Under the Dome

Being my first review (and my first real blog post), I think it is best to lay out a few things before jumping in. First of all I am going to try to keep all my reviews based on current readings or viewings. You won’t see me reviewing a book I read or movie I watched a year or two ago here and I’m doing this to try to give the best review I can with accurate memory of the work. Second, there will be spoilers in the reviews though I will try to give an overall feeling for the book before getting into spoiler filled specifics … and I will try to state when the spoiler filled portion begins. Lastly, my tastes are not like everyone’s and these are just my thoughts and I’d love to hear other’s thoughts also.

Now on to the review…

“Under the Dome” by Stephen King is about a small town in Maine which one day awakens to find that they have been surrounded by an invisible barrier that stops anything from moving through it. I really enjoyed the way the book told the story of an otherwise normal town with normal people placed under just a single extraordinary circumstance which had a major impact on their lives. I also enjoyed the way the characters were developed and while a great deal of time wasn’t spent on any of their pasts, there was enough there to get a feel for who they were and develop a liking of or a hatred for certain characters.

The writing style was very much Stephen King’s, with plenty of profanity and sexual acts as well as gruesome description where it fit (and sometimes a bit much and/or repetitive perhaps), but King does a great job of telling a story and giving the reader enough to be able to picture it while keeping the plot and the reading interesting and moving along.

The ending was a bit of a letdown as the story finished rather abruptly and conveniently but overall I would recommend this book to even non-King fans despite the length (just over 1000 pages).

*SPOILERS START HERE*

Right from the beginning the effects of the dome are felt as a plane crashes into it, there are some deaths from cars crashing into it, and a man who ends up being one of the good guys is unable to leave the city as he had hoped. The town also loses the police chief as his pacemaker explodes when he approaches the dome.

From that point you begin to find out who the big players in the book are going to be. There’s the guy who was leaving, Barbie, who ends up being one of the good guys. He was ex-army and was a likeable guy. Then there was Jim Rennie who was a town official with more power than he should have had, who had a drug business on the side despite being very religious and who craved power. He was the biggest of the bad guys and a guy that you could really hate. There was also his son who was a bad guy himself, and then some of the other good guys such as the newspaper lady, the resident nurse and his wife, etc…

The whole story only lasted about a week but a lot of things happened very quickly in it. Right from the start Rennie saw an opportunity to be had to become a hero and to also grab power from the situation. Throughout the book things just seemed to go his way until the end, and every plan he hatched had the effect he had desired. From the riot at the food store to getting his nemesis locked up to growing the police force how he wanted, he planned well, and became the main power in the town. He was even getting away with murders to help cover his crimes as those who could point fingers at him came to him instead. While having everything go right for so much of the book was frustrating at times it was more because I wanted to see him fail than the things going on weren’t possible.

Meanwhile his son had killed one girl (only in part due to illness) while the dome fell and killed again later. This was a disturbing individual to say the least.

Chef was an interesting character on his own, neither good nor bad really. He cooked up the drugs and was so strung out that he believed he was an agent of god and really only wanted to protect what god had given them (the meth) but still had a human side seen when he buried his wife and helped Andy “see the way”. I personally think Meth is one of the worst things humans create but I still liked Chef’s character despite his flaws (and obvious insanity).

Throughout the book you could see the two sides forming, the good and the bad, with Barbie and friends looking to find solutions and keep the town intact up against Rennie, his son, and the police force which he built up using the situation to grab control of the town and not caring who got hurt, raped, maimed, or killed in the process. It was a chess match of sorts where Rennie was looking to get power while pinning things on Barbie and his friends and Barbie and friends were trying to figure things out while staying out of Rennie’s lockup. A third party, the outside world and more precisely the military played a small role in trying to get them out including firing missiles at the field but didn’t have any bigger role than failed attempts at removing the barrier.

Eventually in the beginning of the end Barbie had been locked up framed for crimes that the Rennie family had committed, then was broke out, and then the group had hidden where a bright kid working with “the good guys” named Joe had found the field generating device. While there they “saw” aliens when they approached the generator and thus they knew that it was alien kids that had placed it there like human kids would put ants under a magnifying glass.

Meanwhile there was a chaotic scene at a town meeting which saw an official gunned down while she tried to inform the town of Rennie’s evils. The next day found the city police force sent after Chef and Andy at the meth lab while the remainder of the town went to the barrier for a ‘event’ that would have their family on the other side as well as a scheduled press conference. However things at the meth lab went bad and a very large number of propane tanks and some C4 were detonated causing a huge (over the top) explosion that traveled through the dome towards the gathering killing pretty much everyone except Rennie who was in the city hall bunker and Barbie’s group.

The final end saw Rennie succumb to hallucinations where those he had killed (plus his son who had died during the breakout of Barbie from jail) drove him kind of batty to the point he ran out into the now poisoned air trying to escape. I was hoping for some hellishly deserved end for Rennie as I had grown to hate him but this will have to work.

As for the “survivors” and the field, as they were living on what little air could be forced through the dome but getting sicker they finally decided that they would make an attempt to beg the alien kids to let them go. In what was a bit of a letdown for an end to the field they communicated through the generator with one of the aliens (telepathically), convinced it that they were real and had lives and the alien lifted the field.

As I had said, overall I really liked this book. I thought the characters were well developed and the reader had a good sense of who they were and that made many of them likeable/hate-able. The situation of a “real town” with a single supernatural situation was great and I really enjoyed reading about such a case where everything is something you can relate to but for this one outlandish piece. Most of the stories of the individuals as well as those that were integral to the main plot were well written and enjoyable to read and kept the story going without there really being a time when things bogged down. The end of just having the field lifted after a bit of pleading was a bit weak compared to the rest of the book and left me feeling like something more could have been done but definitely not a killer for the rest of the book.

Next book for me … “Moby Dick”