Beyond Expectations

I started Stephen King's Under The Dome confidently expecting a gripping story, something along the lines of The Stand, from the last century: the good guys eventually lining up in extreme circumstances to take on the bad'uns with the reader cheering on his favourites as they somehow triumph despite the odds and the costs. I got exactly that for around nine-tenths of the novel, and highly entertaining if acceptably predictable it all was. Definitely value for money from my favourite story-teller. And then came something unexpected, despite the many clues the something was on its way.

For the last hundred pages or so SK pulls the switch on a close cousin to the apocalypse, except it's very much a self-contained affair taking place within the confines of the dome. At first this was a touch disconcerting as characters were made to shift their mortal coils with even greater insouciance than SK's readers are accustomed to. I began to wonder whether it wasn't in effect the story-teller himself torturing those whom he had trapped under his dome.

But it turned out to be not like that at all. The ending is the best I think he's ever written in terms of having something to say about our capacity for cruelty and pity - the twin constituents, if you think of it, of any kind of real horror. The thematic strands are woven together with great power through the final pages, even in the bleakly pathetic demise of an excellent villain. The resolution of the whole dome idea is genuinely worth waiting for, even though it's so downbeat in the final analysis. I found myself knocked gloriously sideways in a way I never expected yet entirely welcomed.