Under The Dome by Stephen King

Under The Dome by Stephen King

I lost the habit of reading all of King’s books sometime in the mid-1990s, based on the lame books he published in the early 1990s.

Under The Dome is a partial return to his glory days. I can’t say it has the intensity of his great books. That’s pretty much be impossible to maintain for over 1,000 pages — and I was never a big fan of his first really long novel, The Stand.

One Saturday morning, as disillusioned, guilt-racked Iraqi veteran Dale Barbara is trying to hitch a ride out of Chester’s Corners, a small town in Maine, a huge forcefield dome cuts the city off from the rest of the world.

I don’t want to give away the secret of its origin, but let’s just say it’s not very credible. In my opinion, it smacked too much of King making a serious moral statement about life.

I don’t disagree with his overall viewpoint that we should respect all life, I just want to believe that those technologically capable of the dome would have instituted safeguards against its use. But I can’t prove that, and so King could easily say I’m just being naive.

In some ways this book is an interesting examination of how people in such a small town would react to being physically cut off from the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, I could never believe in King’s main thesis — that a cabal of town leaders including the hellfire preacher could be the leading methamphetamine manufacturing center of North America.

Are some prominent people involved in the business? No doubt. That may include some hellfire preachers, though it’s unlikely.

I also don’t see how they could have hid it, when the town’s not that big, and the manufacturing, though outside of town, was still close to it. Manufacturing meth creates a strong odor. That’s why it’s popular near where my area of the country — in rural areas of Missouri. To escape detection you have to create the odor in an isolated area — not close to a popular church and to a radio station. (Although the radio station programming is automated — it never stops throughout the novel — it would have had visitors, ad sales people and so on during regular hours.)

King wanted to make the point of how the town was ripe to fall into a great evil as a small town manipulator takes the opportunity to become a tyrant.   

I get that. I just never believed Rennie was as good a manipulator and potential tyrant as King wanted me to believe.

To me, King let to many of his own personal beliefs filter through. He obviously has it in for fundamentalists, and political conservatives (they overlap, but are not the same thing at all).

Somehow, I enjoyed the story without getting caught up in it intensely, which he used to do so seemingly effortlessly. There were moments — such as the Bratz torturing, but on the whole my emotions just didn’t get caught up with these people.

On the other hand, none of the good people were as unpleasant and nasty as Dolores Claiborne, and he fulfilled on the promise of his ending. He didn’t walk away from the final confrontation as he did in Gerald’s Game.