.
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!
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