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.

Pages 177 - 197, Part of Madness, Blindness, Astonishments of the Heart:: Behold the Oncoming Train

.
What happened?  We meet Joseph McClatchy, Scarecrow Joe, a pleasant young boy genius/hackmaster with a streak of rebellion, who decides to "Stick it to the Man" (do kids really still say that?  Mine sure don't.) by forming a protest at the edge of the barrier at 2:00 tomorrow.  And he's just the well-regarded cool young geek who can do it.  Unfortunately, the Rev. Batshit Crazy Coggins is having a Prayer Meeting at the selfsame place at the selfsame time with all his religious nutbars.  And when word of the impending colission of events reaches Romeo Burpee (God, that name!), the second richest man and biggest capitalist in town, what does he do?  Hell, he decides to throw a tent party at the site (and get rid of a lot of his second-rate and factory second merchandise at the same time).  This cannot be a good thing.  But it will be fun.

Man, SK is thinking big on this one.   We're rounding up on 200 pages into this baby -- close to 20% in -- and he's still introducing new characters.  Which makes one wonder how long some of these vividly drawn also-rans are going to last.  *sniff* do I smell early-onset bloodbath?  *sniff*?

Pages 157 - 173, the rest of Prayers: Good (?) God and Shiver Me Timbers

.

What happened?  We meet the Mills' two ministers up close and icky-personal: apparent Good Guy Piper Libby of the First Congregational (the Congo), who still ministers to her flock though she's lost faith or belief in God, apparently with the loss of her familiy some months before ... and batshit crazy Lester Coggins of Holy Redeemer, who flagellates himself and has visions.  Yipes.  Also: the dead good Sherriff Perkins' widow (and here we thought we'd seen the last of that line) snoops in his computer and finds that her heroic if somewhat dead husband had been gathering evidence on Big Jim Rennie all along, and was working with the Fed to drop the hammer on him when his heart unfortunately and unexpectedly 'sploded.  WOnder what she'll do with that?  And briefly seen nurse Rusty Everett goes home to his wife and kids, only to find one of them in some kind of seizure, babbling about Pumpkins and avoiding Hallowe'en.  Okay, here comes the spooky part...

Hmm.  "Piper Libby" is very close to "Piper Laurie," the name of the actress who played Carrie's (Sissy Spacek's) religiously batshit crazy Mom in the movie version o Carrie some years back.  (John Travolta and Sissy Spacek.  Hard to even think of them in the same sentence these days.)  This time, her near-namesake in the sane Bible-thumper, while a close relative of Carrie's Mom is carryin' on just down the road.

King is clearly split on the positive nature of Christianity, though very clear on its great power.  He's had good guys -- literally world-savers -- as priests in Salem's Lot and the Gunslinger series; non-aligned but powerful Christers are wizard-level do-gooders in The Stand, but then Carrie's Mom and many others have used that same power for eeeeevil ends as well.  Here, he's standing 'em up right next to each other: Congo vs. the Redeemer.  And now we've got a second set of forebodinational doin's: Rusty's little boy is having convulsions about the Great Pumpking and Hallowe'en, The Right Batshit Rev. Coggins has been envisionated to look for "the blinded one who has gone mad."  Clearly weird-ass crapola is happening at the psychic as well as the physical level here.

And think about it: we're not even 24 hours into this disaster.

Pages 143 - 156, part of Prayers: Barbie Gets Goin'

.
Not much time to read today -- don't ask -- but what little I got through is chock full of ominous-ness.

What happened? Barbie, with Editor Shumway in tow, goes to a quiet part of the Dome barrier and sees the whole damn place surrounded by Special Forces soldier-types who won't even look him in the eye.  He has his long talk with Colonel Cox, who assures him -- half-believably -- that nobody knows WHAT the hell this thing is, it's not a government conspiracy (uh-HUH), and it's not really a Dome at all: it's a barrier that goes up about five miles and down probably just as far; that it lets in a little water and most air, but nothin' else, and that it exactly conforms to the entirely man-made City Limits of Chester's Mill.  And since Barbie -- who, it turns out, is a recently resigned Special Forces Search-and-Destroy Black Ops kind'a guy -- is their 'inside man,' it's up to him to find the possible 'generator' of the field ... somewhere in the Mill.

Interesting character, Barbie, and not exactly like the normal SK "normal man thrust into heroism" that we've seen in the other Big Books.  This guy is prepared, and though he seems weary of all the intrigue and challenge, he's not entirely reluctant.  And there's no question is capable.

Lot of exposition here, a lot of scene-setting, and done, as usual, swiftly and elegantly.  DAMN, I wish I could write like this...

Pages 113 - 139, The Good of the People, the Good of the Town

.
What happened? Big Jim Rennie fully consolidates his power, and gives bullyboy Randolph permission to hire up a bunch of other bullyboys and "provisional police."  This does not bode well. Meanwhile, editor Julia Shumway gets a call from the Oustide World -- from Colonel Jim Cox, the mysterious high-ranking official Dale Barbara was trying to get word to.  Captain Dale Barbara, as it happens.  She's supposed to hook them up, phone-wise.  And she agrees, smart cookie that she is.  We don't see Barbie in this section, but we do see migraine mass murderer Junior Rennie ... just long enough for him to have a sweet, unifying moment with his Dad when Pop makes him a friggin' cop.  Oh, happy day.

So here we are: somebody finally calls it "The Dome."  And we're off to the races.

You can see the Good Guy / Bad Guy factions shaping up, Stand-like already.  Barbie, Rose, Julia (more to come) on the Good Side, Big Jim, Chief Randolph and obviously Junior on the Bad Side.  But interestingly, outside of the Dome's appearance itself, not a single supernatural element to be seen.  This could easily be some kind of technology gone mad, not somebody casting Dome Spells in their underground Wiccan lair.

One other thing that's differentiating this book from most other Kings: it's placed very much in the real world c. 2009.  The "Event" is on CNN, at least at first.  The President -- implied to be Obama -- is making a national address about it.  The Army is lining up outside, pushing the media back.  None  of the other 'real world' books placed in Castle Rock or Derry ever 'broke out' of their small-town horror onto the wider stage.  It will be interesting to see how far King takes that, or whether his government-paranoia (i.e., the government lab in The Stand that built Captain Trips, or the ubiquitous, evil Shop that shows up in Firestarter and so many other places) just has the guvmint clamp down on the whole secret and makes the world go away.  The Feds alrealy clearly control outside access to cell phone and the internet.  Who knows what'll come next?

Pages 87 - 109, We All Support the Team: How to Torture your Bratz

 .
What happened?  Barbie gives up his exploration and goes back to work at the diner, Sweebriar Rose.  We see his deep and abiding friendship with Rose Twitchell, the owner.  (She's a few years too old for him, but we can see: something special here, and these are the good guys.)  Meanwhile, tumorescent nutboy Junior Rennie -- son of the Big Man in Town -- not only seems to be getting away with killing Angie, but he actually manages to steal some money from his dad's secret lockbox AND return to the scene of the crime ... where he proceed to be kill Angie's best friend Dodee, who come's by for comfort.  (Dodee's mom was in the plane that crashed against the dome back on Page 3.)  We also meet Julia Shumway, editor of the local paper and another apprent Good Guy.  (Both the Sanders family and the Sweebriar Rose staff are suffering pretty badly here, and we've barely passed page 100 ...)

In between all the truly horrific stuff, SK cements characters into place with small, often nasty details (how many times have I already said this?).  This time around, we get a clear sense of who/what the just-now-deceased Dodee, was really like.  She's the kind of strange, loser-ish girls who likes to smoke dope, drink on the sly, and then play (even as a young adult by taking Bratz dolls and finding new and interesting ways to torture and destroy them.  Hell, her friend Samantha Bushey (whom we haven't met yet) actually buys MORE Bratz dolls on eBay so they'll have EXTRAS to mutilate.  Now why, exactly, is this so creepy?  Little boys do it to GI Joes all the time, and we accept it -- mostly as just boyish delight in symbolic violence (though think about that REALLY odd little kid in Toy Story 1, and the dolls he mutilated.  Ewww...).  Little girls do it, and it's sick.  (What was the book or movie in which the female lead's horrible sister is illustrated as a TOTAL BITCH because she used to steal her sister's Barbies and cut off their hair?  Help me out here.)  Worse, big girls keep doing it long after they should have stopped, and it's just plain icky.

Come to think of it, there are lots of behaviors that we see in children as experimental, temporary, generally tolerable, but in adults are seen as damn near psychotic.

Gosh, I love the kids, don't you?

Pages 65 - 84, Clustermug: GASP!

I could be wrong about this, but I believe that modern horror is the only genre of popular literature that owes its existence to the invention of film.  Yes, yes, I know Dracula and Frankenstein both predate the modern era, even predate generally available still photography, and ghost stories are as old as the first campfire.  But I'm talking modern horror -- the stuff you see in the section marked HORROR at the local bookstore.  The vast majority of those books -- both good and bad -- have a 'cinematic' quality to them that is unique.

I can't think of another genre or subgenre of fiction that tries to make the reader do exactly what a movie does.  Mainstream fiction is far deeper; mysteries more complex and leisurely, science fiction -- until quite recently -- more extravagant and involved, even romances frequently more internalized that film.  And none of them work so hard to trigger exactly the same reactions as film.  Horror books-- just like horror movies -- try to make you JUMP in surprise, to shiver in anticipation or revulsion, to GASP! at something entirely unexpected.  I think Stephen King became as impossibly successful as he did as early as he did because his books grow almost entirely from that cinematic tradition: reading almost any of them is exactly like watching a good horror movie,with comparable levels of depth, pacing, and imagery.  (Which makes one wonder wy so few of King's horror novels have been made into decent films ... but that's a mystery for another day.)

Even now, even when we think we know precisely what to expect from SK, he can still pull of that cinematic effect like nobody else.  We 're not talking about a scene that simply makes us feel icky, or creepy; we're not talking nameless dread or an overwhelming sense of foreboding.  We're talking surprise, we're talking startlement, if there is such a word.  We're talking GASP!  

He does it right here, in the charmingly named section called Clustermug, by having a pacemaker blow up in a good man's chest -- just like that, KA-POW!  He does it so quicklky, so unexpectedly, and so cinematically, that you -- I -- actually GASPED! and when "Jeeesus!"

How does he DO that?

Anyway, Clustermug moves us along a bit farther: Dale Barbera continues to explore the edges of the barrier, and we learn a bit more about him.  He's not quite the hapless drifter we've been led to believe; seems he a fairly competent (and recent) ex-soldier with some connections.  We meet Rusty Everett, a  nurse, and Ron Haskell, a doctor at the one-and-only hospital inside the Dome.  Decent guys.  And now that Good Sherriff Perkins is dead (see KA-POW, above), his surly and bullyish second in command is now in charge.  And we know how much King likes cops and those in positions of authority (just as we see Big Jim Rennie already shaping up into one of those highly dangerous tinpot smalltown dictatator types.  'Ware, 'ware!)

Pages 46 - 62, Lotta Dead Birds: THAT'S how you do it, right THERE

.
Plotwise: people are still whacking into the invisible wall, Barbie and his 'outside' compantion begin to explore it (and begin to cop to what we already know: it doesn't end), and crazy killer Junior Rennie goes home to an empty house.

Observationally: anybody out there want to learn how to write a horror novel?  Or suspense, thriller, action-adventure, ANY of those related genres?  Read this piece.  Even JUST this piece, without knowing anyting else.  My GOD, can this guy tell a story.  And catch you completely unawares when you least expect it.  Yeah, I said, all spoilers no secrets, but if by some small change you HAVEN'T read this section yet, read it before you finish this. It's important.

I'll wait here.

There.  You're back.

Look: that double-take, feint-and-punch he does with the car crashs here is absolutely CLASSIC stuff.  First we get the Bickersons, right up to the edge of a life-changing decision, that is so realistic and painful in itself, with no supernatural stuff attached, that you really ARE caught unawares when they crash headlong into the barrier.  And that's not enough?  We get a couple of kindly, elderly nurses who stop BEFORE the dome, and help the one surviving member of the couple (more detail magic here: the injured woman's scalp hanging down in a flap on the side of her head.  Gah!) ... only to load her into their car, put it in gear and DRIVE HEADLONE INTO THE BARRIER THEMSELVES.  Even if you see THIS one coming, there's barely time to scream, "No! Don't do it! NO!" before it's all over and the injured girl AND one of the nurses is done for.

Damn.  While he's still doing exposition with one hand, and kicking the Junio Rennie subplot along a bit, he STILL manages to deliver and actual, physical SHOCK to even the most jaded reader.

I remain in love with this guy.  Just can't help it.

Pages 31 - 43, Highways and Byways: Yes, we know, get ON with it!!

.
This is the problem with advertising and promotion.  And normally the problem with dust jacket and cover blurbs, though UTD doesn't have those (like SK needs 'em, eh?).  Still: 92.5 per cent of the readers, surveys show, already know the basic premise of the mega-epic: small New England Town wakes up one day under a perfectly transparent, perfect impenetrable dome.  And then the fun starts.

Still, King can't assume that his Constant Reader (more on that name one day) does know even that, so early on -- after the rock'em, sock'em plane crash opening and Junior's murder spree -- he really has to slow down a bit and do the "gosh, wow, lookee there, a damn WALL!" chapter.  He does it well enough -- of course -- and we learn more about Barbie, Dale Barbara,  And yes, there is one limb-severing in the midst of it all, just to keep things interesting (I mean, what's the poin of ten pages of King without at least one act of bloody violence?  Really, now?)

Still: one can't help but feel there is going to be more ground-laying that's entirely appropriate to the book itself -- essential, in fact -- and totally unnecessary for the vast majority that are -- at this point, anyway -- just a bit ahead of him.

But that won't last long, will it?  It never does...

Pages 23 - 27: Yeah, he really kills her. Like, totally.

.
It's all int he details, people, the details. Junoir's complete and excuciatingly detailed beating-to-death of Angie (we hardly knew ye!) is as effective as it is -- which is pretty darn -- because of the details that SK kicks in.  Not the turn of phrase, not the insight, but the tiny bits that stick with you, like the spray of refrigerator magnets that spray across the room when he bangs her against the Coldspot.  That's all I'll remember: the spray of fridge magnets.  Why is that? What does that work so bloody (literally) well?

And thaf's the plot update: yeah, he kills her for sure, and then leaves her there, blood and all, still massively disoriented by the tumor-induced migraine.  We leave him wandering across the town square, and her still dead.  One must wonder, given all the dome-ish things happening along the edge of town (in all directions), how long it will be before anyone discover poor Angie's body.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about the plot?

.
An excellent point.  I guess I have to pause occasionally to actaully talk about the friggin' STORY, don't I?

First: a map AND a cast of characters list.  You gotta love that.  I don't think he's done a map and cast since, what, Salem's Lot?  This is serious stuff.

The Prologue, THE AIRPLANE AND THE WOODCHUCK is easy enough: small two-person aircraft is flying over the charming little town of Chester's Mill, Maine, when POP, an invisible forcefield snaps silently into place right in front of them (or through them,, it'shard to tell), and the plane shatters.  On the ground, drectly below, a self-satisfied woodchuck is in exactly the wrong place at the wrong instant and SHTUP!, his north and south sections are sliced right through.

In BARBIE, we meet a cheerful drifter named Barbie -- aguy, LAST name Barbie -- strolling out of town after a vaguely referred-to affair with a local gal and a beating in the parking lot.  Glad to put the town behind him ... and just happens to be on the wrong side of the invisible line when the Dome plinks into place (we know it's a dome only because -- well, hell, it's the name of the book, and even if there aren't any cover blurbs, and there aren't, the prepublicity tells us that much, at least.)  Barbie sees the plane hit the invisible wall.  He sees the woodchuck split in to.  He sees a would-be rescuer on the far side of the barrier smash headlong into the invisible wal and break hiw nose for his trouble.  And we leave him running full-tilt boogie back towards the twon he so recetnly, and quite hapily, abandoned.

JUNIOR AND ANGIE: Junior is one of the locals who did the beating; he also suffers from nasty migraines, and one's coming on now.  Angie is Angie McCain, a local waitress, who's a lifelong friend of Junior's (and girlfriend to a guy named Frankie, we haven't met yet.)  She's jsut getting out of the shower when Junior, trying to ward off a migraine, knocks on her door.  She answers, expecting her boyfriend ... and get Junior instead.  Who proceed to bust in and beat the hell out of her.

Junior's headaches aren't just migraines.  He's got himself a brain tumor and it's making him do some very bad things, all of a sudden.

Which bings us to Page 23, as the crazed and violent Junior shoves the terrorized Angie into the sunlit kitchen.,,,

Junior screamed again.  This time not with rage, but pain.

Ya gotta love this book already.

Pages 9 - 23: Fear the Familiar

.
This has always been one big thing that SK can do and others can only attempt: he can scare the crap out of us in broad daylight.  He does it by making the familiar, the things we can touch, turn against us in the most realistic way.

This began all the way back in Carrie, his very first.  The opening scene -- Carrie being tormented by her fellow female students, pelting the terrified girl in the shower with tampons and chanting "Plug it up, Plug it up!"  The fear and horror we experienced wasn't about gray-skinned monsters with flat heads and rivets, or vampires with bad European accents and painted-on widow's-peaks.  These are about the things that really scare us: mob rule and public torment in Carrie, the weird old stranger who lives  in down the block in Salem's Lot, dying suddenly and inexplicably from something simple, something as common as the cold ("I TOLD You I Was Sick!") in The Stand...

And now, here, a couple of new ones show up, right at the beginning of the Big New Book.  There's the headache that comes on, so hard and fast it's like getting hit by the car.  It's nothing, the doctor says, Just a headache.  You'll be fine.  But that voice in the back of your aching head says, What if it's not?  What if it's someting awful?  What if I'm really sick, what if  there's a huge hairy TUMOR swelLing in my brain?  That really terrifies us, much more than any widow's peak, and it's right here, right on Page 22.

This is why we love this guy.  Because he knows was scares us, the real things that scare us, and he just will not let them pass.

Pages 3-5: Blissful Manipulation

 
Damn, but he's diving right in this time.

Let's be honest: there have been times when King has strolled into the story, particularly with some of his longer books.  The writing on the leisurely ones is just as compelling as ever, but one some of 'em -- I'm thinking Duma Key most recently -- you look up after Page 50 and realize that huh, not a hell of a lot has happened yet.

Not this time.  No sirree.  One mid-air plane crash and the severing of a friendly woodland creaure, all in the first two pages.  And then ...

"Their lives had another forty second to run."

This is why the people who hate Stephen King hate Stephen King.  This kind of pulpish, intrusive authorial device is something that writers are coached away from all the damn time.  And it's why King himself can't get no respect -- because the Big Time Critics who bestow that respect are subtle people, who like their stories whispered, who run from the campfire and don't like to be reminded that it's all blissful manipulation, that storytelling isn't all subtlety and ambiguity and the clever turn of phrase. Sometimes it is about The Golden Arm and the turn of the clock and BOO!

King makes hamhanded foreshadowing like this work -- partly because he creates a couple of characters that seem both real and care-worthy with just a few deft strokes, in half a dozen short paragraphs.  They don't seem like cannon fodder destined to die in the first scene ... even though that's exactly waht they are.  And it works because he zips past that selfsame manipulation fast, and pays off even faster.  The "forty seconds" is mentioned in the middle of the second page. The crash and severance happen in the next page and half, and then bam, we're out. Barely forty seconds has passed in realy time as well as book time, and now, suddenly, scarily, we're at the end of prologue, and it's already getting weird.

Stongest, strangest opening for an SK novel since I don't remember when.  And I couldn't be happier about it.

Here we goooo.....

How Weird Am I? Very, Yes, Thank You.

 
I actually did show up at Borders mere minutes after The Book was put on the shelves.  One of the first copiesout the door, they told me.

Thirty-five bucks.  Thirty-five bucks, though anybody in the world who every actually pays that much for it is outta their minds.  You can get it for ten bucks online, if you're looking.  You can hike on over to Walmart to do almost as well.  Even here at Borders, they're giving 40% off.

But me, I'm crafty.  I pull out ten dollas' worth of "Bordrs Bucks" because my family has spent over $150 at the chain in September alone (there are advantages with having reading daughters and a teacher-wife. Not many, but this is one.)  So bang, discount, and bang Borders bucks, and suddenly I'm paying like $12, including tax, for this monumental sucker.  And I feel good. 

Dear Stephen:  I know you have a few bucks already, and we're a little short here at Casa de la Primo e Segundo Hipoteca, so I'm hoping you'll understand why I'm undercutting your profit as well as the distributor and book store.  Next time I'll pay full price.  No, really I will.  I swear.

So: $12 out, and UTD in my hands, thick and heavy as a family Bible.  And damn that feels good.

And yet .. I will not read it yet.  Not yet.  Busy day today, probably won't be time even for a comfortable crap until way late in the day.  So I'll just carry it around.  Tuck it under my arm  and sho off my pristine copy to ealous friends, who seem oddly unimpressed.

This is like good sex.  It's all in the foreplay ...

I will do this. I will go Under the Dome.

.
I'm a sick, sick puppy.  Yes, I am.

I've been waiting quite a while for the new King novel -- the BIG novel, the Salem's Lot / The Stand / The Shining kind'a novel,and Under the Dome seemed to fit the bill.  And now I just have to read it.  I'll snatch it from the book store the day it comes out.  No amazon buy on this one -- it would take days, days, to get here, and I just can't have that.  No: I want to be the guy who rips it out of the retail clerk's hands, Harry Potter-like, when they're building the displal just inside the door. 

One thousand seventy-two pages.  No reprints, no short stories, all book, baby.  And mine, all mine.

But ...

I've been here before.  I know that taking on a book like this, in the midst of an actual life, is a major undertaking.

I'm 55 years old. I have a 'career,' a family, volunteer work, chores.  I can't do what I did when SL or TSt or TSh came out, and just lock myself in my room and read it until my eyes are burning, sleep with my head in the pizza box, and then do it agian until I'm done.

No, this is a commitment.  This is like taking on a new girlfriend and hiding it from my wife.  So this time around, I'm going to chronicle my day-to-day foray into The Big Book, starting ... now.