Just Finished Reading Under the Dome by Stephen King

Several years ago, not long after Stephen King's very long novel Under the Dome was first published, I began to read it...but stopped in frustration about a third of the way through.  I was tired of all the political references, with the good guys seeming to support then-President Obama and the bad guys against him.  I also took exception to the way evangelical Christianity was being negatively portrayed in the novel: after recently picking it back up and reading it all the way through, I realize why King did what he did but still feel that he could have done more to balance out the equation on both political and religious fronts.  Since I was already attuned to these issues, I could put them in the background as I read and enjoyed the unfolding story.  Turned out to be a pretty good story, after all...

Just before noon on an October Saturday in the fictional small Maine town of Chester's Mill, a thin, transparent, and impermeable barrier suddenly materializes, separating everybody and everything on both sides of the town's borders.  A plane crashes against the dome as do cars, trucks, and multitudes of birds...many deaths occur in those first few minutes of its existence.  Dale "Barbie" Barbara, the story's chief protagonist (and it contains many protagonists) is close to leaving town after a violent altercation with town ruffians the night before...he just misses getting out in time as the car he was hoping to hitch a ride with doesn't stop as it exits.  So now Barbie has to go back to Chester's Mill, which is full of small-town society and politically dominated by a demagogue, "Big Jim" Rennie, who is a manipulative used-car salesman with no scruples when it comes to enhancing his own power and wealth.  As the dome remains over Chester's Mill, the struggle is on between Rennie's forces and those in the town who want to prevent a dictatorship...

The dome cannot be physically crossed, but the other side is both visible and audible, and radio and the Internet still pass through the barrier.  Barbie is informed by his former Army superior from Iraq that he has been reinstated and promoted to corporal from his former captain rank...and that he is expected to take control of Chester's Mill.  Thus ensues a power struggle with Rennie.  But these characters, although crucial to the story, are just a few of the many that King follows in Under the Dome.  As I said before, it contains many protagonists and subplots...and quite a few villains as well.  I'll leave what happens in this speculative tale to you, the prospective reader, and instead focus on a couple of my own reactions to it...

I can't help but feel that with this story Stephen King was alluding to our planet Earth as a sort of enclosed system that is susceptible to environmental abuse.  The indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels and the release of pollutants into the atmosphere threatens the fragile system that supports our own lives, and like the folks living under that dome, we have nowhere else to go.  I also understand the author's example of how people tend to deny the rights of other species of life to simply be able to live out their own lives...he used the example of kids setting fire to ants with a magnifying glass, regarding them as not really being alive anyway.  What if some alien beings had the same attitude about us that we have toward "lower" creatures?

So in the end, I give a "thumbs up" to Under to Dome.  Be prepared for a long reading excursion, though...it's more than a thousand pages long.  As for the television series, I haven't seen it and don't have any plans in that regard.  There are some sections to this novel that are unforgettable: the strange friendship that develops between Andy Sanders and Phil "Chef" Bushey was totally unexpected.  And Stephen King was brilliant with the dialogue throughout...