Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A small town in Maine. Strange, perhaps supernatural, forces at work. A ragtag group of good-hearted people battle the forces of evil in an almost Biblical struggle.
Why, yes, Stephen King does have another novel out. It’s called “Under the Dome,” his heaviest work yet, in the literal sense of the word. It clocks in at nearly 1,100 pages and is large enough to fend off killer clowns and ax-wielding murderers.
The town is Chester’s Field, Maine. The supernatural entity is a massive force field, clear, impassible, that appears suddenly, trapping the city’s 2,000 residents inside its dome. As the military tries to fruitlessly search for way to break through, “Lord of the Flies” plays out among the townsfolk, our hero being Iraq vet Dale “Barbie” Barbara, our heel in the form of car salesman, city selectman, born-again Christian and secret criminal kingpin Jim “Big Jim” Rennie.
King, as usual, never lacks for cinematic images. The first victims of the dome are small planes, exploding pacemakers and cleaved woodchucks. When the government organizes “visitor’s day,” relatives and survivors stand yards apart in tears, a quarter-mile of parallel lines on either side of an invisible barrier. Children suffer visions, “pink stars falling!” It’s long, but never boring.
“Under the Dome” was first conceived in 1976, King writes in an afterward, but he shelved it because he wasn’t up to the science, like how weather would behave in a life-size snow globe. But two years later he did write “The Stand,” a book considered by many King fans to be his best, and the one “Dome” most resembles.
Unfortunately, “Dome” suffers from the association. It shares some of “The Stand’s” faults, like a left-field disaster — in the first book’s case, it was a nuclear bomb — that works almost as a reverse deus ex machina, randomly wiping out half the cast. In both novels, the climatic “battle” — if you can really call it that — pales to the buildup. King is better at characters and situations than causes and reasons.
But at least “The Stand” feels like a saga, the Book of Revelations played out on a national scale with a manmade supervirus and the demonic Randall Flagg. I won’t reveal the secret of the Dome, except to say that the payoff is more “Star Trek” (original series) than epic.
It’s Stephen King — I’d pay to have him write the phone book. But “z” has to end with some zip.
Under the Dome
by Stephen King
Scribner