The Web Haunt of Ryan K Lindsay

It took Stephen King years, decades even, to write Under The Dome. He had the idea kicking around since forever and even once wrote a stack of it only to throw it all out as unsatisfactory. Yet he still knew that one day he would get back to it. He says he remembered the first chapter in its entirety, or close enough, so he wrote the aeroplane and the chipmunk and the game was, once more, afoot.

Under The Dome is a satisfying read, a real page turner even. It posits that a small Maine town in America suddenly and inexplicably has a dome thrown around it. Not even just over it, the invisible and impenetrable force field goes all the way under the town as well. After the initial plane crash, a few cars and tanks hit the nothing and kill or maim their passengers, and a hell of a lot of birds meet their broken necked demise, the authorities are called in and they can’t find a way in at the top and they dig into the bedrock with no avail as well. The people of Chester’s Mill are cut off from the rest of the world.

With this isolation, King then crafts a tale of how terrible, cruel, mean, and selfish people can be. A small town politician, Big Jim Rennie, sees this as an opportunity to up his game and really control the situation. His son does some terrible things, but that’s even before he knows the dome exists, so you know this boy just ain’t no good no matter what. There’s a riot at the food store and the police force just keeps needing more numbers, or so Rennie says as he builds a private army of goons.

King loves to paint a detailed and crummy bad guy for you to hate. When he takes on injustice it just makes you feel bad. You want to jump in the pages and smack some heads around to stop it or get answers. You feel frustrated, and King is in fine form in offering us plenty of that.

The town is isolated from the rest of the world and don’t people quickly figure that out. This changes the law, very quickly, as you can really exert might equalling right every time. Depravity sinks into many of the young police charges and soon you can see where things are headed. Absolute power and all that.

The hero of the piece, Dale Barbara, is an Iraq vet who has taken to transient wandering, Bruce Banner-style. He was on his way out but the dome pulls him back in, or at least traps him within. The President re-enlists him, promotes him to Colonel and places him in charge of everything under the dome. Whicj is a fine idea except that anyone who could enforce this rule is not under the dome with the rest of the town so Rennie summarily ignores this decree and goes about setting up Barbara as the villain of the piece. It’s corrupt and it’s no doubt evil, but it’s also kind of real. People don’t know where the dome came from or when it will leave, if it ever does. They become weak and pliable, which Rennie knows completely.

From there we watch the town slowly unravel as the good guys separate from the bad and we get true emotions and action out of people, much like the hysteria of Lord of the Flies or The Crucible. This is about isolating people and seeing what happens. It’s a social experiment.

One of my main problems was that I never got a feeling for Barbara, or Barbie as he is known. We get told that he is a veteran, and he served in the Gulf, but that’s about it. Dropping words like Fallujah and gymnasium do not complete a person’s history for me. I want to know more, and King is usually the master of giving such detail of a character’s past. He does it for all the other character but I never get it for Barbie. It’s a shame because the character has potential but the main reveal of what happened in that gymnasium (and it’s not the craziest shock) needed to be saved for later so in that we lose his whole back story. I wanted to feel him, as I feel most King characters, and I felt many of the supporting players, but I just wasn’t in on it, sadly. I also got the feeling that earlier he would have been a ‘Nam vet and that might have been something that King could understand and conceptualise easier.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. For 880 pages it turns pretty quickly and there were plenty of set pieces that King wrote with Crichton-style delivery that had me constantly adding ‘just one more chapter’ before lights out. It’s an enjoyable ride, it just lacks that precision and literate mastery that I truly believe King once held.

Perhaps it’s as the saying goes; “the golden age of science fiction is when you are 13.” I read most of King’s output when I was a formative teen and they all rang true for me, many I consider classics. Lately his work just doesn’t seem to have it for me. Except for the short Hearts In Atlantis, and even that I worry he wrote years ago and just finally found a vehicle to ride it in.

I’d recommend Under The Dome, especially to King fans, he serves up a lot of his usual interesting cruelty, and I would promote that it is a page turner, but it is far away from his best. But it just might show a resurgence to an upwardly mobile game. That I will always hold out hope for.

CODA – SPOILERS

The ending. Don’t read this if you don’t know the ending or don’t want to know what it isn’t. This particularly means my brother who has 200 pages to go and has a weak set of will powers. Walk away now, James.

The ending fell flat on me pretty much completely. It wasn’t satisfying on so many levels and it gave me the same distaste I got in Dreamcatcher when the aliens arrived. Everything was going so well until the aliens came to town. I really wished he had ended it on a down note. The premise is that it’s kind of alien kid’s who have set up the dome, torturing us playfully, much like our human children burn ants. It’s not entirely malicious, just devoid of empathy. And in saying, this I don’t mind spoiling that part because the story is about so much more that this all over the book, this is merely the extended MacGuffin.

In the end, they go to the communication access area where they can see the aliens and they beg to be let go. Things under the dome have become dire, people are dying (a lot) and pleading is their literal last resort. It works. Few survive but those who do get their freedom by begging intergalactic children to let them go.

What I would have done; have them go to beg, sure, fine, but when they get there they find that no alien children are left. They’ve all abandoned the game and that dome will be there until the end of time. The few left will die in it and America will hold it as an unknown vigil, as no one outside had any idea about the aliens and there’s really no way they’ll ever be able to find it. It would be a bleak ending, sure, but King was 4/5′s of his way there anyway. He had the accelerator jammed through the chassis and into the engine itself but then he decided to land a handbreak skid of a stop right before the finish line. He should have just raced through and kept on going, not looking back for photographs or awards. Screw everybody, kill ‘em all and let that be because there’s nobody out there to sort ‘em out.

I would have respected that conviction but instead I get the feeling that the King might be getting a little weary to wear the crown anymore.

Posted on February 11th, 2010 by ryan
Filed under: books