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

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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 ...