Just a little apocalypse: Stephen King's Under the Dome

I was a big fan of Stephen King growing up, but it's been quite a few years since I've read anything of his. When I heard that his latest novel was a thousand-plus-page science fictional epic, I knew I was going to have to give it a try. Under the Dome describes, in minute detail, what happens when the small Maine town (what else?) of Chester's Mill is cut off from the world by an invisible, impenetrable barrier. The result is, without spoiling too much, a rapid descent into fascism, an exploration of the town's dark, Twin Peaks-ish underbelly, and an unhappy ending for just about everybody.

I was a bit disappointed in the book for a few reasons. It was certainly a page-turner, but I did feel it was a bit too long, and could easily have been wrapped up two or three hundred pages earlier. One part of the problem is the incredibly short time-frame the story covers: the entire novel describes a single week, beginning pretty much the moment the Dome appears. The pacing of the novel is compelling, but I would have much rather learned what life was like in Chester's Mill five weeks, three months, or six years later; wrapping things up in seven days robs us of much of the extrapolative possibility inherent in the story's central concept. Furthermore, King has already done the basic story of Under the Dome-- bizarre event isolates the inhabitants of a small Maine town; fascism rapidly emerges--  in "The Mist." At one point a character makes an offhand comment about "that movie, The Mist," and once you get past the initial chuckle it feels like King's tacit acknowledgment: Yeah, I've done this before, but look! this is ten times longer! None of these problems kept me from finishing the book, but I do wish it had been a bit more... something.

Religion crops up in several places in the story. We see it first in the town's two ministers. First is the fundamentalist Lester Coggins, a conservative convinced that the town is being punished for its sins (in which he has a large share). Second is the Congregationalist Piper Libby, who isn't too sure she believes in God anymore: "Not-There was her private name for God lately. Earlier in the fall it had been The Great Maybe. During the summer, it had been The Omnipotent Could-Be." Such is our introduction to Libby; she's saved from the cliché of the preacher-who-has-lost-her-faith by a depth of character that emerges much later in the book.

But the real meat of the book's religious, and apocalyptic, content comes from two non-ordained characters. "Big Jim" Rennie is a used car dealer and local despot who attempts, with a disturbing level of success, to position himself as the town's absolute ruler as soon as the Dome descends. Rennie is Lester Coggins' chief congregant, and his spirituality is presented as the lowest common denominator of evangelicalism: his image of the afterlife is to spend eternity eating steak and mashed potatoes with Jesus. (We get a glimpse of his actual afterlife at the book's end, in a moment with a nice Twilight Zone flavor). This bland religiosity covers up a much more sinister contempt for everyone and everything. He sees the Dome not as a tragedy, but as an opportunity to take complete control of the town. Anyone who thinks King is sentimental about small-town Maine should take a close look at this character, who makes it pretty clear that he sees dark and evil things barely even concealed beneath the veneer of rural gentility.

[There are some spoilers in the paragraph below.]

A bit more interesting is Phil Bushey, a speed freak now known as "Chef" due to the incredible size and efficiency of his meth lab-- a meth lab created and owned by Rennie and Coggins. Chef dropped completely off the town's radar months before the Dome, and has become transformed by a combined drug paranoia and religious mania into a volatile and extremely dangerous force. After an extended drug binge in the meth lab-- a shack behind Coggins' church-- he has developed an elaborate end-times theology in which he, anointed by God and high-quality drugs, is a God's frontline soldier in the war against "bitter men" like Rennie. His violent millenialism turns the small apocalypse of the Dome into a big apocalypse when the meth lab ultimately explodes, taking the rest of the town with it. And, by the book's end, after seeing the depths to which a "normal" town can stoop in so short a time, we're not so sure that Chester's Mill doesn't deserve it.

[Here endeth the spoilers.]

Ultimately, Under the Dome doesn't quite justify its page count. Though the plot moves quickly and the enormous cast is well-drawn, it doesn't push its SF ideas quite far enough. When we learn the mystery of the Dome at the book's end, it feels suspiciously like the conclusion of a carefully-constructed shaggy dog story. King isn't primarily an SF writer, of course, and some might even question identifying this novel as SF at all. But as someone who came to this book because of its genre leanings, I felt it would have been well-served by devoting a bit more of its energy to idea-exploration. Add to that a fairly disturbing sexualization of violence toward women in the book's first half (something I'm surprised more reviewers haven't mentioned), and you have a book that simply isn't rewarding enough for what it asks of its readers. It's a mostly enjoyable book, sure; but 1,100 pages calls for a big investment of time and attention, and we need more than this book gives us to make that investment worthwhile.

Comments

[melinda]

i actually just got a copy of 'Quarantine' - in which our whole solar system is put under "the dome". As interesting as the SK book premise sounds - I never could get through a Stephen King book for exactly the reasons you said, "minute detail"