Under the Dome Spoiler Discussion

I'm a little disappointed with Big Jim Rennie's demise. Not that he didn't deserve what he got and it was obvious through the book that his heart was bound to give it up at some point.
But I was really hoping that he would be dragged out in the end and made an example of. That the big fish in the little pond would have to face everyone he tried to destroy and finally get the public disgrace he deserved.

I also read that the symbol on the device is also described in IT. Anyone have a copy of the book that can confirm this?

Finally finished this. Best thing King has written in at least a decade. It had a great premise, some likable heroes and some truly hateful villians.

The best thing about it? No bullshit ties to the Dark Tower verse.

Best thing King's written since 'It'.

He was taken by his God...how is THAT NOT perfect?

King didn't stick the landing on this one.

I'd say his best since Desperation. It had great pacing, and was so much better than the "Simpson Movie knock-off" I thought it would be.

I also would have enjoyed seeing Big Jim get some comeuppance.

I kind of thought that Rennie was somehow going to be stuck in that bomb shelter for years after the Dome was lifted and the entire region condemned. He'd be reduced to gnawing off pieces of his deputy for survival, more animal than human.

Anyone bothered by the fact that SOUND travelled so easily through the dome?
It really bugged me at the beginning of the book, but by the time I got about a third of the way through I actually began to think it was a brilliant conceipt.

Made the 'alienness' of the dome much more convincing.

The one thing missing from the ending? Barbie reunited with that guy on the other side of the Dome from the beginning. That could have been a prime John McClane/Sgt Powell moment!

'Seadogs' aka Paul Gendron?
Yeah, his reappearace would of worked.

My review: http://chud.com/articles/articles/22...OME/Page1.html

The more I think about it the more I'm annoyed with the aliens. I really think King should have just left the Dome ambiguous; if he wanted it lifted at the end he should have just lifted it. It's not so much the fact that it's aliens that bothers me, it's that it's alien kids and that nobody thinks to fucking ASK them to lift the dome until the town is blown up?

hmm...

I haven't read anything new from King in over a decade, but this one is hardly a classic.

Most of the characters feel regurgitated from the same old King trope factory. And given the size of the novel, its a real wasted opportunity. The black and white of the two camps was far too simplistic and an easy way out.

It would have been far more compelling if both sides within the dome had been injected with some grey... what if the civilians panicked and did riot for food (as oppossed to Big Jim's over manipulation of the events within the dome)?

I don't think, especially given the size, I will be recommending this to anyone soon.

I don't mind the aliens. What bugs me is the 800 pages he spent setting up rival camps (power on one side, stacking evidence on the other) only to have the whole town blow up.

Why even come up with that Vader file and have people die for it if it doesn't matter? Why put your hero in jail for half the book? Instead of having a whole town see the error of their ways, they just die, and no one really learns anything (the people who do were pretty good to begin with).

Also, the smart kid wasn't all that smart.

Having read "It" an unhealthy number of times, I can confirm the symbol is in that novel, as well. It's the symbol painted on the door of It's lair beneath Derry. Each of the Losers see it as something different: Bill sees it as a toy sailboat; Ben sees it as mummy wrappings; etc. I don't necessarily there's any connection between "Dome" and "It", however.

The problem I had with the Vader file was that a big deal was made of giving a copy to someone to keep it safe when the town still had internet access - they could have emailed it to anyone they wanted.

That certainly fits the retard-tech theme. I think King has a sub-grandpa awareness of what computers do. Imagine how many viruses he got before EW magazine finally just bought him a Mac.

Fuck! I'm pissed off at this book!

Howbout the priest guy: he grows a conscience, God or "Stephen King Providence" or whatever TELLS him to fess up, which leads to his death, which leads what? the Barbie frame? The evidence (baseball imprint in head) doesn't really exonerate Barbie. The people who find it already believe he's innocent. The proof they gather is never used.

The proof in the Vader file is never used, either (someone died for it; we wait the whole book for the fucking dog to find it [aided by a ghost BTW], while simultaneously waiting for the lady to clean up so she'll be able to use it; then she just dies and the file becomes a wasted trust exercise for two sociopaths we know will eventually kill each other). This sort of thing would make sense in a novel with a King Lear-like nihilistic through-line. But providence exists in this book. It's just, what, not very strong or something?

Why would a kid have a vision of the golden baseball imprint? Nothing comes of it. Why do kids have visions of burning Halloween stuff if no one acts on it or gets saved by it in any way? How different would the book be if non of the kids had any visions? None different!

Why does Barbie and Rusty seemingly meet each other for the first time twice (1st at the BBQ thing, 2nd when Barbie gets the Geiger counter)?

When they succeed at their little computer broadcast, Norrie Calvert kisses Benny Drake. Later Joe hopes she'll kiss HIM AGAIN. She never kissed him the first time! I know both boys like her, but I think King got them mixed up.

And Devin's right. Why is this stupid book set in the future? I thought it was just an allegorical thing, but the fictional sequel show to Lost is too specific a "in the future" kind of thing for allegory. (BTW what was that stupid show called? Anyone remember? King talking about Lost at all is like having Henry IV talk about Henry V. He also references one of his own books as character reading material doesn't he?)

So anyway...sorry I went nuts.

The Hunted Ones? Something like that, anyway.

Ha! I started a post just like this. It's my biggest complaint with "Dome". Are you sure? There's a lot of hand holding and hugging and kissing between Benny, Norrie and Scarecrow Joe.
I think it was called "The Hunted Ones".

Re: the 2014 setting--the only thing that makes sense to me is that he's planning on writing further books using the alien creatures, and he wants to set them in a pre-Dome world (as I think we can assume that the Dome incident would serve to "out" the aliens' existence).

I went back and confirmed that she kisses Benny Drake. It's harder to find the page where something didn't happen, but I have no memory of her and Joe kissing once for there to be this 2nd time he hopes for. If it happened off-stage that's fine, why include the easily confusing on-stage kiss between her and Benny? It's easy unclear writing or lazy drafting (and this novel REALLY feels like a 2nd draft).

I don't mean to be a dick (seriously) but it's intriguing how many readers didn't catch that it was set in the future. The LOST sequel show, the old Obama re-election sticker on the old professor's car, the scene where they're discussing '11 and '12 model cars - the timeframe isn't made a big deal, but it's definitely not hidden.

That's what we call not reading for content. How could someone miss that the story is set in the near future?!?

Strange, I could be wrong, but I believe there's a scene towards the end where Joe seizes the opportunity to plant a quick kiss on Norrie and then thinks about how much he'd like to do it again.

Oh, and not to kick off a round of fantasy casting (although I kind of dig it), but I couldn't help picturing this guy as Big Jim Rennie:

I'm sure you're right. The whole thing is a mess, though.

Something else that I found ultra bizarre: towards the end of the novel, Joe tells his fellow rebels he may have some ideas about stopping the dome projector. Nothing is ever mentioned about these supposed ideas again. While I understand the explosion intervened, I suspect Joe's ideas might have been in the (apparently) 1,000 or so pages edited out of King's original draft. Just weird, in my opinion.

The book's a mess. I'm curious how the TV version will handle the massively anticlimactic ending - you have Barbie in prison for half the running time, they break him out and then... he does nothing.

Not true. He does Julia Shumway (who is, in my head, played by the lovely Elizabeth Mitchell).

Just finished this. It was a page-turner for most of it's 1,000+ pages but ultimately forgettable. It felt rushed and probably could have used some additional editing to address a handful of continuity errors, like the kissing thing above (and another case involving Rusty that I can't recall at the moment, but it had me thinking what??).

How did they have internet and... I guess cable (assuming it wasn't over the air) but electricity had been cut off? Sure they could've been using cellular networks but they couldn't even use cell phones to dial out. The internet thing just felt clunky and served no purpose really - King would've been better off saying net access was kaput too. The blank CD thing cracked me up too. Sweet birthday gift.

Really dug the scenes where the Dome first drops and the ensuing chaos.

I wasn't crazy about the ending. Rennie's demise was alright but I really wanted a final standoff between him and Barbie (and the others). It just felt a little lazy, the way it wrapped up.

As mentioned, the VADER file felt like a waste of time, the premonitions, etc. All of it worked and worked well until you realize it was of little or no importance.

Just finished it, and wanted to add my own little nitpick: The skateboarding "lingo" makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

For all the nitpicks, which are plentiful, I enjoyed reading this a hell of a lot. It moved like a goddamn rocket sled. It didn't read so much like classic King to me, but rather like cokefiend King, who wrote Cujo and the Tommyknockers. But it was much better than those. Best in a while? Yeah, probably since Desperation. In fact, good enough to put me back on the King bandwagon, likely until he dies.

Speaking of Tommyknockers, he did the giant conflagration at the end there too, as well as aliens. Except there it was alien ghosts instead of alien children. But Tommyknockers was one of the worst things he wrote, so it all compares pretty well.

Honestly, the device that makes this book is Jim Rennie. There's some strong secondary villains in this, but Rennie seems to be every single thing King hates about America distilled into pretty much the best antagonist King's had since Annie Wilkes. While reading it, there was only one person I could imagine pulling it off in live action:

He would be a good choice, Arjen, but I had this guy in mind as I was reading.

My Big Jim Rennie was Stephen Root. I'd really love to see what he could do with it.

This did not bother me. Plot-wise I guess it was only a MacGuffin, but I didn't feel enraged that it led "nowhere." As for tying into the providence theme: I guess you could say it matches into the "there are higher beings, and they're playing with us!" viewpoint.

This is nothing. The ending to DARK TOWER reads like he spit it out in twenty minutes. Ridiculous short cuts in writing. Not just in the events, but in the actual prose.


All 1,000 pages over and done, all nitpicks and plot holes considered, I liked this one a lot. Most entertaining in decades. Never once does it slog, like many of his books. He's wanted to write his own LORD OF THE FLIES for a while, and this is definitely his, right down to the dictator, crazy right-hand man, and apocalyptic inferno. How it remains interesting over so many pages is incredible. King's definitely the master of pacing and suspense.

The characters are indeed pretty flat. Big Jim is cartoonish for the entire book (but by the third or fourth hundredth page I was rolling with it.)

The "have pity on us!" ending is cheesy, but 'Twilight Zone' had plenty of similar endings. I laughed when the sky was blue, the grass green, and here comes Horace the Corgi, jumping into your arms and licking your face! "Oh, what a wonderful world!"

Just finished it. I still need to let a lot of my thoughts distill a bit, but I had to mention how much I loved what King did with Andy Sanders, especially when you realize how much Sanders is W to Rennie's Cheney. What better disdain for King to show for W then to reduce him to a sad puppet of a man, turned into a psychotic tweeker? Also, and this is coming from someone who has read probably 95% of King's output, has there ever been a bleaker treatment of his own characters. I thought Needful Things was King's way of destroying Castle Rock once and for all (though he came back to it) in admittedly sloppy but stern fashion, but DAMN did he take out some anger on the residents of Chesters Mill. I thought it lent some creedence to the ending, actually, when you consider the alien is pretty much King himself. He knows his own penchant for setting up his characters for certain disaster like a cruel kid with an ant farm and a magnifying glass. After putting them through as much hell as possible, he makes the few remaining ants beg him for relief.

Lastly, for now, I can't remember the last antagonist that I read that irritated the piss out of me more than Rennie. That's not a complaint, a compliment actually, because man I fucking hated Rennie. I mean, Randall Flagg may have been a representation of pure evil, but at least he wasn't a self righteous prick.

I also just finished this and wanted to chime in. I can't argue about what everyone else has been saying but the nitpicks didn't really bother me. The only thing that really did rub me the wrong way was the aformentioned aliens as children behind it all. An ambiguous reason would have been more satisfying. And I could have gotten a denoument after the Dome came up. The VADER file and all the shenanigans going on in the town not getting any resolution didn't really bother me much either. I just saw it all as a way to get you so pissed that Rennie doesn't get his comeuppance in public but alone. All of the backfighting didn't really matter because everyone was tied up in that instead of worrying about the real threat (the Dome). The Chef and Sanders bomb going off was just a giant exclamation point that none of it mattered in the long run.

Just finished reading it today. I really enjoyed it, and while the book isn't perfect, I was pleased to see that it was such a quick read. A few random thoughts:

- I think the books biggest strength is Big Jim Rennie. It got to the point where I began to really hate him and hoped someone would put a stop to him. I'm glad King is still able to make characters you can root for and against. One of King's best villains, and there isn't a supernatural element to him. His demise wasn't as satisfying as I would have liked or expected, though.

- I'll agree that the characters don't quite sing the way other King protagonists do. Barbie is a bit bland as a character. I feel he is sort of like Jack Sawyer in Black House, in that he is too perfect as a person. I don't need him to be a recovering alcoholic or have family problems, but he seems to take everything in stride. I guess we are supposed to chalk that up to him being a former soldier, but the story misses some drama by always having him be on top of things.

- Junior's death seemed like it came too quickly in the book. By the time he is killed, he's no longer himself, and I felt the scene lost impact because of that.

- I felt there were too many characters to keep track of. I found that they all had similar sounding names, (or names starting with the same first initial), or similar sounding last names. So there were times in the book when a character would make an appearance and I wouldn't immediately remember who they were.

- I also felt there were a bit too many archetypes in the story. The town drunk, the incompetent police officer, the town gossip, the plucky teenager. I think the scariest aspect of the story was the townspeople themselves. Living in a small town where "accidents" can happen. Gives me the creeps.

- For some reason, King isn't quite able to write convincing child characters anymore. These always sound like how an older person thinks kids sound like. What was up with all the fist bumping (especially in a predominately white town)?

- I wished more of the characters considered the idea of assassinating Rennie. I know Andrea was about to make an attempt, but I would have liked to have seen a scene where the heroes of the story weighed their options, and someone suggest they kill him. Since they all know that he is the one in power, why not try to take him out? I know they're just regular citizens but seeing as how they knew he had killed Brenda Perkins, and suspected he had killed Reverend Coggins, in addition to framing Barbie and putting Rusty in jail, I think they should have at least tried to come up with a plan.

- My favourite scene of the book is Rennie and Cox's telephone conversation where Cox tells Rennie just how they are going to make him look to the media. I thought it was kind of cool how Rennie was becoming a sort of dictator (or Jim Jones).

- I think I would have preferred no aliens being involved in the story. The story was told mostly realistically, and I think it might have been better had the dome never been explained. Or, if aliens had to be the ones responsible, make it clear that they had put up the dome as an experiment. At the end of the day, we still don't know anything about them.

- Like most King books, the story ends anticlimactically. While reading, I kept wondering how he could possibly wrap the story up. And then the final 100 pages or so just come to a halt, with not enough closure for some of these characters. It just ends too abruptly.

- One last nitpick, but while I got a kick out of the Lost references, it kind of bugs me that Rusty would remember such a specific quote from the show ("Do not mistake coincidence for fate), yet not only misattributed the quote to the wrong character, but didn't even remember the name of the character he was placing the quote with.

You know what would've been a very gutsy (if utterly nihilistic) ending? The town blows up, the people on the outside find some way to penetrate the dome and search the wreckage to find one lone survivor... Big Jim Rennie. Yeah, everyone would walk away pissed but it feels true to the spirit of the thing. The novel is pessimistic in a lot of ways and that feels like the natural conclusion.

I can appreciate the balls to go that way, but I would have hurt my hand punching the book. King is a populist more than ever these days, and my bet is the days when he ends a book in a seriously bad way (Cujo, Pet Semetary) are probably over now. There's always the short stories.

I am on disc 5 of 30 and OMG these rednecks are pissing me off. How can someone say, a punk kid no less, "There is no more constitution" in a town in America and not immediately get called a fascist? 'The Mill' is like a town full of teabaggers, and were it not fiction it would be enough to make me give up on the MRP* and leave Maine to it's own devices

*My MASSACHUSETTS RECLAMATION PROJECT is where the lands of Maine would be reclaimed by Massachusetts and the USA would move to a single body (with representation based on population) of congress ensuring that redneck America does not somehow gain influence because New England lost two senators when Maine was disolved. Support the MRP today and help bring Massachusetts back to what the founders envisioned!

I can't believe it, it's the dome addled tea baggers VS Barack Obama's hand picked bubble baron! This shaping up to be quite a tale

I am on disc #8 now and my god, I can tell you that no town in Western Massachusetts would empower a bunch of psycopaths just because they happened to be handy with a gun. Our civic leader's first thoughts in a crisis would not be to balloon the police force, and if we had to do so we'd choose well known and well liked members of the community (who could command respect), not brain tumor addled killers.

Is anyone here from Maine? Is this really how you'd conduct yourselves in a dome attack?? I am finding this book pretty tough to take. At least in the Stand people waited for the world to end before going looney. At the first sign of a dome related incursion Maine tosses the constitution out the window! Obama is writing these Maine-iacs hand signed letters calling on them to rise to the occasion as human beings and American citizens and they're still on the verge of going full DOOMSDAY. I am confounded by these developments, confounded to no end

OMG, the fascists just called some Massachusetts citizens "Mass-holes" and assaulted them and then stole their marijuana. At this point I won't be satisfied till the book ends with Junior getting eaten by that demonic laundry machine

I am currently up late and listening to disc 15. I can't help but be pissed at Barbi. I mean seriously, he has done VERY little to confront Big Jim or protect his own butt. He complains that people don't see the truth about big Jim, but right from the beginning he just kept his mouth shut and let him suck up all the power. This is New England damnit. He should have questioned Jim and his justifications for his power grab right from moment one, and done it in public in front of a crowd. He should have said, "Folks, the President has called on me, a trained army vet, to lead you, Jim Renny is a cars salesman and second selectman, this is a national security issue". At the very least, he'd have gotten some people to listen to him and could have blocked Renny at every turn. Instead he basically hid out till shit got too bad to manage. His dog tags get stolen and he knows he will be framed. Does he tell the public "My dog tags have been stolen, if they show up at a crime scene it is a frame up"? Weirdly no

He knows Renny is going to try and jail and kill him. He knows Renny and his Khmer Rouge youth brigade are a mortal danger to the town. Does he pick a pistol and go full Jason Bourne on the threat? No, he just sits back all "Woe is me, whatever shall I, a trained marine, do about a crazy 400 pound heart attack prone fat man?"

I can't really respect a character like that

I have extreme contempt for the way Renny uses obnoxious fake curse words as if doing so somehow meant that he was not basically peppering his speach with nastiness anyway. It is not the word that is rude, it's the spirit of what you're saying. I think I find 'clustermug' far more vile than the genuine idiom

OK, so I am up to disc #19, and I am growing sort of frustrated with some elements of the book. I don't know if it's sloppy writing or what, but there just seem to be alot of plot holes. Obvious things that characters could do about the situation but don't, or the way Cox seems to be totally ineffective and uninterested in using his not inconsiderable powers and influence to help people out...

And then there is the technology. King seems to have learned everything he knows about youth culture and computers from watching the WB. "We could block the cell phones and Internet" "That won't work, Renny has walkie talkies" "Drat! The CIA is powerless to block walkie talkies!".

The more the plot begins to hinge on nonsensical things like that, the more the story begins to feel sort of thrown together. It's full of great ideas but I'm not sure they all belong in the same story, or at least, I'm not sure King has a logical reason for the DOME to have gotten so terrible so quickly.

Why doesn't Cox say "We're going to be putting a help desk on the other side of the DOME, where people can speak to family and loved ones and have the Government answer their questions in an orderly fashion, but first you have to listen to Dale Barbara" I don't care how popular Renny is locally, the promise of getting answers and face time with loved ones would have put Barbara on the top spot lickety split. Instead they just sit around whining "No one has a reason to listen to me!"

Why did Barbi never ONCE stand on a soap box with his letter and say "I've been sent here by Obama to help". It would have at least made him a rival to Renny, someone who needed to be managed and respected because of his following. Instead he basically hid out till Renny could frame him for murder. It's mindbogglingly dumb on Barbi (King's?) 's part

EDIT: 5/8/10


Ok, so, I just got to Disc 21 and it looks like inspiration finally struck Cox and he decided to run with my idea, only he had it about 10 discs after I did and now it's too little too late. Good work, Gov'

EDIT 2: Also, Why on earth was Cox not more definitive in his statement about Barbi's innocence at that announcement to the presser. To say "to the best of my knowledge" is of no help to Barbi, and anyone watching inside the Dome would just say "well he's not here so he doesn't know"

He needed to say "Not only is he innocent, we believe he's been framed and the true murderer is sitll at large". His statement's intended audience should have been the people in the dome, not the fox news couch potatoes watching from the fly over states. Arg.. incompetence.

So was the future setting meant to be a message saying "Hey, Bush is gone, and Obama gets two terms, but Bush's spirit still remains!" or what?

Finally finished it. Gosh darn it, but that cotton picker King once again let the book fly off the rails. It's like he got bored of writing it and just gave up. There was nothing really frightening that ever happened, and the ending was telegraphed from chapter 5. "Halloween might come early this year or it might not". I feel like that was King talking to himself. "Either I'll follow through and finish all the ideas I started (like returning the Geiger counter to the town hall, finding out the town's reaction to learning that Renny was a crook) and write a confrontation for my hero and villain... or I'll just type 'Kablammo!' and call it a day"


I mean, yes, it's awesome that the corgi was the first out of the dome... but what a let down. I really felt like the book was going somewhere, like this might be another Stand. Instead I feel like I just got Buick 8'd

When reading this book, the momentum carried me straight through the ending, and I didn't pause too much to think about how wrong some of the choices were (such as having the main hero sit in a prison cell for a large stretch of the final act.) I think it's King's insistence on having no outline. In ON WRITING, he states that you get the premise and run with it, preferring story over plot. Yes, the pace is strong, but I think a little more planning would've cleaned up the ending.