REVIEW: Under the Dome (book) by Stephen King

Under the Dome is science fiction. I bought my copy new.

This review includes spoilers. 

Review:

On October 21st, an invisible dome goes down around the town of Chester's Mill, Maine. The immediate result is many animal deaths and several human deaths, as individuals crash into the barrier or, if they're unfortunate enough to be in the way, are cut in two by it.

Outside the Dome, the US military and the best and brightest scientists try to figure out what they're dealing with. Inside the Dome, theoretically, people are doing their best to figure out what's going on and not panic. Theoretically.

Unfortunately, Big Jim Rennie is Chester's Mill's Second Selectman. He's used to being the town's true power behind the good-natured and easily manipulated First Selectman, Andy Sanders, and in the Dome he sees an opportunity to truly solidify his grip on the town. By the time the Dome is finally breached, Big Jim figures that everyone will be grateful for his leadership, so grateful that certain issues might not even be noticed. And surely he can find a handy scapegoat for everything else.

At the time the Dome went down, Dale Barbara, known as Barbie to his friends, was on his way out of town, hoping to escape the wrath of Big Jim's son, Junior. The Dome trapped him in Chester's Mill, same as everyone else. Although he's currently a cook and a drifter, he was once an Army lieutenant. He has the skills necessary to keep things calm and well-organized within Chester's Mill, but he knows enough about how the town operates to realize that Big Jim's more likely to work against him than with him.

This book follows a huge cast of characters and multiple POVs (including, briefly, a woodchuck). Thankfully, King is a skilled enough writer to ensure that all of those characters are relatively distinct, and it was rare that I found myself wondering who a particular character was when they appeared on-page. I found myself emotionally invested in a bunch of them, hoping that they would somehow make it through this.

I also learned to hate Big Jim, his son Junior, and several of Junior's friends. I was very much looking forward to the moment when Big Jim and Junior finally died. Both of them had issues (Big Jim's heart, Junior's undiagnosed brain tumor) that made it obvious that their deaths were a question of when, not if. But man, King sure made me wait, and their final moments were, unfortunately, much shorter than their periods of awfulness. My one comfort was that Junior's experiences with necrophilia were never described in detail (although the same could not be said for one character's rape by several of Junior's horrible friends).

I had to keep reminding myself that this was written well before Trump's first presidency and the pandemic, because this very much felt like commentary about both.

Although King did a great job with the characters, and I enjoyed rooting for the decent ones and hoping the awful ones would die terribly, all of the characters and POVs dragged things out tremendously. The entire book takes place over the course of only a few days, but it felt like weeks at least. On the one hand, I was impressed at the way King made me feel like I was genuinely keeping tabs on an entire town's worth of people. On the other hand, surely it could've been tightened up a bit? 

And ugh, the ending. It didn't surprise me in the slightest that the Dome was alien-generated. But the whole thing about everyone realizing they were alien children and getting them to lift the Dome just by begging and hoping for a shred of empathy? Surely King could have come up with something better than that.