Under the Dome

I recently finished this book and I was very excited to read it. On the front cover it had a quick remark from Lee Child which said "Seven words: The best yet from the best ever." Another review said something along the lines of this being the best book he has written in recent time and reminds of his style used while writing The Stand. Well this got me even more excited because I am a huge Stephen King fan and I think The Stand is probably my favorite book of all time. Well, as the reading went on, I realized I was going to be let down. This doesn't touch The Stand in my opinion.....not even close.

Now listen to this before I go on, anything negative I say is done so with extreme caution because Stephen King will always be a legend in my mind and I am just a crappy blog writer and pretty much no one reads my stuff anyways. That being said I did not think the book was horrible by any means, it was still fun to read, there were just some disappointments.

The quick summary of the plot is this; a dome encapsulates a small town in Maine(go figure it's in Maine) and traps everyone inside as well as keeping people out of the town. Very little gets through the dome to include water and wind. The town almost immediately takes a dive into crazy-ville. Everything falls apart at the seams and a line is drawn between the good guys and the bad guys from the get go. The villain is a local nobody politician who likes his small town because he feels powerful there. You good guy is an ex-Army officer who has a haunted past.  For about 700 pages we hear about all the terrible things the Jim Rennie is doing and apparently no one can stop him. Whenever it appears as though our good guys are going to get the upper hand he skates by and keeps on trucking down his road of self righteous evil. Towards the end the book starts to pick with a really cool shoot-out between the would be cops and a couple of tweekers, followed by an explosion that basically vaporizes the whole town. After that we have our sole survivors trying to stay alive in the conditions left by the explosion, but before they can get out of the dome, they have to beg some alien kids to turn off their XBOX and let them out.

OK, like I said before, Stephen King is an amazing writer and the book was pretty fun to read but I had a few problems with it. First and foremost, and this is my pet peeve in books and film, was the mini-cliffhanger attempts at drama. I absolutely hate it when you have chapters that hint at the future because it seems like a pathetic try for some pizazz in the story. These aren't word for word, just examples off the top of my head, but ending chapters with things like "if she only knew what her actions were about to cause......", "little did he know that his whole family would soon be dead", and "such and suck character did this....if only he knew what is going to cost him." I think things like this are really terrible and if you read the book hopefully you know what I am talking about.

I had a problem with the main characters, Barbie and Big Jim. My problem with Barbie might not be substantial though because I am in the ARMY and I expected more from him. I know that he had his haunted past and all of that, I get it, but I was really just waiting for him to get over it and start kicking some ass, get some guns, assemble a fire team, and take the town by force. Like I said though, that might just be the soldier in me talking. My problem with Jim was that he seemed to be what the entire 1,000 page book was about. All we heard about was Big Jim and his hooligans, and like I said before, no one was ever able to touch him. Now I know that the villain just can't be gotten rid of easily but a small town politician is not very scary and in my experience, small town citizens are armed to the teeth and they seem to be just itching to use them on someone. I also was let down by his demise in the end, I don't know if that was supposed to be him getting his pay back but it sure didn't feel like it to me. None of our good guys got to get at him. He just died in a hole after shooting his pawn boy down. I guess I wanted to finally see that confrontation between the characters go down, not have everyone just die off by themselves.

Lastly there was the ending, and Stephen King's recent book endings are going to be a topic in the near future. I guess due to the nature of the dome it had to be alien, but kids playing with an ant farm? It seemed a little cheap to me. I mean yeah I guess people are pretty cruel to animals sometimes so it makes a little bit of sense but it just didn't seem to hold much weight to me. Then the dome lifts up after they convince the kids to stop their game and the walk off into the fresh air and.......The End. I don't know if I'm the only one but not real impressive. Let me know what you think. I am going to search out some other blogs on the book and compare notes. Let's see what other people thought.