Under the Dome

So, I read the book Under the Dome from Stephen King. Stephen King is a well known novelist and he has always been my favorite author thanks to his unique way of capturing the moment, and this is how I knew I could finish this 1074 page monster in time. Under the Dome was published in 2009, so it’s a relatively new book from Mr. King.
The book tells a story of a small town, Chester’s Mill, getting isolated from the rest of the world by an invisible dome. Nothing seems to be able to destroy the dome, not missiles nor speeding trucks. The residents of Chester’s Mill are stuck inside with some tourists, trying to deal with having no electricity and no way of getting more food supplies. Town’s Second Selectman (Jim Rennie) is spreading chaos by doing pretty much everything a responsible human being wouldn’t do from murdering innocent people to manufacturing drugs. These irresponsible actions cause conflicts between Rennie and the protagonist (Dale Barbara) to the point where Barbara ends up getting himself on Rennie’s hit list.
Barbara has his own storyline going along the main plot. This includes a somewhat romantic relationship with the town reporter Julia Shumway. I enjoy a good love story as much as a cockroach enjoys getting stepped on, but I’m not sure how to feel about this one. I’m not even sure if we’re talking about love here. The conflicts between Rennie and Barbara however were excellent, I could almost feel how Rennie’s slight discomfort with Barbara turned into pure hatred.
The language of the book is actually one of the main reasons I enjoyed reading it so much, it was filled with inspirational little sentences such as “Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.” and “If you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity.”, such beautiful words, I just felt like writing them down somewhere. The narrator was omniscient, occasionally letting us know who’d die in the next 30 minutes, it was written well so I enjoyed it a lot.
I really liked this book, the character development was believable and nice, the relationships between the characters were really human like. The ending however left me unimpressed, it felt like King would have just thought to himself ”Well, I’m done. I don’t feel like writing this anymore… I’ll make it end with a huge boom and aliens”. I also really enjoyed reading a book in English, been a while since I last did that, it was a lot easier than I remembered. The book was huge and hard to carry with me, but it was definitely worth it, I’d recommend it to anyone who appreciates a good storyline more than a satisfying ending.