Under the Dome Collector's Set: A Novel [Hardcover]

I read my first Stephen King book when I was 13 years old and have been hooked every since. As is expected with an author that has something like 50+ published novels of pretty substantial size, I have been disappointed a number of times. Under the Dome, however, is not one of those times. After getting my hands on an advanced reading copy through my work (a bookstore) I started this behemoth and was hooked from page 3. King starts this story with a bang and burns rubber throughout the entire novel, never letting up the hyper-speed pace. With a book this size, I was expecting a few parts to sag, to be boring, but nothing like that ever happened while reading this book: I was completely addicted.

The story is simple: a big ol' dome comes down and cuts off this one small town, Chester's Mill, from the rest of the world. No one can get in or out. What the novel focuses on is how that changes the society inside the dome, how people react to their new enclosed space. And, since this is a King book, you can expect that they don't act well. This town has a lot of bad apples and skeletons in the closet, and they all come out to play when the dome comes down.

There are a few times in this story where I had to suspend my disbelief a little bit farther than I was willing. Mainly, in that things turned south so fast. Perhaps it was just the fact that the book was hundreds of pages, but I couldn't help being jarred whenever I learned that only a day or two had passed in the world of the book, when it felt like it was more time to me. Perhaps this was a conscious decision to keep the pacing fast. Some of the characters can come across as cartoonish, especially the main villain. Most of the characters are well-written and interesting, with faults that make them more believable. But this book is a good one. Not as good as the book it's inevitably going to be compared to (The Stand), but good. King dives into some complex questions about authority, fear, and propaganda, drawing some comparisons between the tactics of George Bush and Dick Cheney and our Dome-villian government figures. There is also a pretty heavy dose of environmental catastrophe interlaced throughout that parallels well with our current global warming issue.

My advice would be not to start this book unless you're ready to turn off the phone, lock the door, and finish the whole thing in one go.

I have never read a Stephen King book before, but I have seen many movies based off his books. As expected his books are not much different than the movies. Stephen King seems to have the curse of writing great beginnings and then not knowing how to end them. Besides the lame ending, one thing that really bother me about this book was the gross technical inaccuracy. Many people do things like confuse GSM with Wifi, so I can't hold that against him. I can also forgive him for not thinking about using induction to transmit power to the people in the dome, and to create breathable air at the end, since Stephen King is not a scientist. However, Stephen King seems to lack even a grade school understanding of combustion engines. All combustion engines require three things: fuel, spark, and air. How in the world people could be driving cars when there is not enough oxygen to breath, is beyond me. I could ignore this flaw, and simply pretend like all the vehicles are battery powered. However, the generators would have the same requirement. The story makes too big a deal out of the propane for me to suspend my disbelief, or do something like pretend the generators are backup batteries or such...

My recommendation is read the book until the climax, and then make-up your own ending.

Ok, I'm one of those "rabid King fans" mentioned in a previous review. I had a hell of a time NOT buying this when I saw it in the bookstore, sure that it would be a Christmas gift, as King's newest always is, from my brother. And then I burned through the first 800 pages, gorging on Christmas chocolates AND Stephen King. Let's face it - he knows what he's doing. There were no slow spots (in a 1000-plus page book? Yes, really!) But it was all...familiar. The characters, the bad guys, the kids. Anyone remember the author in Bag of Bones? How he wrote more than a book a year sometimes, saved up the extras and then doled them out when he ran dry? Hm.

And while I saw (and loved) the environmental and political parallels (and for that reason sped through the book to find out if they can be saved - what's the magic potion? What do we need to do, to save ourselves from our larger, but sadly similar dome?) I felt a bit like Annie Wilkes in Misery: cheated. The ending was well, kinda phoned in. Sorry Steve - you're still the King in my book-reader's heart - the decent thing for me to do now is to write the rave reviews for all your books that are fantastic. And there are many, many of those. I'm going to go read one now.