With my tepid reaction to recent Stephen King books like Just After Sunset, Duma Key, Cell, and Lisey’s Story, I was kind of prepared to be vaguely disappointed by Under the Dome. I wasn’t. In fact, it’s one of my favorite King books to date, because it harkens back to a lot of what I loved about his earlier work. It also does some stuff that’s new for King.
This epic novel (the print version is over 1,000 pages long while the audiobook version took me 35.5 total hours to listen to) tells the sad tale of what happened when the town of Chester’s Mill is suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an inexplicable, dome-shaped force field. There’s relatively little supernatural or sci-fi to the story beyond that, as what King seems really interested in is examining how the social fabric of a small town ripples, strains, and eventually tears when Chester’s Mill becomes insular to an extreme. At the center of society’s startlingly rapid deterioration is the opportunistic and sociopathic politician James “Big Jim” Rennie, a town Selectman and –I kid you not– used car dealer. Big Jim takes “dome day” as an opportunity to seize and consolidate power in Chester’s Mill, building a ruthless police force and deftly manipulating public opinion in his favor. Opposing Rennie is Dale “Barbie” Barbera, a drifter and ex-Army Captain who had worn out his welcome in town but becomes trapped there by the dome. Barbie and his cohorts do their best to counter Rennie’s machinations, but they have to swim against the tide of apocalyptic hysteria and mob mentality created by the dome disaster. That and the fact that things seem to break Big Jim’s way at every turn.
The concept of a small Main town alienated from the rest of the world and preyed upon by sinister forces is one that King has worked extensively with before. It’s the central theme of both Needful Things and Storm of the Century, plus it shows up in other works like The Tommyknockers, and Desperation/The Regulators. But King explores the concept a lot more thoroughly and a lot more convincingly in Under the Dome, if for no other reason that he shows how the people of Chester’s Mill are responsible for their own doom moreso than the dome. The dome is just there. It’s the people, and the mob they form, that freaks the hell out and turns to Jim Rennie for help. It’s the people who blindly believes in Big Jim to the point of savaging each other and tolerating his abuse “for the good of the town.” The town cracks along the fault lines of human nature, and with Jim Rennie in charge things get really bad astonishingly quickly.
Likewise, King does a pretty good job of showing how the voices of reason, like newspaper owner Julia Shumway and physician’s assistant Rusty Everett, have their work cut out for them. And in the last few chapters of the book everything goes to hell (as it always does in King’s stories) and people are fighting just to stay alive, sometimes without success, in a poisonous and polluted environment. This part was pretty effectively done and evoked genuine despair in me.
You may be thinking, “Hrmm. That makes me think of Iraq. And global climate change. And the Bush administration.” To which I would say, “Yep, pretty much.” Under The Dome is clearly King’s most nakedly political (or allegorical, if you prefer) work. Big Jim Rennie and his easily manipulated First Selectman Andy Sanders are CLEARLY stand-ins for Dick Cheney and George Bush, respectively. The rapid deterioration of the air and weather inside the dome is CLEARLY global warming writ small. The town’s rapidly expanded and sadistic police force CLEARLY embodies the deterioration of civil liberties in the last decade. This is not subtle stuff, people, and you wouldn’t have to hunt very far to find King going on record with it. But at the same time it clicked for me, and Under the Dome becomes not only King’s most exciting book in a while (it has an amazingly peppy pace for such a long work with a whole town’s worth of characters) but also perhaps his most insightful and relevant examination of human nature.
Published by