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Summary
Summary
On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash, a gardener's hand is severed, and people are divided from their families as "the dome" comes down. Dale Barbara, an Iraq vet working as a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens against Big Jim Rennie, a politician grasping for the reins of power.
Author Notes
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, he became a teacher. His spare time was spent writing short stories and novels.
King's first novel would never have been published if not for his wife. She removed the first few chapters from the garbage after King had thrown them away in frustration. Three months later, he received a $2,500 advance from Doubleday Publishing for the book that went on to sell a modest 13,000 hardcover copies. That book, Carrie, was about a girl with telekinetic powers who is tormented by bullies at school. She uses her power, in turn, to torment and eventually destroy her mean-spirited classmates. When United Artists released the film version in 1976, it was a critical and commercial success. The paperback version of the book, released after the movie, went on to sell more than two-and-a-half million copies.
Many of King's other horror novels have been adapted into movies, including The Shining, Firestarter, Pet Semetary, Cujo, Misery, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers. Under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King has written the books The Running Man, The Regulators, Thinner, The Long Walk, Roadwork, Rage, and It. He is number 2 on the Hollywood Reporter's '25 Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list.
King is one of the world's most successful writers, with more than 100 million copies of his works in print. Many of his books have been translated into foreign languages, and he writes new books at a rate of about one per year. In 2003, he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2012 his title, The Wind Through the Keyhole made The New York Times Best Seller List. King's title's Mr. Mercedes and Revival made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2014. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2015 for Best Novel with Mr. Mercedes. King's title Finders Keepers made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015. Sleeping Beauties is his latest 2017 New York Times bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (1)
New York Review of Books Review
Now that the town halls have blazed with vituperation, and fantastical patriots are girding themselves for fascist/socialist lockdown, Americans of a certain vintage must be feeling a familiar circumambient thrill. Boomers, you know what I'm talking about: cranks empowered, strange throes and upthrusts, hyperbolic placards brandished in the streets - it's the '60s all over again! Once more the air turns interrogative: something's happening here, but we don't know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? Stop, children, what's that sound? In Stephen King's new novel, "Under the Dome," the people of Chester's Mill, Me., get a letter from the president. Typically exalted in its rhetoric, it wrings a tear from at least one grateful citizen. But Big Jim Rennie, the town's second selectman, is disgusted. He scowls at the printed sheet. Yep, there it is in black and white: "The bastard had signed it himself, and using all three of his names, including the terrorist one in the middle." Why is Obama writing to Chester's Mill? Because an enormous transparent dome, not breachable by prayer, bullet, laser beam or cruise missile, has suddenly and unaccountably descended over the town. Its provenance is uncertain (aliens? North Korea?), but its effect is incontrovertible: no one gets in, no one gets out. Some kind of energy field is attached to it; at close range it blows up i Pods and (bad news for incautious oldsters) pacemakers, and sends a gust of "horripilation" through the human nervous system. Bummer, right? Not for the tyrant-in-waiting Big Jim and his pet goon squad. For them this is Christmas Day in the morning. Secession has occurred! The "thug in the White House," the "Blackguard in Chief," is on the other side of the dome, and Anytown, U.S.A. - with its meth factory, its profusion of religious denominations and its atavistic police department - is about to, as the phrase has it, "go rogue." According to an author's note, King took a first crack at "Under the Dome" in 1976, but gave it up "after two weeks' work that amounted to about 75 pages." An interesting sequence of expressions must have crossed his face when he watched "The Simpsons Movie" in 2007: here, in glowing animation, was a great glassy dome landing on a clueless municipality, a civic meltdown, etc. ("We're trapped like rats!" screams Moe the bartender. "No," says the man from the E.P.A., "rats can't be trapped this easily. You're trapped like . . . carrots") But the Simpsonian merriment bounced off him, apparently; King held on to his dome concept, waiting perhaps with his genius on "sleep" for our national politics to get a little more kinky, a little more vicious - a little more like a Stephen King novel. So this is it: 1,100 pages of localized apocalypse from an author whose continued and slightly frenzied commerce with his muse has been one of the more enthralling spectacles in American literature. King's previous novel, "Duma Key" (2008), was a subterranean first-person trip, in the vein of "Misery" or "Bag of Bones": Edgar Freemantle, rehabbing on the Florida coast after a construction accident that cost him his right arm and nearly his mind, starts banging out lefthanded paintings whose Dalí-esque motifs have freaky real-world effects. Classic King: a maimed artistic consciousness, a symbolic journey. With "Under the Dome" we swoop up again to the God's-eye view, or to the view of some equally altitudinous but less merciful entity - a panorama of interlocking stories and a huge cast of characters, many of them being used rather cruelly. As the values of the dome assert themselves, people become matter: a woman flies through a windshield "trailing intestines like party streamers," another woman shoots herself in despair, leaving her brains drying on the wall "like a clot of oatmeal." Big Jim, taking control of the Chester's Mill police department, starts recruiting from the local pool of jocks and bully boys, "the ever-present football player rapist," as the songwriter Gibby Haynes once put it. A town leader congratulates the chief of police on doing "a hell of a job." Where is God in all this? Pastor Coggins, who flagellates himself and prays "in an ecstatic televangelist tremolo," doesn't last long; more durable, possibly because she doesn't believe in God anymore, is the Rev. Piper Libby of the First Congregational Church. And holiest of all is Phil Bushey, known as the Chef, the heavily-armed meth wizard who commandeers the town's Christian radio station. Chef, tweaking away, has some great lines: "God has told me this, Sanders," he booms. "You're in the Lord's army now. . . And I'm your superior. So report." As for the prose, it's not all smooth sailing. Given King's extraordinary careerlong dominance, we might expect him at this point to be stylistically complete, turning perfect sentences, as breezily at home in his idiom as P.G. Wodehouse. But he isn't, quite. "Then it came down on her again, like unpleasant presents raining from a poison piñata: the realization that Howie was dead." (It's the accidental rhyme of "unpleasant" and "presents" that makes that one such a stinker.) I felt the clutch of sorrow, too, when I read this: "What you're planning is terribly dangerous - I doubt if you need me to tell you that - but there may be no other way to save an innocent man's life." BUT then, King has always produced at pulp speed. "Nov. 22, 2007 - March 14, 2009" proclaims the final page of "Under the Dome": that's 1,100 pages in 480 days. We shouldn't be too squeamish about the odd half-baked simile or lapse into B-movie dialogue, is my point. Writing flat-out keeps him close to his story, close to his source. It seems to magnetize his imagination: by the final third of this novel King is effortlessly drawing in T.S. Eliot and the Book of Revelation, the patient etherized upon a table and the Star Wormwood. Pollution thickens against the inner wall of the dome, and the sunset outside becomes alien and terrifying, a "vast, dusty glare." The dome grows metaphysical - one character, contemplating the suffering of another, feels "a clinical sorrow, safely stored inside its own dome: you could see it, could appreciate its existence, but you couldn't exactly get in there with it." Big Jim Rennie, with his monster breakfasts and "carnivorously sociable smile," is swept to power on a wave of homicide and municipal procedure. He snaps necks, and he attends emergency-assessment meetings (echoes here of Donald Antrim's wildly black 1993 novel "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World," which begins with an ex-mayor being drawn and quartered by some inflamed Rotarians). He's the worm in the brain of democracy: it takes him only four days to undo just about everything. The coalition that forms against him includes a journalist, a librarian, an Iraq veteran, some acned skateboarders and an English professor from Massachusetts who (rather wonderfully) has just edited an issue of Ploughshares. Get ready, libruls, King seems to be saying: If the dome comes down, you're going to need one another. James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.