Is there a real-world timeline to the DT books? When Flagg did what you mentioned in the spoiler, was it in, say, 2001? Or can that be determined?
Oh good heavens, now you’re thinking too much. I don’t mind thinking of the crow as Flagg.
I feel like I’m late to the party but I just finished this book. It started off good and I read the first 750 pages in about 4 or 5 days. This was probably one of the worst SK books I’ve read. I’d give it a 5.5-6 out of 10.
My general thoughts on the book follow in the spoiler I guess
One big problem I had was that the book didn’t focus for any length of time on the actual Dome. I wanted them to try to do things to get out, try to figure out what it was made of, anything other than just shrug and focus on the soap opera in town. The dome wasn’t even really a part of the story.
The characters were all caricatures and it really distracted me from the story. Big Jim was TOTALLY evil, 100% of the time and Barbie was TOTALLY good 100% of the time. Barbie and Rennie are the 2 most boring characters I’ve experienced in a King book.
The people in town followed Rennie like sheep in a very unrealistic way. I just don’t see people in this day and age falling for the type of weak tricky he was playing on them. The town followed Rennie just because it suited the story and the character. SK never made any effort to convince ME, the reader, why these people would blindly follow everything he said, and that’s a big part of buying the story. Big Jim IS Sweregen from Deadwood, but more evil.
All of these shithead kids were deputized and all it took was Rennie saying “Make’m cops”? WTF? Stupid.
The gang of skateboarding kids with the skateboarding genius. Really? Was that really necessary? Those characters could have been deleted and the story wouldn’t have changed. I was uncomfortable watching SK try to write convincing teenage characters that don’t exist in his comfort time period (50’s-70’s). Terrible writing on those chars.
The aliens. WTF? We go through all of the drama and conspiracy shit and it all gets wiped away by an explosion and aliens? Weak ass ending. Just super weak.
2nd Lt’s don’t wear stripes.
The permeability of the dome seemed to be added when he reached the end because he couldn’t figure out how to get the characters air.
Barbie and Big Jim. Terrible characters.
All in all this was not a good book and by the time I got to page 750 I just wanted it to be over and started skimming, and I NEVER skim.
Someone loaned it to me. I’m about 500 or so pages in. I’m not loving it. It seems to be just dark for dark’s sake without anything standing out. And I’m not getting sucked in - I read about 20 pages a day and that’s just fine with me, I feel no urge to read any faster.
I haven’t read any of the spoilers yet in this thread. I’ll be back when I finally finish it.
I really enjoyed the explosion scene, to the point of re-reading it a number of times. I just think it was a horrible way to end the book.
Call me crazy, but I would’ve preferred to have the oxygen slowly run out as the air gets fouled from everybody breathing it. I actually thought that was where SK was going with this, making it a CO2, greenhouse effect allegory.
You and me both. You articulated how I felt about the book quite well.
I’ve been consuming SK since Carrie came out. This book was compelling, but in a more junk-food way than in a comfort-food way.
I got to about page 770 and gave up. What a long, boring slog of a book. Every other page seems to be a litany of characters I couldn’t recall talking about another list of characters that had no role whatsoever except to be mentioned so the reader would think, ‘Wow, what a populated town.’
And does anyone honestly believe an entire town would be held under the iron grip of a used-car salesman?
Never thought I’d say it, but King could take a few pointers from Dan Brown when it comes to creating a compelling narrative.
This became a MAJOR issue for me after the first 400 pages or so.
In what town is a 2nd (or 1st for that matter) Selectman a hugely respected governing individual that people are going to go to for direction on anything other than what day to have the homecoming parade?
There was nobody, and I mean NOBODY, in Chester Hills that LIKED Big Jim. In fact almost everyone HATED him, including the people who were “working” with him through the story.
There was never any motivation for the overwhelming majority of the evil actions he did. For me the final nail in the coffin (though I already hated reading this character) was when He asked Carter if the Bubsy bitch was any good when he raped her. WTF?? That was out of left field and for no reason.
All of these points run counter to the fact that everyone in town followed him like sheep. It was just stupid.
And Barbie was like the most cliche, A-Team, David Banner, roaming-misunderstood-wanderer-with-a-military-past-he-doesnt-want-to-talk-about-helping-people-every-step-of-the-way-while-he-works-meanial-jobs-in-town dude. It was so boring. Unless he was only on active duty for less than 4 years he wouldn’t have been an Lt when he seperated from the Army. If he was only an Lt he would have been pretty inexperienced in general but he was a top shelf officer, one of the best Cox had seen in his career dammit. Please. And all of these people in the restaraunt where he was a short order cook were so SURE he couldn’t be capable of these murders and what not. Because they all knew the fry-cook for so long??? Huh?? What??? And when he went back to his apartment and his “instincts” told him something wasn’t right and then he realized someone had been in his room because there were footprints on his rug that he never walked on. :rolleyes:. So then he goes straight for the sock drawer to look for his dog tags, which of course were missing, and he immediately figures that he is getting ready to be freamed for something by BJ
I won’t get started on the Ex-Army MP, the chick, who Barbie knew would be top shelf because he had heard of her or something. I hate to say this, and I know it’s not true 100% of the time, but generally speaking, MPs and SPs are some of the dimmest bulbs in the military and have some of the highest turnover rate around because they are no good at their jobs and get in trouble all the time.
I also never got the Chester Mills = Gym Sock reference throughout the book. I kept looking at the map in the front and no matter how I looked at it I couldn’t see a sock.
I’m sure I will be back with more criticisms.
Things I liked:
I liked that the Dome just showed-up out of no where. I liked that things were crashing into it.
I haven’t re-read (you couldn’t pay me) but what bugged me about this was that King said the town was shaped like a sock, and later that the dome came down at exactly the city limits, and the dome was, um, dome-shaped? Circular? Oval?
Minor nitpick for a book that had major problems though. I’m still awed that those people hauled propane tanks around in pickups. :rolleyes:
I wondered the same thing.
The cover art showed a dome (and it was called a “dome”), but that wasn’t how it was described in the book. It was the shape of the town, extended upwards for about 40,000-odd feet, then closed off at the top.
JohnT, and how silly is it that the alien device precisely fit the boundaries of Chester’s Mill? A simple circular dome would have worked just as well.
Early in the narrative, it’s explicitly stated that it isn’t a hemispherical dome, and that people just call it that for lack of a better word.
I don’t have a problem with the entire town being in the thrall of a fundie Cal Worthington; that seems almost plausible. I do balk a bit at the idea that the entire population is trapped like moths in a killing jar, and only the four kids looking to the center to try to find the source, with nearly everyone else concerned with other things.
Hain’t got to the end yet, but so far I am content with assuming that an alien artifact has been exerting some influence since before the town was incorporated - just like over at Derry. Apathy rays in an extraterrestrial social engineering ant farm, or summat.
I just finished it. I agree with a lot of the negative comments in this thread. Caricatures is an excellent description and really the whole thing made me feel ill. Darkness for darkness’ sake.
You know, the part about the explosion would have made a great short story - while I didn’t like the book overall (especially because of this ending), I find myself re-reading those last 30-odd pages over and over again.
I just hate that it was used to wrap up 1,000 pages of a completely different story! Explosion ex machina indeed.
Stupid ending. Not as awful as Cell, but SK simply wrecks his longer novels with the endings.
And some the details were off - Barbie’s initial rank started out as captain, then later on dropped to lieutenant. As for the promotion to colonel, malarkey.
Another thing that bugged me was when King has Junior Rennie being good with little kids – not the teenagers, but the younger kids who were stranded because their mom was on the other side of the dome. He made a point of talking about Junior bonding with them, like we were going to see another side of the guy. I was waiting, but it went nowhere.
I guess I’ll finish Barbara Bushee’s [url=http://www.amazon.com/Gringa-Purple-Toenails-Barbara-Bushee/dp/0557083079*Gringa With Purple Toenails before I get back to King’s epic.
I “chick” story for sure, and one that this man enjoyed every minute of. A small book that you could zoom through in a few hours. Yum!
This arrived last week. Around page 500 I grew tired of all the predictable characters and bailed on the book. Unless I hear it got all wild and woolly sometime later in the book, I’ll consider it time well-saved.
One more try:
Gringa, etc
Whew!