Tag: Stephen King

  • Under the Dome: A Novel

    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.

  • Creature Comforts

    By sheer coincidence, the only two Stephen King books I’ve read are “Under the Dome” and Needful Things. They’re separated by a decade and a half (publication) and so, I was surprised to see a massive similarity in the themes – strange things happening in a town and then the focus shifts to human transactions, motivations and the good/evil within us. In the earlier book, it was a new shop and its proprietor  that played havoc, in the later one, it’s an indestructible dome.

    When I discussed this with a few friends, I was told that this was not surprising and there were more books with that broad theme, and many authors repeated their themes regularly. These authors and their books are bestsellers too, which means a lot of people like this arrangement?

    I have vaguely sensed this in music too – from MLTR to Bon Jovi to Bryan Adams to (even sometimes) Rahman, there seems to be a basic tune which is rendered differently at different times and released as a new track, and it sells. Which does make me wonder if even in these so-called hobbies, many of us have become creatures of habit, just like most other spheres of life – including food, people and so on. Comforts are easy that way, keeps the mind away from thinking. Of course, it could be subjective, and you could be on autopilot on some things, and not on others.

    Meanwhile, all this is not to say that others, who are always pushing themselves out of the zone, can get all judgmental about it, but I do wonder whether its a conscious decision to stick to a comfort zone, an inability to break out of it, or not even realising you’re in one. Etymologically, ‘comfort’ means ‘make someone stronger’, but by building that fort around the self, do we become stronger or weaker in the face of life?

    until next time, comfort knocks