REVIEW: Under the Dome (Stephen King, 2009)

In a way, you're already familiar with them.  Scarecrow Joe McClatchey, the dorky teenager addicted to wi-fi.  Big Jim Rennie, the opportunistic car salesman who holds Jesus in his arrhythmic heart.  Rusty Everett, the hopeful doctor who knows everybody in town.   Julia Shumway, the eager reporter who never has a damn thing to report.  Rommie Burpee, the market manager who unwisely ordered too many hot dogs a few months back.  Melvin Searles, the drunk twenty-something with a small brain and smaller temper.

They all live under the Dome, and they all come from Stephen King, who’s slowly worked his way from blockbuster schockmeister to distinguished American author over the course of forty years.  The journey hasn’t been easy, and it’s come mostly from the critical community, which has become wise to King's virtues as a storyteller.  He has a thing for the blue-jeans dialogue of Americana, the rhythm of out-of-the-way folk, and, of course, a sick interest in what happens when the inexplicable invades this familiar zone.

In this story, the inexplicable is an invisible, spherical barrier that separates the sleepy town of Chester’s Mill from the outside world.  Trapped inside their city, liberated from America, the town stands little chance of survival in King Country.  Part of the problem is King’s bleak view of people in fear, which he’s made explicit in pulp masterpieces like The Stand and "The Mist."  Another problem is this town’s rotten core, which is a powder keg of corrupt bureaucracy and drug conspiracies.

The biggest problem, however, is the inherent nature of pack mentality.  When Frankie DeLesseps visits his tired girlfriend, he and his three hideous friends, free from consequences, goad each other into raping her.  When Big Jim Rennie decides to implement his own Reichstag on the town, all it takes is a "closed" sign to turn the local grocery store into a mob scene.  Even the protagonists struggle with groupthink, as soldier Dale "Barbie" Barbara forces away memories his unit in Iraq capturing an innocent man in Fallujah.  As a repeated song lyric notes, we all support the team.

If that detail about Iraq makes this novel sound contemporary, take comfort that King manages to weave a tale both of our time and utterly timeless.  That, while the rampant ecological disasters under the Dome point clearly toward a society in excess, King crafts a group of characters of varied subtleties and excesses.  As a storyteller, King's largest talent has always been the creation of diverse, vivid casts, and here, he rediscovers an energy and confidence (and pace) I haven't recognized since Misery.

This is the man, after all, who created Carrie White, Randall Flagg, Annie Wilkes, and Roland the Gunslinger, and even his caricatures, like John Coffey and the Trashcan Man, vibrate with life in a way few genre writers have captured.  Most seem devoted to their situations.  King lives for his people.  In Under the Dome, Christian despot Big Jim Rennie is most terrifying.  He's the type that will dismiss a snooty woman as a "rhymes-with-witch" and then orchestrate a firebombing.  His son, Junior, is even worse, a homicidal sleaze set free by the distracting Dome.  Junior's drawn-out "Baaarbie" taunt irritates as well as it haunts.

Everyone under the Dome is humanized, and perhaps that's what terrifies most.  It's easy to hate Frankie DeLesseps, who helps during a gang-rape.  A little harder when he holds a sad vigil for one of his friends in the hospital.  It's easy to sympathize with drug-addled Andrea Grinnell, but less so when she idiotically triggers a riot in the Town Hall.  As the hundred or so people King details faction and face off, he lifts the narration outside the Dome, explaining, in present-tense prose, how everyone is behaving in a given moment.  He shows us their sad little lives with detachment, and perhaps pity, too. He sees defiance and hatred, compassion and cruelty.  For King and King's readers, this is all familiar.  And welcome.

RATING: A