This book has the heft of a brick. It also has a premise that can be summarized in seconds. On a beautiful autumn day in Maine a transparent dome materializes over the town of Chester's Mill. Once the Dome falls, all vestiges of normal life are suspended. Things run amok. They get scary. The townsfolk become fate's playthings. And Mr. King, who can manipulate this crisis in any way that occurs to him, becomes a kid in a candy store.
The premise provides so many options that Mr. King's decisions about how to tell this story are of special interest. The King book that is most readily brought to mind by "Under the Dome" isn't an earlier large-scale apocalyptic fantasy like "It" or "The Stand"; it's "On Writing," the instructive autobiographical gem that cast light on how Mr. King's creative mind works. In the spirit of "On Writing," "Under the Dome" takes a lucid, commonsense approach that keeps it tight and energetic from start to finish. Hard as this thing is to hoist, it's even harder to put down.