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read by Raúl Esparza
with an Afterword by The Author
(New York: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2009)
MP3 Audiobook, 2.88 GB, 34.4 Hours, Fiction
From the Cover: On an otherwise normal, beautiful day, the town of Chester’s Mill, Maine is suddenly and inexplicably sealed off from the rest of the world in Under the Dome, Stephen King’s biggest, most riveting novel since The Stand.
My Review: So, I feel like I am in an abusive relationship with Stephen King.
When we first started our relationship together, he was wonderful. He never failed to disappoint, he was intriguing, he had interesting things to say, I enjoyed spending time with him, and even lost track of time when we were together. Then, after fifteen or twenty years of being together, the relationship started to get a little stale, and often we had to fall back on the “good times” we used to have together, and I started looking at other people, even enjoyed spending time with other people. Then, things got violent. He would promise me something new and exciting and I would, like a fool, keep coming back in spite of the fact that I kept getting hurt. However, I kept telling myself that maybe this time it would be different. This time would be more like the early days of our relationship. Yet, in spite of all that I was hurt time and time again, some times painfully hurt. Then, just when I was about to give up entirely on our relationship and begin divorce proceedings, he came to me one more time and told me he was sorry about everything he had done over the last decade or so, and that he really had changed, and look … I can make it just like the old days. Without daring to hope for much, I started to believe what he was telling me and I went crawling back; expecting to be hurt at every turn, but daring to hope that he really had changed.
I think he has … but we’ll get to that in a minute.
After the stinker that was Duma Key and the disappointment that was Just After Sunset I had almost decided that I was going to stick with King’s earlier stuff (i.e. pre-2000) and then the hype surrounding Under the Dome started and I began to believe again … mostly because this was a retooling (and updating) of material that he had started and stopped in the late 70s and early 80s. I got the hardcover from my parents for Christmas and was able to get my hands on the audiobook and decided that that would be a much easier way in which to get through this book (given that I had readings for two classes to do as well as prep and readings for an English 101 class I was teaching and picking up King’s largest book to date (1,074) just didn’t seem feasible).
There is a lot to say about this book and I’ll try to get to it all, but we’ll see. I scrupulously (maybe even neurotically) stayed away from any and all reviews of the book in order to experience it on my own and form my own opinions of it (this was hard to do since I subscribe to a number of not just book blogs but also blogs that are concerned with the horror industry) and as of this writing, I still have not read any outside reviews of the book.
First and foremost, I will unconditionally say that this is the best Stephen King novel in at least the last four or five years (since Cell). Why? Well, since King’s accident in 1999 there has been a change in the tone of King’s novels. Dreamcatcher, From a Buick 8, Lisey’s Story, Duma Key … they’re all much different than, say, The Shining, It, The Stand. They are much more intimate novels, and I don’t know that I can explain it any better than that. They don’t seem as encompassing in their scope as some of King’s prior novels did (the exceptions to that rule are, perhaps, the last three novels in The Dark Tower series). With Under the Dome, though, some of that scope is brought back. This is a much bigger novel than any King has produced recently, not only in length, but also in scope. This is a novel on a par with The Stand and It. (Though as such, it suffers from some of the same problems that those larger novels do) and shows off King’s real talent for creating characters.
Second, this is a long book. That may be the understatement of the year, but I think it still warrants saying. In print it is 1,074 pages long, and in audio it is 34.4 hours long. It takes a major commitment to sit down and read or listen to Under the Dome. It took me 45 days to through it. Often I had to roll back the time on my iPod to remind myself what was going on if it there had been some time between listening sessions. I imagine that reading the book would present some of the same problems, though I would imagine that it would be (1) easier to backtrack in the print edition and (2) the fact that there is not only a map in the front of the book but also a Dramatis Personae list of a kind. (Though, I will say that when I was done with the audiobook and looked at the map in the front of the book, my vision of the geography of Chester’s Mill was much different than that of the map’s, and I’m not even sure that the map’s conforms entirely to King’s descriptions, in that it seems that on the map things are much closer together than they are in the book.)
Third, and this holds true for many of King’s longer books (especially It and The Stand), the build-up in the book is much more exciting than the denouement and conclusion. The set-up to Under the Dome is absolutely brilliant, and King constructs some very interesting inter-personal dynamics as things start to unravel (Second Selectman “Big Jim” Rennie is a good (if somewhat stereotypical) villain (if there was any sort of cosmic justice, he’d be played by the late-J.T. Walsh in any sort of film adaptation of the book)) but when the novel takes 900 pages to set up and only 100 to get out … it was bound to be somewhat disappointing. When the explanation for the dome arrived, I felt quite let down and it seemed more like an original Star Trek episode-like explanation (with Shatner and Nimoy and the rest) than something from Stephen King. But that kind of deus ex machina is what happens in The Stand and It and so I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything different from a novel of similar length, but I was kind of hoping … I was also a little disappointed in the finale of “Big Jim” Rennie’s character. I was hoping for something a little more dramatic, once again, there is a lot of set up but very little pay-off, though one might be able to read a certain amount of karmic intervention in what happens to Rennie.
Fourth. While I miss having the late-Frank Muller growl his way through Under the Dome, and would have thought that either Campbell Scott or Ron McLarty would have been the choice to narrate this tale. I have to admit though, that Raúl Esparza (a new audio Reader to me) does an excellent job of bringing King’s words to life. My one nitpick with his reading though, is that all the children under the age of ten in the book sound like their noses are stuffed up.
What it boils down to is that if King’s next books (he has talked about an eighth Dark Tower book The Wind Through the Keyhole, writing a sequel to The Shining titled Doctor Sleep, a collection of novellas (coming out November 2010) Full Dark, no Stars, and a third part to The Talisman-Black House series) are anything like Under the Dome, I think that I’m prepared take him back, even though he’s hurt me in the past. With Under the Dome he’s promised he won’t hurt me any more.
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