Under the Dome gravely threatens Stephen King’s status as a mere chart-busting pop cultural phenomenon. It has the scope and flavor of literary Americana, even if King’s particular patch of American turf is located smack in the middle of the Twilight Zone. It dispenses with his usual scatology and trippy fantasy to deliver a spectrum of credible people with real family ties, health crises, self-destructive habits and political passions. Even its broad caricatures prompt real emotion, if only via the damage they can inflict on others. Though the book’s broad conspiratorial strokes become farfetched, its ordinary souls become ever more able to break hearts.
This book has the heft of a brick. It also has a premise that can be summarized in seconds. On a beautiful autumn day in Maine a transparent dome materializes over the town of Chester’s Mill. Once the Dome falls, all vestiges of normal life are suspended. Things run amok. They get scary. The townsfolk become fate’s playthings. And King, who can manipulate this crisis in any way that occurs to him, becomes a kid in a candy store.
The premise provides so many options that King’s decisions about how to tell this story are of special interest. The King book that is most readily brought to mind by Under the Dome isn’t an earlier large-scale apocalyptic fantasy like It or The Stand; it’s On Writing, the instructive autobiographical gem that cast light on how King’s creative mind works. In the spirit of On Writing, Under the Dome takes a lucid, commonsense approach that keeps it tight and energetic from start to finish. Hard as this thing is to hoist, it’s even harder to put down.
Consider the book’s step-by-step way of defining the Dome. King isn’t about to do the easy thing, which would be to give a straightforward description of what it is and how it works. Instead he offers a textbook demonstration of how to make action and explication one and the same. First step: A woodchuck on the ground and a pilot in the air named Chuck are sudden victims of the Dome’s guillotinelike slicing descent.
Second step: The book’s hero to be, a short-order cook and Iraq war veteran named Dale Barbara, looks upward. He sees the front of Chuck’s plane fall off and the back get crushed by the invisible barrier that, we now know, reaches sky high. Big sigh of relief here: Dome calamities, while definitely deadly, will not be (by King’s high standards in this area) described gruesomely at all.
Third step: Barbara, aka Barbie, waves frantically to a stranger for help. The stranger walks right toward him — and smashes into an invisible wall. So the Dome’s extent is making itself known. Then King defines the perimeter by ticking off the various roads that lead to Chester’s Mill. “And shortly before noon on Dome Day,” he writes, now attaching a name to this calamity, “every one of them snapped closed.”
With the same tight efficiency, King goes on to introduce the various businesses (restaurant, newspaper), institutions (hospital) and officials (police and town selectmen) on the Chester’s Mill map. Under the Dome even comes with a map, but the town in the narrative is much too sharply drawn to need one. Special editions of this book also come with playing cards featuring illustrations of the main characters in this story’s huge cast, among them its mega-villain, a used-car salesman and diabolically devious second selectman known as Big Jim Rennie. He has been drawn to look just like Dick Cheney.
RSS