Book Review: Stephen King's Under the Dome

by JustEd

Under the Dome with Stephen King — that’s probably the last place on Earth I’d want to be. I mean, King seems like a nice guy (I guess), I’d have a few beers with him, sure, but I don’t think I’d want to spend any length of time cooped up with that imagination of his (imagine how he feels!). And I certainly don’t want to be anywhere near the town of Chester’s Mill.

This is an ambitious novel, harking back to The Stand in length (almost 1,100 pages in hardcover), and echoing that book’s end-of-the-world milieu. There’s even a dramatis personae at the beginning, with a couple of helpful maps of the area thrown in for clarity. But don’t let that throw you; though it can be helpful to refer to them, King draws his personalities (taken from a set of stock characters) and locations so vividly you really don’t need to do so. This is good old-fashioned King at his best — Good vs. Evil, with no doubt whatsoever about who’s on which side. But then, the end of the world has an awful ability to clarify and distill, doesn’t it?

Not that Armageddon has come to Chester’s Mill — oh no, that would be easier, more cleanly defined. It’s just the End of the World As We Know It (and nobody feels fine). A perfectly clear, perfectly impregnable, perfectly impossible dome settled down over the town of Chester’s Mill early one October day, limning the town’s borders, perfectly cutting it off from the rest of the world. Slowly but surely, as the truth becomes evident both to those within and those without, civilization inside takes a decided turn for the worse.

This is the kind of story King tells so well, the old Twilight Zone trope about an ordinary person forced to deal with extraordinary conditions. Inside the dome, the citizens of Chester’s Mill are thrust into a test-tube atmosphere in which their hopes, dreams, and responsibilities are magnified and transmogrified, and the characteristics of their humanity are probed, tested, and exploded. Cut off almost entirely from the outside world, they are at their own mercy, and there are more than a few who display no empathy for their fellow citizens.

In this setting, and even at this length, there’s simply no time to dwell on those characters whose actions will not affect the ultimate outcome, so King does deploy a bit of shorthand — we get a few glimpses of the lives of secondary characters, but the meat of the conflict quickly resolves to the standoff between Dale Barbara, the cook at the local bar and grill and an ex-military man, and Jim Rennie, the town’s Second Selectman and de facto leader. The followers who gather around these two men are sharply delineated: Rennie draws the power-hungry and weak-willed to do his bidding, and Barbara almost by default draws the indignant, righteous, and defiant to do battle with the forces of the evil overlord.

But I’m being a bit unfair —Rennie is no Randall Flagg and Barbara is no Mother Abigail. As much as this story may be framed as Good vs. Evil, King is more concerned with humanity’s potential for both harm and good, rather than with a Final Battle. There are no otherworldly influences on behavior in this story; no supernatural explanations for actions, just humankind’s own propensities. The capability for good or ill resides within us all, King says, and it doesn’t take much of a push one way or another to bring out the best or worst aspects of our characters.

While things are happening inside the dome, the reactions of the rest of the world — from the military contingent sent to guard the perimeter, to the curious news media, to the concerned relatives and loved ones caught outside on “Dome Day” — are filtered through the interface of the dome. The town’s residents can still communicate through the dome and receive Internet and television signals, but they also know (and the outsiders come to realize) that those on the outside are powerless to help them. The ordinariness of life as it continues outside the dome only serves to exacerbate the claustrophobia within.

Throughout the story, King shows us brief memories about past events in the lives of key characters about which they are deeply ashamed. For ex-military man Barbara, it was the brutal questioning of an enemy combatant in Iraq; for newswoman Julia Shumway, it was the merciless taunting by a group of bullies that she was subjected to as a child. We never get the full details of either event, but we understand enough to know that the incidents formed the basis for the emotional, empathic response that these characters bring to their everyday lives.

The ending that King chooses for the story is ultimately heartbreaking, quintessentially human, and somewhat maddeningly simple. After all the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the town’s villains and all the courageous acts undertaken by the town’s heroes, a simple act of sympathy, an empathic response to a plaintive request, is the saving grace. That seems to have been where King was headed all along; the concept that humankind’s propensity for good or bad can and should be tempered by our concurrent capacity for empathy and understanding.

Stephen King, Under the Dome. Scribner’s, 2009.

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