Pages 347 - 392, In the Frame: Aftermath, with Extra Foreboding

.
What Happened? All around the town in the aftermath of the failed missile 'puncture.'  Barbie talks with Julia Shumway about running for selectman; she suggests Brenda Perkins, the dead Cheif's wife, instead.  Sammy wakes up from her beating, still bleedin badly, and manages to get her baby out of the house, onto the open road before she collapses.  Later the "good" pastor (and the only one still alive), Piper Libby, finds her and takes to the hospital ... and ultimately bullies her to get the names of the people -- the 'cops' -- who did this to her.  Thurston and Carolyn, the college prof and his 'student', are matched up with abandoned kids Aiden and Alice -- a refugee family with no place to refuge-ate. Barbie meet them while entering a deserted city hall, then slips down to the bomb shelter (that we've seen before) and gets the Geiger Counter.  Brenda runs the firefighting op at the missile impact point, and does a great job, impressing the 'good' merchant Rommie Burpee.  Thinks about runnin for Fire Chief in the inevitable upcoming elections.  More kids have visions, this time about pink stars falling from the sky, leaving trails behind them.  And somebody's stealing all the propane in town -- even from the hospital.

It occurs to me that this is far and away King's most political novel.  Where The Stand is about faith and friendship, Salem's Lot about courage and personal sacrifice, It about childhood and adulthood and moving from one to the other, etc. etc., this 'small town horror' is very much about politics: factions forming and flowoing, the madness and dark magic of crowds (and mobs), the leadership of the sane and the insane.  It's also the first time I recall the real, live 'outside world' penetrating a King novel.  I mean, a letter from the President?  And though unnamed, it's obvious the current President Obama (whom Big Jim dismmisses immediately, almost thoghtlessly, as a 'monkey' and a loser).  Yes, there are some interesting characters here -- the good guys like Barbie and Shumway are particularly well-drawn -- but he's spending a lot of time on things lke elections and leaders and the future implications of same.  Along with the normal blood, death, and horror, of course.  It's particularly apparent in the last couple of sections, where he went to some trouble to set it up so the whole town could see the failed missile impact, and the lengthy discussions of how that public display would help or hurt each 'side' (lost of side-taking this time).

In fact, the actual disappointment and fear from the failure is acknowledged but almost brushed past, in favor of more set-up and foreshadowing -- so much so that the 'personal' moments, like the creation of the unlikely refugee family, seems a little weak.  (In geneal, the Thruston/Carolyn/Kids constellation seems the sketchiest and least necessary story line in the whole book so far, which probably means they're terribly important and I'm just missing something.)  But watch those pink stars falling and the upcoming Halloween.  If  I'm doing my math right, 'today' is the 25th, so there's still six days of hell -- at minimum -- before the bloody denoument.

We'll see ...

Pages 299 - 343, Missile Strike Imminent: What Did You Expect?

.
What Happened? The piggish deputies begin evacuating the part of town where the Cruise Missile just might land.  They encounter Thurston Marshall, out-of-town college professor, and Carolyn Sturges, the grad student he's boffing, who've screwed and slept through the local disaster, until now.  They get roust the couple, while Frankie and Junior encounter two children, Rachel and Aiden Appleton, whose mom is apparently on the other side of the Dome. Good cops Jackie and Linda visit the Rev. Coggins' home and find evidence of his self-flagellatoin, but no body.  They move on to the utlra-automated, ultra-spooky WCIK, and find no one.Moments after they leave, the totally insane, emaciated and filthy Chef crawls from his hiding place.   Barbie hooks up with young, brilliant geekboy Scarecrow oe McClatchey; together they set up a web cam to watch the missile impact.  Chief Randolph and Big Jim hate it, but they lose the confrontation.  Everybody watches as the missile arrives, explodes .. and does nothing but start a fire on both sides of the Dome.  It has failed.

Clearly the Chef is UTD's Trashcan Man, the truly nutty bad man who shouldn't even still be alive, but is -- and will remain so, it seems, long enough to wreak a little havoc downstream.  Meanwhile the battle between Big Jim and his faction and Dale Barbie and HIS faction shape up even more ... and boy, is Barbie on the wrong side of this one.  Overall, it's a whole lot of build-up (especially the long confrontation over the web cam thing) for a pay-off we all knew was coming: the missile didn't work.  I mean, look, i's not even page 350 of 1050 yet; you know the Dome isn't disappearing yet.  Let the episode of Castle where the killer gets caught in the first twenty minutes.  You know it's bogus -- it's an hour show, man.

This is a big book.  It's gonna drag now and then  And even though we had to see what the missile was going to do, we already knew the outcome, and it took thirty pages to get there.

Let's hope all those little seeds being planted bear big, ugly-ass flowers, and soon.

Pages 255 - 295, Nyuck Nyuck Nyuck: Too Real

.
What Happened: Hunkered down in his home office, Big Jim Rennie calms his pet First Selectman Andy Selectman down ... just in time to see his hated enemy Barbara, talking to the editor and his not-so-controllable Third Selectman, Andrea Grinnell.  Shortly thereafter, Barbie, Brenda and Julia Shumway show him the letter for the President, supposedly putting Barbie in charge.  Just as Barbie suspected, Rennie dimisses it: the Prez and the rest are out there; he's the boss in here.  Meanwhile, posters are going up everywhere: they're going to fire a cruise missile at the wall, tomorrow at 10 a.m.Rennie isn't taking any of this well.  He privately confronts Brenda and makes it clear if she supports Barbie in the coming confrontation, he'll cut off her Oxycontin supply, and she needs those drugs.  Elsewhere, his son Junior sits in the dark with the rotting corpses of his victims and draws comfort from them, Rusty Everett's kids have another premonition, this one about bloody golden baseballs ... and Lester Coggins forces a meet with Rennie.  He has to confess, Coggins says.  They all have to tell the truth about the meth lab behind the church.  In rsponse, Rennie kills him -- smashes his skull with his golden baseball.  He's standing over the body in his study when his son comes in. And like a good son, Junior helps finish him off and takes the body away.  Together, they will use the body -- along with Junior's own victims -- to get back at Dale Barbie. Somehow.  And even that pales in comparison to the rape and beating of poor, stupid, drunk Sammy by the "deputies."

So much happening and none of it good.

A few years ago, Dan Simmons -- another brilliant writer who understands genre fiction -- wrote Children of the Night, a vampire novel set, in part, in Ciacescu's Romania.  One of the main themes of the novel: the pansy Victorian horror of blood-sucking counts and romantic mesmerism are nothing, nothing, compared to the real horrors of what human do to each other every day.  Strangely, it's probably one of Simmons least successful novel -- not because of the 'tour' of the hell that was Romania in those days, but the relative thinness of the fantasy elements.

SK's doing the same thing here on an almost-intimate level.  The brutal beating-murder of Coggins (who, let's face it, was annoying as hell), even its discovery by Rennie's son and Junior's own participation, is almost tame, almost incidental, compared to the very real, truly awful gang-rape of white trash Sammy.  Look at it, King's saying: you've got a fairly typical (though wonderfully written, brutally abrupt) Hammer Horror Movie violence on one hand: a preacher beaten to death with a gold-plated baseball and choked about by the murderer's son, no less -- and a coolly described, blow by blow (literally) recitation of a real-life, very brutal gang rape.

Which is worse?  God, is there any comparison?

In fact, it works so well that the preacher's murder actually rings a little hollow, seems a little stilted.  When Rennie says, "It's my will, you troublesome fly," it's just ... not real.  Not like what happened to Sammy a few pages earlier.  Not like what can and does happen daily around the world.

This is King's real talent, isn't it?  He understands horror -- all kinds of horror -- and presents it to us in unflinching detail.  And then asks us ove and ove: what's worse? The EC Comics horror, the happy grand guignol you can shrug off ... or the real horror that humans perpetrate upon each other, in the open sunlight of every day?

Pages 240 - 251, The rest of This Is Not As Bad As It Gets: What Babie Did (and Didn't)

.
What happened: Barbie tries to enlist the help of the dead Sheriff's wife, but to do so he has to tell her exactly what happened in the parking lot  Turns out that Angie, the long-dead 'girlfriend' of psychokiller Junior Rennie, mad a pass at Barbara and he rejected.  She got back at him by telling everyone he raped her, and that was more than enough for Junior and his buddies -- now all "Deputies" -- to ambush him and kick the crap out of him .. but not until he hurt them all  Only the (now dead) Chief's intervention saved his life ... and his escape was stopped by the Dome.

Some novels are this long and no longer.  But in Dome, we're barely a quarter of the way in .. and only now discovering the ugly little truth about Angie and the others.  Background/exposition like this is always a bitch to reveal, but King manages to make the lengthy flashback exciting and loathesome all at once ... and you know it's going to go badly from here on in.  Every one of the new cops in town hates his guts.

Pages 215 - 239: first part of This Is Not As Bad As It Gets: Clean, Fast, and Ugly

.
What Happened: Everybody runs to help the horribly injured Dinsmore boy.  Rusty Everett, the Physicain's Assisstant, tries to administer first aid; Barbie nearly gets arrested by the "Special Deputies" -- Randolph's bully-boys, who already hate him -- and only a bold bluff by Julia Shumway keeps him out of the can.  Everybody backs away, Scarecrow Jim invokes Lord of the Flies and sees just how bad this is going, while Barbie gets another call from Colonel Cox, most of which is hidden from us: the guvmint is planning something to try and bust the Dome.  And the aging but brave Doctor Haskell tries in vain to save young, stupid Rory ... and dies from a heart attack himself mere moments after losing the boy.

Here's the trick, horror fans, the one that the Saw and Friday the 13th and Texas Chainsaw remakers just don't get: the deaths have to matter.  You can play the blunt and theatrical "each death more colorful than the last" game for a long time, sure, but ultimately it's forgettable, it's just cheapjack grand guignol. (Notice how the numbers on the new Saws went in the toilet.  I think the blood-hungry public has lost interest in that particular spectacle, and there's no other meat on the bone.)  No: to sustain any real interest, even in the most grotesque situation, you actually have to have characters people care about, at least a little, before you know them off.

Okay, Rory Dinsmore was pretty much cannon fodder, and even SK isn't above that (the woman in the garden who was snipped in half by the dome, or the man who lost his arm and bled out: cannon fodder).  But he tries to make others 'real' even if he only have a few sentences and a few short strokes, like the woman in the Sanders woman in the airplane, whose daughter and husband figure prominently in future events, and like good ol' Doc Haskell here, the Wiz, who has all of one scene a few chapters back -- just enough for his sudden and heroic death to mean something to the reader.  It wasn't quite a GASP! moment, maybe, but it makes the bottom drop out of a second, too.  More of a "God DAMN it!" moment ... and all the more real for that.

Also a note about the writing itself.  King writes about big, splashy things: murderers, madmen, decapitations, bloody death -- but you'll rarely see his prose go purple.  He long ago learned to use the most common words and constructions to describe the most horrifying things, and it is exactly that plainness of language -- missed by so many other horror writers -- that makes his stuff so effective and vivid.  A perfect example of that in these couple of sentences describing the damage that Rory Dinsmore did to himself with that high-powered rifle ricochet:

He had hoped it wouldn't be as bad as he feared, but the socket was raw and empty, pouring blood.  And the brain behind the socket was hurt plenty.  The news was in how the remaining eye cocked senselessly skyward, bulging at nothing.

Check it out: exactly one adverb in "senselessly", and only a couple of carefully chosen and very simple adjectives: "raw" and "empty."  Nothing big, nothing overwrought ... but you can see this kid's mortal injury, and wince at its reality, after only, what, less than 50 words.

Wow.

A long chapter for this book.  More bad shit to come, I'm sure ...

Pages 197 - 211, the rest of Madness, Blindness, Astonishment of the Heart: Set 'Em Up, Knock 'Em Down

.
What happened?  Plenty.  The big party down by the Dinsmore Farm -- with bad hot dogs, prayer meetings, and protests signs -- actually goes all right for a while .. until the 'smart' Dinsmore boy decides to be the local hero by 'popping' the dome.  Easy: he'll just fire a high-powered rifle direclty into the invisible wall, at point-blank range.  Which does nothing but bounce the bullet back, blow out his eye and ram into his brain.  Rev. Batshit Coggins' prophetic vision is already fulfilled: a mad, blind child has led him ... though to what, we can only guess.

I wonder if this is just King being economical or whether he's learned a late-in-life lesson about complex storytelling.  In the Dark Tower books, and in The Stand and Salem's Lot, among many of the other, shorter works, he sets up ominous foreboding visionary crap all the time ... but then may take pages and pages, months and months, to make it pay off.  In Dome, he's moving much faster.  Like a prize-fighter in the early rounds, it's set 'em up, knock 'em down.  We see the Sheriff die, KA-POW, and two chapters later his wife is finding his secret files, and two chapters after that she'll be meeting Barbie.  We see Coggins' vision in one chapter, and in the next, that ugly vision is fulfill, badda-boom.  A much faster pace and quicker mini-payoffs that I recall in the past.

And to further, painfully extend the boxing metaphor: a rather nice feint-and-jab here: we REALLY expect there to be some kind of confrontation between Coggins' nutty religiousness and Scarecrow's activists, or at least between the townspeople and the army men just outside the wall ... but King lulls us into a false sense of security -- as secure as anything is in a King story -- by letting them-all get along quite well.  And just when you're starting to relax: here comes the kid on the ATV with the rifle.  Oh, shit.   All of which keeps you off-balance and achin' for more.

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Pages 177-197, Part Two, Yet More About Madness, Blindness, Astonishment of the Heart: Barbie and Julia, Sittin' In A Tree...

.
What happened? Stuck in between the other stuff in this busy little chapter: the connecting tissue between Rose, Julia, Barbie, and the dead Sheriff's wife ... the one who's discovered all the baaaad crap about the Rennies.  We can see a growing relationship between the editor and the ex-soldier; she's the only one who knows about his 'outside' connection, and she knows everything about the town.  Now they have to get the geiger counter out of the bomb shelter basement, and Brenda Perkins is their best shot for access.

I wonder how SK manages to keep all this straight in his head.  So many people, so many plots.  When I wrote the Big Ol' Long Book of my own (never again!), it was pages of outlines and doublling back just to keep it straight; King's making it doubly hard on himself by having all this happen simultaneously; we're not even 36 hours into this thing but everything's happening at once.  Which -- unlike, for instant, Salem's Lot -- gives us an even greater sense of the hothouse -- of people under pressure and most of them not responding well.

Still, I have to say the whole "let's get the geiger counter" thing feels a bit like the side-quest in a video game: "To unlock this door, you need the Jewel of Abinoggi, and you must travel to the Vault of WankyDoo in Cawdor to fight the dragon Mulch and return with it ..."

Let's see if the geiger counter ever appears, and if so if it matters one bit.