Book Review: “Under the Dome” by Stephen King

There have been precious few books published in the last few years that are anything close to being readable, and I have many times tried to read a Stephen King novel only to put it aside and never pick it up again.

Most of the books written by Stephen King since IT have been pretty boring for me. In fact, I still have not finished IT, even though there is a copy sitting right there on my shelf. Will it ever be read? Probably not. I found it to be way too long, way too boring, and way too unconnected.

So, when I saw a copy of Under the Dome sitting on the New Books shelf at my college library, I checked it out and started to read. Unfortunately, with the schoolwork I had to do, I didn’t even manage to get past the first 50 pages during the two week period that I had it.

I will say, however, that those 50 pages kept my interest, and I longed to be able to read the whole book. That longing was alleviated last week, when I saw a copy of the trade paperback edition of Under the Dome at Sam’s Club and bought it.

By Saturday, I was up to about page 200. Saturday night I started to read more. I continued to read until about 10:00 Sunday morning, and had just 200 pages of the over 1000 pages left. I set my alarm so that I would get a 4 hour nap, then continued reading when I woke up. I did not stop until I was completely finished with book.

Under the Dome is one of Stephen King’s best pieces, second only to The Stand. On the cover of my copy is a quote by Lee Child: “The best yet from the best ever.” I have to mostly agree with that statement. I still believe The Stand is by far his best piece of work, but that is just my own opinion.

Under the Dome is tense, fast-paced, and easily readable. You get to point where you genuinely want to know what happens to the very real people of Chester’s Mills as they face the problem of being trapped in their own town by some sort of force field (known as The Dome).

King has done a great job of making you believe that the people populating Chester’s Mill are very much real people, all of them trying to come to terms with something beyond their control and understanding.

You flip from page to page, hoping that everything comes out okay in the end for each and every one of them.

I am not going to give away the end of the book, but I will say that it was the end which caused me to still rank The Stand as his best. For some reason, the whole story seems to unravel in the end. I found myself wishing that King had at least put some sort of moral for the whole story at the end. Instead, what I got was a flatness, an emptiness, a void that needed to be filled.

By the end of the book I could easily have seen the story as being a tale of climate change, of needing to change our behaviors to stop what happened to Chester’s Mills from happening to the whole planet. I was expecting it to be just such an ending.

The reality was much different.

The writing and character development throughout the book are top notch. If I were to score the book solely on that, it would receive 5 out of 5 stars.

But because of the flat ending, I can only give it 4 out of 5.

I can only hope that a “complete and uncut” version comes out at a later date that has the real ending in it, because I have a feeling that this version suffered from the editors knife.