flying lesson with Claudette Sanders behind the wheel, an ill-fated chipmunk and a beautiful fall day in Chester’s Mill, Maine. Within a few pages the plane has crashed, the poor chipmunk has been cut in half and the whole town has been sealed off by an invisible barrier.

Throughout the first few chapters, you are sent into a whirlwind of activity, ranging from horror to the fact that this town is inexplicably cut off from EVERYTHING, no importing, no exporting, no justice, to downright nauseating  factors such as Big Jim, the town’s second selectman/ tyrant and his gruesome son Rennie who is apparently into murder and necrophilia.

The whole book only takes place over a couple of weeks and it goes from bad, to horribly tragic. You follow all the characters (and as per Mr. King’s usual, there are DOZENS) on and off and follow through all the different coming and goings of the town as they deal with this horrible brute fo a tyrant and how they are all coping with the fact that they have no real doctors, a limited amount of supplies, support, and no options other than to take what they can and deal.

You get to know every single one of the characters in such an intimate way, you literally take a blow to the heart every time one (or all) of them are killed off. You get an overwhelming amount of religious decree from an overwhelming amount of characters and you see how the sensible ones (Barbie, Rose, and Julia) struggle to conserve everything from power to oxygen, and how the ridiculous-self-centered- egotistical ones (Big Jim, Rennie, THE ENTIRE POLICE FORCE) really just fuck the whole thing over and literally lead to a massacre.

An underlying reoccurrence of the book is this radiation and the affects it has on the townspeople. Majorly the young and elderly (of course), ranging from visions of terror about Halloween and terrors involving fires and scarecrows. Leading into the ONLY problem I have with this book.

As with all the other Stephen King books, I always find one aspect to just throw me off and make me cringe. In this case: Aliens. Which, don’t get me wrong. Totally gave me nightmares as did all the issues I had with other books, but really? I really thought it would be a government experiment and there would be this political corruption and punishment for the fact that they had the biggest meth lab on the eastern seaboard. But no, it’s the leatherfaces (as I believe they called them) and they are playing with what they feel is an imaginary world. (Totally reminds me of men in black and the whole galaxy hanging around the cat’s neck.)

Really makes you think about the fact that if this were to actually happen, and it’s not entirely implausible; what would you do? What would the people around you do? Would YOU be the next Big Jim??

It’s almost sad that I finished this book. It was one of the Mount Everest’s in my collection and, as with The Stand, I would love to reread it to fully grasp all the detail and small references that are made throughout the book, both to real world references and to other parts of the story. Definitely a GREAT read and one that I will one day conquer again.

Favorite Quote(s):

"Big Jim- "Take a good look, pal- this is what incompetency, false hope, and too much information gets you. They're just unhappy and disappointed now, but when they get over that, they'll be mad. We're gonna need more police."