Tom McGee's Blog

I don’t even want to tell you how late I stayed up the last couple of nights finishing off this book. 1100+ pages seldom go by so quickly, and I did the last 300 in one mad sprint last night.

So I guess it’s pretty good. Not perfect, but very good.

The story revolves around the singular (for the most part) supernatural element of an invisible force-field like “dome” that suddenly descends over a small town in Maine. It’s completely impermeable to anything except light and sound, though water and air will very gradually seep through. No one, and nothing, can get in or out.

From there, it’s like a science experiment. Cut off from outside assistance or restraint, what happens to a typical bunch of small-town Americans?

How do they behave? In a lot of cases, pretty badly. Who rises to the top: Not the cream, that’s for sure.

After its Twilight Zone premise, think of a combination of “Lord of the Flies,” “It Can’t Happen Here,” and “The Killing Fields.”

Now it’s usually axiomatic to me that the quality of a King novel is in inverse proportion to its weight. I thought the original version of “The Stand” was much too long, and so never even tried the expanded one; and I absolutely despite “It.” On the other hand, “The Shining,” “Pet Sematary,” and “Thinner” were just great. So despite the good reviews I was skeptical going in.

But as I mentioned above, 1,100 pages didn’t seem that long. There’s very little fat on the bones of this one. Every chapter drives the character and plot development along; in his afterwards he talks about how he wanted the book to feel “pedal to the metal” from start to finish, and he did it.

The denouement is, unfortunately, a little bit silly and unsatisfying — to me at least. The explanation for the phenomena, even though he ties it in very neatly with the major themes of the book, just doesn’t feel “big” enough; almost trivial in fact. Even though that’s probably exactly the point, I was hoping for something a little more substantial.

But nevertheless, the fun of these books isn’t in the arrival, it’s in the journey. This is a good one, with bit plot lines, big-as-life characters, and a suitable amount of King-style gore and mayhem that crawls into you before you see it coming. And the climactic scene in which all the bad-guys’ machinations blow up in their faces is a real barn-burner. Puns intended.

So this is top-drawer King as far as this reviewer goes. Have fun, but try to get some sleep on work nights.