Under the Dome

One of the longest of King's novels, Under the Dome will go by a whole lot faster than you would think. The plot of the novel is a classic story that wouldn't be out of place in a Twilight Zone episode: a mysterious forcefield appears around a small Maine town, cutting the people off from the rest of the world. The plot is simple, but King's approach to it is far from it. A master of characterization, King uses this claustrophobic setting to pit each character against each other. Alliances are made and broken, riots break out, and government cracks down. All of this is played inside a town that gradually begins to feel the effects of pollution that is unable to escape the mystical forcefield thus giving the novel an environmental message. King has a lot on his mind in his book. He criticizes politics, governments, authority, foreign policy, and everything in between as he weaves his narrative back and forth through a cast of fifty or so characters. Perhaps what is most on King's mind is the idea of man being the worst monster of all. While King's supernatural novels such as IT and The Shining are good, nothing is more terrifying than what man can do to each other. King delves deep into the distorted minds of the sociopathic and psychotic in this book and it is this understanding of such a mind that makes this novel such a terrifying read. Reading this book isn't going to make you afraid of things that go bump in the night. Instead, it's going to make you afraid of the people around you and that is a much more unsettling feeling than any monster underneath my bed.