Book Review: Under the Dome by Stephen King
Genre: Horror
Age: Adult
Format: Hardback
I’m going admit right up front I struggled with this one. I like King, but some of his novels do fall into the bloated category, and this is definitely one of them.
Chester’s Mill, Maine, is your average small town, complete with meth lab, corrupt town councillors, and violent young men just looking for an opportunity for their next fight. On the day Dale Barbara attempts to leave, however, an invisible force field drops down over the town, blocking it off from the rest of the world. Food, electricity and water soon run short, and as the army make attempts to destroy the dome, inside it, the situation quickly gets dire.
I think King can be a great writer, at times, but his good is so great that when he gets it wrong, it feels more disappointing, I think. Let’s start with something that requires a trigger warning, shall we? So, trigger warning for sexual assault.
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There is a lot of sexual violence in here. And even where it’s not explicit, it’s bad. The whole reason Barbara is trying to leave town is because he’s falsely been accused of rape, which is…gross. Just gross and handled very badly. As well as this, there is a whole plot line involving a gang rape that is especially brutal, and the plot that follows just gets more grim from there. It really felt like the sexual violence – whether it was graphic or in the language some characters used – was massively unnecessary. There could have been plenty of reasons for Barbara leaving town that didn’t boil down to a girl hitting on him, it going badly from her perspective, and accusing him of rape because she’s been rejected. It was the major complaint I had throughout the book – the treatment of female characters. None of the town’s residents come out of this intact, but it felt especially like the women experienced a lot more of the worst kind of stuff in here.
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So, I was unimpressed with the way King wrote the women here. I think it might be because it’s such a large cast, but it felt like when things went wrong, it was often due to a wrong, often unintelligent decision by a woman – for confronting abusers and bullies, for not listening to what they’re told to do, for being a little different than the rest of the town. Not to say the men always get off lightly – Barbara has a tough time, a doctor underestimates the main antagonist and suffers for it. I’m not suggesting this is deliberate, and I’m usually a big fan of King’s work, but something felt like it got lost here.
The other thing that really grated on me with the kid/teenage characters. I think King is great at writing kids, but Under the Dome felt like he was basing the teens on his own sons twenty years before. The slang they used felt really off at times, and very outdated.
Things I did like – this feels like a weirdly prophetic book. A disaster strikes, unexplainable and unknown, and the people in power are incompetent, or take this as the opportunity to gain complete, total control. The main antagonist sees himself as the only true leader who can get the people through the crisis, and he uses the situation completely to his own benefit, smiling through each tragedy in the small town because he knows he can use it all to his own advantage. His son is equally as terrifying, though in a more reckless, unpredictable kind of way.
There is a small resistance group that springs up, but characters who could have been really interesting here are killed off too soon. They don’t really do much, either – understandable in the circumstances, but no one actually moves against the main antagonist, and he’s pretty much left to get on with things.
There are good parts to this book. The ending is unfortunately not one of them, but King – as usual – paints really vivid, memorable scenes for a lot of the main events that happen. The horror lies in the tiny details, and even now, a fair while after reading it, there’s some particular events which really stick out in my mind.
Overall, this book is a bit of a bloated mess. I struggled a lot with the length and pace, but there’s some great writing buried in here, too. It got really bleak and dire at points, which is unsurprising, but it’s got King’s signature foreshadowing, the characters that are written well and written really well, and it’s definitely got very haunting moments to it.
Review by Elle Turpitt
Twitter: @elleturpitt
Bluesky: @elleturpitt.bsky.social
www.elleturpittediting.com
I own this book.
