Review by New York Times Review
Now that the town halls have blazed with vituperation, and fantastical patriots are girding themselves for fascist/socialist lockdown, Americans of a certain vintage must be feeling a familiar circumambient thrill. Boomers, you know what I'm talking about: cranks empowered, strange throes and upthrusts, hyperbolic placards brandished in the streets - it's the '60s all over again! Once more the air turns interrogative: something's happening here, but we don't know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? Stop, children, what's that sound? In Stephen King's new novel, "Under the Dome," the people of Chester's Mill, Me., get a letter from the president. Typically exalted in its rhetoric, it wrings a tear from at least one grateful citizen. But Big Jim Rennie, the town's second selectman, is disgusted. He scowls at the printed sheet. Yep, there it is in black and white: "The bastard had signed it himself, and using all three of his names, including the terrorist one in the middle." Why is Obama writing to Chester's Mill? Because an enormous transparent dome, not breachable by prayer, bullet, laser beam or cruise missile, has suddenly and unaccountably descended over the town. Its provenance is uncertain (aliens? North Korea?), but its effect is incontrovertible: no one gets in, no one gets out. Some kind of energy field is attached to it; at close range it blows up i Pods and (bad news for incautious oldsters) pacemakers, and sends a gust of "horripilation" through the human nervous system. Bummer, right? Not for the tyrant-in-waiting Big Jim and his pet goon squad. For them this is Christmas Day in the morning. Secession has occurred! The "thug in the White House," the "Blackguard in Chief," is on the other side of the dome, and Anytown, U.S.A. - with its meth factory, its profusion of religious denominations and its atavistic police department - is about to, as the phrase has it, "go rogue." According to an author's note, King took a first crack at "Under the Dome" in 1976, but gave it up "after two weeks' work that amounted to about 75 pages." An interesting sequence of expressions must have crossed his face when he watched "The Simpsons Movie" in 2007: here, in glowing animation, was a great glassy dome landing on a clueless municipality, a civic meltdown, etc. ("We're trapped like rats!" screams Moe the bartender. "No," says the man from the E.P.A., "rats can't be trapped this easily. You're trapped like . . . carrots") But the Simpsonian merriment bounced off him, apparently; King held on to his dome concept, waiting perhaps with his genius on "sleep" for our national politics to get a little more kinky, a little more vicious - a little more like a Stephen King novel. So this is it: 1,100 pages of localized apocalypse from an author whose continued and slightly frenzied commerce with his muse has been one of the more enthralling spectacles in American literature. King's previous novel, "Duma Key" (2008), was a subterranean first-person trip, in the vein of "Misery" or "Bag of Bones": Edgar Freemantle, rehabbing on the Florida coast after a construction accident that cost him his right arm and nearly his mind, starts banging out lefthanded paintings whose Dalí-esque motifs have freaky real-world effects. Classic King: a maimed artistic consciousness, a symbolic journey. With "Under the Dome" we swoop up again to the God's-eye view, or to the view of some equally altitudinous but less merciful entity - a panorama of interlocking stories and a huge cast of characters, many of them being used rather cruelly. As the values of the dome assert themselves, people become matter: a woman flies through a windshield "trailing intestines like party streamers," another woman shoots herself in despair, leaving her brains drying on the wall "like a clot of oatmeal." Big Jim, taking control of the Chester's Mill police department, starts recruiting from the local pool of jocks and bully boys, "the ever-present football player rapist," as the songwriter Gibby Haynes once put it. A town leader congratulates the chief of police on doing "a hell of a job." Where is God in all this? Pastor Coggins, who flagellates himself and prays "in an ecstatic televangelist tremolo," doesn't last long; more durable, possibly because she doesn't believe in God anymore, is the Rev. Piper Libby of the First Congregational Church. And holiest of all is Phil Bushey, known as the Chef, the heavily-armed meth wizard who commandeers the town's Christian radio station. Chef, tweaking away, has some great lines: "God has told me this, Sanders," he booms. "You're in the Lord's army now. . . And I'm your superior. So report." As for the prose, it's not all smooth sailing. Given King's extraordinary careerlong dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P.G. Wodehouse. But he isn't, quite. "Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison piñata: the realization that Howie was dead." (It's the accidental rhyme of "unpleasant" and "presents" that makes that one such a stinker.) I felt the clutch of sorrow, too, when I read this: "What you're planning is terribly dangerous - I doubt if you need me to tell you that - but there may be no other way to save an innocent man's life." BUT then, King has always produced at pulp speed. "Nov. 22, 2007 - March 14, 2009" proclaims the final page of "Under the Dome": that's 1,100 pages in 480 days. We shouldn't be too squeamish about the odd half-baked simile or lapse into B-movie dialogue, is my point. Writing flat-out keeps him close to his story, close to his source. It seems to magnetize his imagination: by the final third of this novel King is effortlessly drawing in T.S. Eliot and the Book of Revelation, the patient etherized upon a table and the Star Wormwood. Pollution thickens against the inner wall of the dome, and the sunset outside becomes alien and terrifying, a "vast, dusty glare." The dome grows metaphysical - one character, contemplating the suffering of another, feels "a clinical sorrow, safely stored inside its own dome: you could see it, could appreciate its existence, but you couldn't exactly get in there with it." Big Jim Rennie, with his monster breakfasts and "carnivorously sociable smile," is swept to power on a wave of homicide and municipal procedure. He snaps necks, and he attends emergency-assessment meetings (echoes here of Donald Antrim's wildly black 1993 novel "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World," which begins with an ex-mayor being drawn and quartered by some inflamed Rotarians). He's the worm in the brain of democracy: it takes him only four days to undo just about everything. The coalition that forms against him includes a journalist, a librarian, an Iraq veteran, some acned skateboarders and an English professor from Massachusetts who (rather wonderfully) has just edited an issue of Ploughshares. Get ready, libruls, King seems to be saying: If the dome comes down, you're going to need one another. James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 26, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
On an October Friday night during what would be Obama's second term, a clutch of local toughs, unfortunately led by the son of the town boss, gang up on Iraq War vet Dale Barbara, lately short-order cook at the Sweetbriar Rose. So he's hoofing it out of town the next bright morning. An old groundhog galumphs along the highway, and a small plane buzzes overhead. Suddenly, the animal's in two bleeding pieces, and the Seneca V's explosively colliding with nothing Barbie (as friends call him) can see. A barrier, initially invisible, has fallen precisely on the boundaries of Chester's Mill, Maine, and penetrated deep into the ground. It keeps all but wisps of air and trickles of water out, but everyone and everything in. The week accounted for by the succeeding 1,000-plus pages doesn't go well at all. Indeed, it culminates in an actual holocaust because of the machinations of the aforementioned town boss pious, covert sociopath Big Jim Rennie, who sees in Chester's Mill's involuntary quarantine an opening for covering the tracks of his meth-making business and blaming any attendant violence on Barbie. King keeps a huge cast very busy in his third-biggest novel ever, but most of its members are flimsily realized. However, his explanation for the dome has a prestigious pedigree (Shakespeare's King Lear), and his way with mayhem remains nonpareil.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
King's return to supernatural horror is uncomfortably bulky, formidably complex and irresistibly compelling. When the smalltown of Chester's Mill, Maine, is surrounded by an invisible force field, the people inside must exert themselves to survive. The situation deteriorates rapidly due to the dome's ecological effects and the machinations of Big Jim Rennie, an obscenely sanctimonious local politician and drug lord who likes the idea of having an isolated populace to dominate. Opposing him are footloose Iraq veteran Dale "Barbie" Barbara, newspaper editor Julia Shumway, a gaggle of teen skateboarders and others who want to solve the riddle of the dome. King handles the huge cast of characters masterfully but ruthlessly, forcing them to live (or not) with the consequences of hasty decisions. Readers will recognize themes and images from King's earlier fiction, and while this novel doesn't have the moral weight of, say, The Stand, nevertheless, it's a nonstop thrill ride as well as a disturbing, moving meditation on our capacity for good and evil. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The frequent accusation that King writes too long is sometimes deserved. However, when he works in an epic mode, depicting dozens of characters and all their interrelationships, he can produce great work. He did it with The Stand and with It, and he has done it again here. A small Maine town is enclosed one October morning by an impermeable bell jar of unknown origin. Within this pressure cooker, the petty differences and power struggles of village life are magnified and accelerated. Opposing camps develop, one headed by Big Jim Rennie, the Second Selectman, and the other by Dale Barbara, a drifting Iraq vet who was nearly out of town when the Dome fell. The characters are well rounded and interesting while retaining the familiar appeal that has drawn and kept King fans for decades. Verdict Regular King readers will rejoice at his return to his strengths. Some will balk at the page count, but a fast pace and compelling narrative make the reader's time fly. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/09.]-Karl G. Siewert, Tulsa City-Cty. Lib., OK (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Maine. Check. Strange doings. Check. Alien/demon presence. Check. Unlikely heroes. Check. An early scene in King's latest (Just After Sunset, 2008, etc.) takes us past Shawshank Prison, if only in the mind of a characterand there are dozens of characters, large and small, whose minds we enter. One of them, a leading citizen in the quiet town of Chester's Mill, is crooked, conniving wheeler-dealer Big Jim Rennie, whose son, a specialist in taking wrong forks in the road, is the local terror but has apparently surrendered his power to awe to larger forcesin this case, the ones who have very gradually sealed off Chester's Mill from the rest of the world. Why? It's the kind of hamlet where a big night of fun involves driving with a six-pack and a shotgun, hardly the sort of place where the overlords seem likely to land. But these overlords, they're a strange bunch: They walk among us, and they might even be us. King runs riot with players, including a newshound who numbers among his ordinary worries "the inexplicable decay of the town's sewer system and waste treatment plant"; a curious chap named Sea Dogs; some weekend warriors; and the lyrically named Romeo Burpee, who "survived a childhood of merciless tauntsto become the richest man in town." Evil is omnipresent here, but organized religion is suspect, useful only for those who would bleat, "The Dome is God's will." The woods are full of malevolent possibilities. Civic and military leaders are usually incompetent. And it's the brave loner who has bothered to do a little research who saves everyone's bacon. Or not. It hardly matters that, after 1,000-plus pages, the yarn doesn't quite add up. It's vintage King: wonderfully written, good, creepy, old-school fun. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
