Devouring Stephen King: Under the Dome

I started reading Under the Dome quite lacklustrely. It's a BIG book, which meant I didn't want to carry it round with me, you know, anywhere, and I found that my reading time at home kept being eaten up by other things I needed/wanted to do. After dedicating myself to it one particular evening, however, I found I couldn't stop reading it. I started reading before bed, in the half an hour I give myself to wake up in the mornings (mornings are so hard, you guys), and I even started carrying it to work with me because I NEEDED to know what happened.

So it's a little bit good, is what I'm trying to say here. Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Annoyingly, though, I'm going to start with a criticism because that's just the kind of person I am. I loved this book and couldn't get enough of it, but upon finishing, I realised that I kind of hadn't gotten to know any of the characters at all well. In, say, The Stand, there are a few characters who are really the main focus and you get to know them pretty well, and you would live and die for them, essentially. Under the Dome has its main characters, but I feel almost as though I didn't know them well enough to care about them as much as I would have liked to. I wanted to care, but I realised after I had finished that I had been gripped by so many other things, but not so much by a love and concern for the characters.

But that's ok because there were so many other things about this book that were SO GOOD. It is structurally so excellent, and each section ends with a shocking thing that happens, and when you think that was the most shocking thing, you come to the end of the next section and there is an even more shocking thing. It's the kind of thing that keeps me reading so hard, but it didn't feel like it was being forced upon me so much as it seemed like these were exactly the kinds of things that would happen in a town enclosed by an invisible dome, run by a complete psychopath (oh yeah, that's basically the jumping off point of the plot).

Let's talk about that psychopath though- Under the Dome is set in Chester's Mill, and Chester's Mill is run by Big Jim Rennie. Big Jim is one of the worst characters I've ever encountered, and by the worst, I actually mean the best worst. I became so frustrated with him that I can only compare my hatred to that I have for Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter- he is incapable of listening to, not only criticism, but actual common sense that says being trapped under a dome is maybe not the best time to make a giant power grab, but maybe just to try and fucking help people. He is a tiny Hitler (tiny in terms of the amount of people he has to control, not his physical size) and he cares for nothing other than trying to control his (literal) captive township.

I feel like a lot of King's stock characters you would traditionally root for die really early on, and these deaths are always shocking because these are his people! These are the guys who should be fixing things, but by taking them out of the way, King ensures that Rennie's power grab goes much, much further than it should be allowed to. He fills the police force with mean, untrained teenagers, incites riots to make the town believe that they need strong leadership, and relishes all the opportunities that a fucking disaster bring. I feel like I need to stop talking now before I spoil some things, but rest assured that this book is darker than a lot of King's work, and it's because, apart from the dome itself, everything that happens in this book is as a result of human behaviour, rather than supernatural influence.

Scary stuff, huh?

So basically, in case you couldn't tell, I bloody loved this book. It was intricate and well thought out, and if I found 'the good guys' a little underwhelming, that was maybe only because they didn't even have the opportunity to be heroes like King's good guys usually do, but instead had to muddle their way through Rennie's tawdry wet dream. There are way too many things in this book to adequately cover in this one review, so I'm going to have to go ahead and recommend that you all read it, and then tell me all your feels.