Under the Dome »

Few authors have tapped into our secret fears as adeptly as Stephen King, Master of the Macabre and one of the most widely read novelists writing today. With his trademark blend of fantasy, horror, and psychological suspense, this prolific and immensely popular contemporary writer continues to remind us that evil is still a potent force in the world.

On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester's Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and fall from the sky in flaming wreckage, a gardener's hand is severed as "the dome" comes down on it, people running errands in the neighboring town are divided from their families, and cars explode on impact. No one can fathom what this barrier is, where it came from, and when — or if — it will go away.

Dale Barbara, Iraq vet and now a short-order cook, finds himself teamed with a few intrepid citizens — town newspaper owner Julia Shumway, a physician's assistant at the hospital, a select-woman, and three brave kids. Against them stands Big Jim Rennie, a politician who will stop at nothing — even murder — to hold the reins of power, and his son, who is keeping a horrible secret in a dark pantry. But their main adversary is the Dome itself. Because time isn't just short. It's running out.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Stephen King's Under the Dome is another brick -- more like a wheelbarrow full -- in the construction of the argument that genre writers are doing far more than their high-lit colleagues to realize the novel's potential for examining the institutions and politics of contemporary society. In King's 1,074-page Under the Dome, a transparent dome suddenly descends on a Maine town, trapping the people inside and allowing the local thugs, elected and otherwise, to rule according to nothing more than their lust for power. The military and the media are stationed around the dome's perimeter. And Washington even has someone -- inadvertently -- on the inside: Barbie, the former military man turned drifter, reappointed in the face of the emergency and designated by President Obama as his man in charge.