Day 191 – 52 Books in 52 Weeks

Under the Dome has been touted as Stephen King’s most ambitious work since The Stand. The Stand is probably my favorite book by King, so I picked up Under the Dome (actually, I pick up all of King’s work because … I have everything thing else of his so I might as well).

In the “Author’s Note” at the back of the book, King says that he started writing Under the Dome back in 1976, but “crept away from it with my tail between my legs after two weeks’ work…” He says is was due to the technical problems the story presented and that it was important that he got it right – he didn’t want to screw it up. But in 2007, he picked it up and asked Russ Dorr (who had helped him with research on The Stand) to become the head researcher on Under the Dome. And so the book, thirty years in the making was started again.

The story centers around a small Maine town (I know, unusual for King, right?) called Chester’s Mill, population 2,000. On one beautiful October morning an invisible barrier surrounds the sock-shaped town, trapping those inside. One of the men trapped, a short order cook, who had been on his way out of town, is trapped just feet from getting out. His name is Dale Barbara, aka Barbie. Turns out he’s ex-army, and when the military is called in to try and break through the Dome, he is put in charge on The Mill side of things.

But there’s one problem: this is Big Jim’s town and no one is taking it from him. Barbie’s had a run in with Junior (Big Jim’s son) and well, he knows all about Big Jim and the fact that right now, he’s just a cook with no army behind him and Big Jim holds all the cards. Jim wants the Dome to remain in place and to be the town’s highly praised leader. Barbie wants the Dome gone. And in the space of less than a week, the people Under the Dome become a mob.

The book starts off like a typical King novel with some gruesome scenes and lots of swearing. But there’s one huge difference, there is a large cast of characters in this story (so many that King provides a sort of cast of characters (and a town map) at the beginning of the story. At the beginning, you’re introduced to a half-dozen or so, each of their stories told separately, but King brings them all up to the same point in time (when the Dome first appears), by interweaving their stories rather brilliantly.

Toss in a couple of murders, some suicides, a brain tumor, a psychotic drug addict, and a host of other troubles, all Under the Dome, and you’re in for a ride. It was fun. But it was also disappointing.

Dale Barbara, who is now Col. Barbara and supposed to be leading the way to get out of the Dome ends up in jail about half-way through the 1100 pages, and then he’s sort of lost in the shuffle. Up to that point, King made Barbie interesting – how was he going to react to Big Jim? Would he remain one step ahead? How is he going to find the Dome’s “generator”? … and then, nada. In a sort of cheesy plot point, Barbie’s helping out in the understaffed medical center, and is summarily carted off by Big Jim’s police force, thrown in jail and there he sits for a good two or three hundred pages.

There was talk of him escaping, or being extracted by others in town, but if he was supposed to be this military interrogator that served in Iraq, was highly decorated, etc… well, why did he just sit there? I think part of the problem lies in the fact that the story does take place, the bulk of it, over four days. And though Barbie was only in jail for a couple days, yet it scoped, as I said, a couple hundred pages, it made me think he’d been in there for months.

And therein lies probably the biggest problem I had with the book. I know King wanted to show how fast a typical small town community could turn on itself under the “leadership” of the wrong guy. But trying to tell all of these interwoven stories of this huge cast of characters in a short timeline but large number of pages, things got lost. And really, the first half of the book was done quite well. The pace was fast, you had a more conscious idea of the timeline. It worked.

Then it lost steam and the stories that had been brilliantly seamed together now began to fray. Which is ironic because it’s at the point where the different people finally come together in the story.

One other disappointment was how King stereotypically portrayed Republicans vs. Democrats, and religious people. Most of that could have been left out of the book and it would still have been a good story. But I guess he wanted to press home the point that he was not a fan of George W. Bush and though he didn’t particularly speak favorably of Obama… you knew which side he preferred.

Overall, a good book, I did enjoy reading it. Typical King in most regards. Somewhat predictable but had a thing or two I wasn’t expecting. However, it lacked the fluidity and cohesiveness of The Stand to which it was compared. It was an ambitious project, but for something that had been ruminating in his head for 30 years, it could have been better.