Stephen King hates Dan Brown. Having famously labelled the books of the man who now outsells him as “the intellectual equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries”, Under the Dome, King’s biggest book in decades, is his attempt to regain the high ground.
At almost 900 pages this is not just a huge book — “I’ll be killing a lot of trees,” the author remarked last year, though his editors have cut the manuscript by half — it is one that has had an elephantine gestation. According to King’s publishers he has been working on it for 25 years.
The reality — revealed by King himself — is that he first had the idea back then but was so put off by the scale of the project that he abandoned it and came back to the idea only recently. There is about it something of an American Lord of the Flies, as King also admits, but laced with his trademark touch of fantasy and earthy vulgarity culminating in cinematic apocalypse.
The premise is this: one warm afternoon in late summer, without warning or apparent reason, over the small New England town of Chester’s Mill, cars on the road out of town collide violently with thin air while above them aircraft and birds drop from the sky. Against all logic, reason and explanation Chester’s Mill has been instantaneously severed from its immediate environs — and the rest of the world — by an invisible barrier, one that emergency services soon discover extends deep underground and thousands of feet up before terminating in an invisible dome.
Trapped inside, along with a cast of more than 100 characters who fight for our attention out of Chester’s Mill small population, is Dale Barbara, a decorated military hero and Iraq veteran. He had been on his way out of town — to avoid the consequences of a bust-up with the local toughs, which he won resoundingly — only to find nothing in his way: an impenetrable wall of nothing.
Advertisement
One of those with whom he had his altercation, however, is the son of the small town’s de facto political boss, a second-hand car salesman and born-again evangelist known as Big Jim Rennie. The son, known universally as Junior, has been trying to settle a grievance with a girl when he loses his temper and murders her.
Terrified that the police will nail him, he is delighted to discover that the local law enforcement is more concerned at the entire town’s incomprehensible incarceration. So when the occasion affords he murders another young woman and hides her with the first in a disused pantry, where he looks forward to frequent visits with his now-compliant “girlfriends”.
When Junior finds his nemesis Barbara back in town it seems like a good idea to blame the murders on him — whenever he gets tired of his playthings, that is.
In the meantime, of course, all hell’s broken loose, what with the US Army encamped around the perimeter of the Dome, preparing to fire a cruise missile at it, a civilian airliner that has crashed into its apex, and the President — not named but quite clearly Obama from the vitriol directed at him by the Republican Rennie — placing Barbara in charge of the town.
Obviously Rennie is not happy with that and joins the anti-Barbara league with his son, unaware — for the moment at least — of his offspring’s murderous necrophiliac tendencies. Put simply, this is a reversion-to-primitivism scenario taken to insane extremes as Rennie takes charge and appoints Junior’s thuggish chums as police deputies. Gun law imposes itself as a peaceable population turns to panic and looting, not least because the air is becoming thick.
Advertisement
The elephant in the room is the nature of the Dome, and where it has come from, with all options opened for speculation, from “the government” to the Chinese, the hand of God and a growing agreement on extraterrestrials.
The solution can never be wholly satisfying. The point of King’s conceit is not the construct itself but the circumstances and human barbarity that evolve under it.
He must regret that he did not get this book out before the Simpsons movie played a similar theme, but at least acknowledges it good-naturedly with a few Homeresque “D’ohs”. There is also acknowledgement for an author King does rate with Barbara wishing that his “old pal” Jack Reacher (Lee Child’s series character) was there.
This is vintage King: loud, rude and rumbustious, taking swipes at holy hypocrisy, redneck rifle clubs and local government pomposity inflated to insanity. Subtle it is not — and I’m not sure of its intellectual credentials either — but if it’s a blood-soaked blockbuster you’re after, this is the ticket.
Under the Dome by Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton £19.99; Buy this book; 896pp)