Stephen King
(ex) Captain Dale Barbara is about to leave town when a gigantic, transparent dome envelops the town of Chester’s Mill. He could consider himself lucky since he survived the arrival of the dome. Several animals and people didn’t, as they crashed into the indestructible, impenetrable dome.
The dome gave an electric shock when a person first touched it, but saved its disastrous results for those with pacemakers and hearing aids. The first victim on that count was the police chief Howard “Duke” Perkins, and that gave the town’s First Selectman ‘Big Jim’ Rennie to assert his superiority with First Selectman Andy Sanders serving as a willing puppet.
He soon appoints his man as the new police chief and begins machinations to seize complete control. He pays special attention to Barbara, whose reason for leaving town was an altercation with Rennie’s son Junior, and his friends. The only people who can see through Rennie’s game are notably Barbara, Julia – the editor of the local newspaper, ‘Rusty’ – a physician’s assistant, and Howard’s widow Brenda.
Even as the military reaches the town’s borders to address the ‘situation’, and the media update a stunned nation, Big Jim manipulates the town’s people into believing what he wants them to believe, despite television channels broadcasting his nefarious schemes for making money. The town and its people meanwhile, remain trapped under the unrelenting dome, like ‘ants under a magnifying glass’
With a huge supporting list of characters, and spanning close to 900 pages, the author has tried to highlight a multitude of things – from human transactional relationships to environmental hazards. Unfortunately, the book didn’t really work for me, it was just too long to hold my attention, especially towards the end. The character snippets, the descriptions of town life and the jarring differences of climate inside and outside the dome, all gets repetitive after a point, and even the vast array of characters, interesting though some of them are, become too tiresome, despite the messages they seem to be carrying for the author.