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TagsBY DAWN KINGSBURY WAKEFIELD
THE INTERNET REVIEW OF BOOKS
1088 PP. SCRIBNER $35
With great anticipation I cracked open "Under the Dome," horrormeister Stephen King's latest. At over a thousand pages, it weighs more than my cat (the fat one). I'd been anticipating this novel more than any Twihard ever anticipated the film debut of "New Moon." And all comparisons to "The Simpsons Movie" aside, King has done it again.
I haven't loved everything King has ever written-but I've at least liked most of them. In recent years I've lost the thrill I felt when I first read "Cujo" at age 13. But I was not disappointed in "Under the Dome." King is back like gangbusters in the tale of a quintessential small Maine town that is cut off from the rest of the world when a transparent dome slams down on it. It's a dome impermeable to all but the finest particles of air and water. Wind, weather, and nuclear warheads cannot penetrate it. It extends from the troposphere and down into the earth for miles. The U.S. government gets involved-as it always does-and when the warhead experiment fails, they try to dissolve the dome using the strongest acid known to man, which apparently can dissolve meters of solid bedrock. The dome, while transparent, is accumulating dust, pollution, and debris, so when the residents look up at the stars about five days after the dome appears, the stars look pink. The kids in the town are all having seizures. And the temperature inside the dome is 10 degrees warmer than the towns outside the dome, a micro-greenhouse effect. There's no electricity or cell phone reception. Supplies are dwindling. The townspeople-not all of them good people to start with-are starting to get a little stir crazy. It's a post-apocalyptic "Lord of the Flies."
Among the unfortunate residents of Chester's Mill is protagonist Dale "Barbie" Barbara, U.S. Army retired and current short order cook at the only diner in town, who is pressed back into service and promoted to colonel to take control of the growing anarchy. But the corrupt town selectmen, who are appropriating all of the town's propane for their own nefarious purposes, are loath to take orders from this come-here drifter burger jockey.Barbie finds unlikely allies in the editor of the town's weekly newspaper, Julia Shumway, and physician's assistant Eric "Rusty" Everett, who band together when Barbie gets on the wrong side of the town's Second Selectman. There are many others; the cast is so huge that King has included a Who's Who in the front pages so the intrepid reader can keep them all straight. He's even included some of the town pets that figure into the story in key ways. I found myself flipping back and forth to the town roster often until King started to narrow the field a bit.
King's epic, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it tales are among his best, and this is no exception. This would fit in nicely in a post-apocalyptic gift set containing "The Stand" and "Cell." So what about all the Simpsons controversy? My 11-year-old son commented on the similarity minutes after I pulled this tome out of its Amazon shipping box. He wasn't the first-nor will he be the last-to notice the parallel to Groening's 2007 animated film about a glass dome slamming down on Springfield, the home of our favorite dysfunctional cartoon family. Alas, there are no naked skateboarders nor wall-crawling pigs in King's far more sinister variation on this theme, though there are plenty of angry mobs. King has claimed on his official website that he had never seen the movie before penning this novel, and the similarity came as quite a surprise. Personally, I think the similarity pretty much ends with the cover art.
There are no zombies, vampires, rabid St. Bernards, or psychotic clowns in this book. The "monsters" here are ordinary small town folk who decompensate in the face of an unknown enemy. King's explanation for the dome's genesis, which comes quite late in the story, and its resolution are revealing, leaving this reader to contemplate the depths to which human behavior can plummet. And that made the novel all the scarier.
Dawn Kingsbury Wakefield works as a litigation paralegal to support her literature addiction. When not reading, Dawn also enjoys international travel, languages and linguistics, vegetarianism, writing and animal welfare. She lives in coastal Virginia with her 'tweenaged son and three cats.
