Review (partial) from the Toronto Sun:
King revoked his retirement clause before it even kicked in, regaining his book-a-year pace in no time. The novels that followed were all good and eminently readable, while Lisey's Story and the story collection Just After Sunset showed King regaining some of the vision and storytelling vigour of his best early works.
Now comes Under the Dome, King's first epic (more than 600 pages) novel since the accident. At just under 1,100 pages it's one of his longest works, second only to the uncut version of The Stand.
The novel opens in vintage King style, with a series of deftly rendered verbal postcards of small-town America. The town is Chester's Mill, Maine, just north of Castle Rock, the county seat and setting of some of King's most iconic works.
Dale Barbara, a.k.a. "Barbie," a decorated Iraq War vet turned fry cook and drifter, is making his way out of town after an altercation with some of the local (and well-connected) toughs. High above him Claudette Sanders, wife of First Selectman Andy Sanders, is enjoying a flying lesson behind the controls of a rented prop plane, while just down the highway a nervous woodchuck stops to assess Barbie.
Barbie is staring at the woodchuck when something happens that makes him question his senses: the woodchuck is cut cleanly in two by an invisible blade. Seconds later, the airplane crashes into an invisible force thousands of feet up in the air and explodes on impact, scattering clumps of burning debris and two shredded bodies over the highway and fields at the side of the road.
Barbie quickly realizes that the roads leading in and out of town and the surrounding farms and forests have been sealed inside an impenetrable, invisible dome. More havoc ensues, including a catastrophic logging-truck crash outside the dome.
It's a spectacular montage of surreal violence and bewilderment, and with a thousand or so pages left to go the average reader can hardly be blamed for wondering if King can sustain the effort.
He does. As the residents of Chester's Mill begin to understand the terms of their bizarre imprisonment no one gets in, no one gets out and the air and water won't last forever the horror switches from the cosmic and surreal to the domestic and political.
Small towns in King's work are hothouses of unsettled scores, power games and complex loyalties kept in check by propriety, dependence and the law. Remove the restraints of law and amplify the town's internal stresses and suddenly the monsters in the closet are emboldened to test out the daylight.
The monsters in Under the Dome are human mundane, mediocre but no less frightening for it. Ruling the bestiary is one of King's best villains, Second Selectman "Big Jim" Rennie, a used-car salesman, fundamentalist Christian and possible drug lord who knows everybody's business and puts that business to work for the Lord as Big Jim knows Him. Jim knows an opportunity when he sees one. The dome may be his best chance to fix the town's problems and deal with its liberal troublemakers once and for all and he's not about to let that chance pass him by.
King draws readers into a not-so-subtle but depressingly believable political allegory about the perils of conformity and right-wing populism. The town's rapid descent into a hillbilly police state feels so inevitable it might have pre-ordained by the constitution, but King lines up a motley band of reluctant, flawed do-gooders to battle Big Jim's allies.
Under the Dome does more than give an extended "screw you" to the Palin-era Republicans, it showcases King's prime talent: the ability to evoke an utterly familiar and quotidian world invaded and illuminated by a manifestation of the uncanny.
This is King's best novel since It, maybe since The Stand. Good thing he didn't retire the word processor.
James Grainger is the author of the story collection The Long Slide (ECW Press).
