Published Sun, Nov 15, 2009 02:00 AM
Modified Fri, Nov 13, 2009 03:36 PM

King aims high and wide, and hits target

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BY SALEM MACKNEE - Correspondent

Stephen King has settled down a bit from the days when he would wipe out most of the world's population with a flu bug just to set the stage for his real story. But once in a while he still likes to work on a big canvas and take, say, a small-to-middling Maine town and put it through the wrath of God.

A cast of hundreds gives him a chance to put on all sorts of hats and tell all sorts of stories, juggling subplots like so many chainsaws as he sets up the big finish. In "Under the Dome," it's the town of Chester's Mill, next door to Castle Rock -- an unfortunate address in any Stephen King book -- which, at 11:44 a.m. on a sunny October 21st, is suddenly enclosed by a force field that snaps down so fast it severs arms, woodchucks, bedrock and anything else in its way.

The story opens with a bang, as a small plane crashes into the transparent dome, and more bangs follow as motorists, a logging truck and a news helicopter discover the new perimeter the hard way. The quieter dangers of the dome -- the potential greenhouse effect and the isolation from any outside help or authority -- take longer to sink in.

Now, there may be a book in how a community might weather a crisis like this by pulling together and listening to the angels of their better natures, but that would hardly be the book you would expect from Stephen King, would it? No, Chester's Mill seems to have -- I hope -- more than the usual small town's quota of sociopaths, and King doesn't help the odds by killing off some of the most likely heroes early in the story. There seems to be a human greenhouse effect at work as well, allowing greed and duplicity to flourish.

On the side of the angels is Dale Barbara, a drifter and fry cook whose military training reasserts itself when things start turning ugly. Barbara's former commander asks him to use his skill at finding al-Qaida bomb factories to try to find the source of the force field. His little underground resistance includes a trio of tech-savvy teens and the editor of the town newspaper.

There's allegory everywhere, from the firebombing of the newspaper building to stage-managed "spontaneous demonstrations" to the "Jesus radio" station playing canned music and serving as cover for the criminal operation that will endanger the whole town. King takes particular aim at the hyper-religious hypocrites who feather their own nests on the backs of others while loudly proclaiming their special relationship with the man who told us to give away all we have to the poor -- or at least that's my take. Allegory, after all, is subjective.

Along the way, we meet plenty of town characters, and King shines as always at serving up a neat little slice of life, in this case a slice that's being superheated by the dome. The town can watch itself on CNN as explained by Wolf Blitzer and Anderson Cooper; a yuppie watches her Amana refrigerator melt; Dale Barbara is haunted by memories of prisoner abuse in Iraq. The real-world details make the horror all the more plausible.

smacknee@charlotteobserver.com

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