Okay. It’s going to be a tad difficult to review a work of this length without giving out any major spoilers, but I will endeavor to do so to the best of my ability.
First thing’s first: this is a big dang book. I’m not talking big like Potter. I’m talking big like Potter being swallowed by Twilight. I’m talking big like holding a danged pumpkin. I hate to sound like a whiner, but this isn’t an easy book to physically read, at least not for long periods of time. I made the mistake several times of having a sit-down and just holding it in one hand; it didn’t take long to start feeling the strain in my wrist. It’s best to two-hand this baby. Weighing in at 1,074 pages, you’re going to be holding it for a while, so you’d better get your reading technique straight right off the bat. With that said, let’s get on to the book itself.
When a mysterious unbreakable dome appears around the town borders of Chester’s Mill, Maine, it’s up to retired army man Dale ‘Barbie’ Barbara to find out where it came from and how to get rid of it, before the corrupt town officials and police throw him in jail – or worse. Lending him help is a vast array of colorful characters, whose names and vocations can be found in a huge list at the beginning of the book. I am extremely grateful for King to have provided said list; I had to go back and remind myself of who was who more than once during the course of reading.
This novel appears to be a classic ‘evils of small towns’ King story. While I am not hugely familiar with King’s dauntingly vast bibliography (the correction of which I am now and shall be chronicling in this blog), I have at least read Salem’s Lot, another example. This book almost felt like the kind of book he wanted to write back then, a feeling born up by King’s afterword and a bit of reading online. King has mapped out the geography strenuously, and the way in which the town works and the people within it interact, as well as what drives them and what skeletons they have in their respective closets. Unlike Salem’s Lot (a book with hundreds fewer pages), however, this comprehensiveness does not come at the expense of the pace. To be sure, this novel does not bolt along with the intensity that Cell did at some points, but it is a very different beast, meant to unfold gradually, slowly painting the bigger picture of the town and the horrors that befall its denizens once the dome has fallen. Since writing Salem’s Lot, King has improved as regards his ability to show rather than tell the history of the town, or at least tell in a more interesting way.
While it’s normally hard to write a long novel with a ginormous cast in a manner that fleshes the characters out well (something that Salem’s Lot fell a bit short with, in my opinion), this book succeeds fairly well, since there is enough time in which to flesh them out. I actually think the villains of the piece are some of the most well-defined. One of my favorite aspects of the book involves the parallels between ‘Big’ Jim Rennie and his son, ‘Junior’ Rennie. As disgusting and repulsive as they are, there is a certain horrifying fascination in seeing them quest for power over those they bully, slowly but surely spiraling into absolute murderous madness. They are even paralleled in that they both have potentially debilitating medical problems that escalate as the book draws to a climax, thus upping the intensity and danger. You know that their health problems could make them flip at any moment.
Of course, that’s not to say that the characterization in this book is all subtlety. There is a Bush-Cheney allegory going on involving the two main town Selectmen, which we are kind of beaten over the head with in some ways, as both Bush and Cheney are mentioned. Considering that Hitler and the Hitler youth are also name-dropped, one starts to get the idea that King voted for the man who invented the Internet back in 2000. I could also have done without every evil character having a picture on their wall with whoever King felt like demonizing at the time: Pastor Lester Coggins has a picture of himself with Pat Robertson; Big Jim Rennie can be seen shaking hands with Sarah Palin and others. While these sort of people are hardly among the right’s most outstanding citizens, it’s an extremely blunt way of getting his point across. It reads kind of like: ‘Okay, here are the people that I think are what’s wrong with the world; the villains in this piece have shaken hands with them, so they are evil, too’. We don’t need that, because we can clearly see the evil in every single action they take.
It’s almost impossible to discuss this book without discussing religion, as well; Big Jim Rennie spouts Bible passages constantly, as do a lot of the more despicable characters contained within. However, I do appreciate the effort of King creating a sympathetic Republican in one of the more important main characters, aka Julia Shumway, owner and editor of the town newspaper The Democrat (ironically named). It’s clear that in that way, at least, he tried to balance things out, though the book on the whole could be seen as an indictment of religion in small towns. The funny thing is, when I think back to the spiritual leanings of the main characters, like Barbie and Rusty (a doctor’s assistant), I draw a blank. I guess they’re all spiritual as well, though obviously not in as overt a way.
Other not-so-subtle King opinions are expressed by way of a character mentioning how much Twilight sucks compared to Harry Potter, but I was a bit confused about that as a whole, since the person who said it was, ah … less than savory. Really, there are some really disgusting scenes in this book. After a thousand pages, you will have read about quite a few people peeing or hurling. I don’t know how many people actually pee themselves when they die, but King seems to be of the belief that just about everyone does. One or two scenes almost ruined it for me (and probably would have if it were a movie), though I know why he put them in. One of the themes running throughout this book is just how much evil the human race is capable of (even Barbie has some scary skeletons), so he went to some pretty dark places in an attempt to illustrate that.
One strength of this book is the climax. The climax is brutal and satisfying, and even a little sad. I got genuinely choked up during ONE point in this book, which, while far behind the track record of the last King novel I read (Cell), still counts for something. In the climax, you can clearly see what a master King is. That he could weave a story of over a thousand pages about a small town and not be boring AND bring it to a thrilling, well-executed climax is no mean feat. A lot of less experienced writers would have botched such a task beyond belief. Heck, a lot of writers who have already churned out dozens of books might very well have botched it up.
It may be excessive, it may not always be subtle, and it may contain more pop culture references than the TV show The Simpsons, but overall Under the Dome is a remarkable achievement, and an incredibly realized world. Even though it came nowhere near knocking down Cell as the King novel I’ve most enjoyed reading thus far, it was at least worth the 1000 + pages.
Next up on my list of King books to read: The Stand. I have heard very good things about this one. I’m hoping for an amazing ride. I only have the shorter version of the story (apparently he made some Director’s-Cut type deal!), but I will wade in nonetheless. After that, I might go for Cujo, though I flipped through his nonfiction book Danse Macabre the other day, and that seemed pretty cool.
