Under the Dome
By Stephen King
Scribner, 1,072 pages

A dome has settled over a small town in Maine. Inside is a thriving little community maintained by a cottage industry, an industry founded on the writing and celebrity of Stephen King. Life is good under the dome, because King is a benevolent man with a disarming, aw-shucks demeanor—in his Entertainment Weekly column, he goes by the handle “Uncle Stevie”—but nevertheless he’s the boss of this enclosed world and its focal point; it exists to accommodate him.

From this hothouse environment, a biography has grown like kudzu, and it goes like this. Stephen King was raised in humble circumstances in rural New England and first encountered fiction in the pulps, Weird Tales, and Analog Science Fiction. King was mesmerized by the raw emotions these stories accessed in him, and while working as a high school teacher, he began writing in the same direct and vivid style. Though first ignored by publishing houses as a mere spinner of schlock, King eventually sold a novel called Carrie in 1974, and readers embraced it. Owing to the visual nature of his prose, great film directors used his material for memorable adaptations, and more and more readers came to appreciate his work. Still, the literary establishment turned up its nose.

Yet King was undeterred by elitist prejudices, and girded by the unflagging support of his Constant Readers and a conviction in the democracy of the tale, he continued to write on his own terms. And, mirabile dictu, at last intellectual snobbery buckled under King’s passion and perseverance, and he began to receive overdue accolades: publication in the New Yorker, an O’Henry Award for the year’s best short story. Even the New York Times, which had once tagged him as a “writer of fairly engaging and preposterous claptrap,” was now affording him his rightful seat as an heir to Victor Hugo and James Joyce.

It’s a good story and has gained purchase because it establishes a neat dichotomy. On one side are the proponents of popular writing, championing action-packed stories that people enjoy. Pitted against them are psoriatic academics much concerned with sociopolitical subtexts in Faulkner and parataxis in Hemingway. In a 2006 interview with the Paris Review (another mark of his newfound prestige), King bemoaned the clubhouse insularity of the “keepers of the idea of serious literature”:

To me, it all goes back to this idea held by a lot of people who analyze literature for a living, who say, If we let the rabble in, then they’ll see that anybody can do this, that it’s accessible to anyone. And then what are we doing here?

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With serious literature (or at least the chimerical “idea” of it) thus idily quarantined to a few fusty English departments, the noble fight to reclaim writing for the people could commence, a struggle that reached a rhetorical peak in 2003, when King was honored with the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. This event was an opportunity to prove to the public that you were not a snob. Lev Grossman in Time celebrated the overthrow of the Western canon. In USA Today, Samuel G. Freedman wrote an essay called “Stephen King Deserves Award for Creating Readers,” attributing to King heretofore unknown divine powers. And straight from central casting, Harold Bloom emerged as the perfect foil to the popularizers, grumbling that King writes “what used to be called penny dreadfuls.” In his acceptance speech, King acted as the peacemaker, magnanimously hoping that the “award means that a bridge can be built between so-called popular fiction and so-called literary fiction.” The speech is called “Building Bridges.” You can purchase it on Amazon.

This bridge only leads in one direction: to awards conferred upon Stephen King. There’s no way of guessing his definition of literary fiction; in the foreword to the story collection Everything’s Eventual, he makes a distinction between his “literary stories and the all-out screamers,” but the only perceptual difference is that people are murdered in the latter. As for popular fiction, the adjective describes nothing but book sales. When introducing King at the National Book Award gala, the detective novelist Walter Mosley self-servingly pointed out that “most of the great writers in history were extraordinarily popular,” but of course he didn’t attempt to reverse the statement: no one would be fool enough to extrapolate greatness from the bestseller list. In fact, popularity is fad-driven, arbitrary, and with books, almost always extratextual. Surely King owes a great deal of his name recognition to Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg, and Stanley Kubrick, who made movies of his books, to say nothing of Jack Nicholson and Kathy Bates, who embodied his characters. But whether it stems from Hollywood, Oprah, or some chance harmony with the zeitgeist, popularity has a purely accidental relationship to content.

King’s best trick has been to insist that anyone who spurns a cultural icon must be a snob. By making this argument, he’s stopped reviewers in recent years from looking too closely at what he’s writing. Because the truth is that, as praise for his books has become a shibboleth for open-mindedness, King himself has become one of the worst writers in America.

Become is the key word here. The decline of King’s work is not the fault of the horror and suspense conventions his books hew to. All writers are beholden to conventions of one kind or another, and it’s what they create within those strictures (or how they subvert them) that defines their art. The hallmark of horror is to visit the macabre upon the ordinary, and much of King’s earliest work does this very successfully. In the exciting vampire novel ’Salem’s Lot (1975), for instance, or parts of the biblically long apocalypse fantasy The Stand (1978), King pushes his malevolent forces through the rifts of fear and hatred that underlie relationships or whole communities. Kurt Barlow has his own vampiric motives for inhabiting the town in ’Salem’s Lot, but the mayhem he wreaks reveals preexisting fault lines of psychological and social disorder. In the novella “The Body” (1982), perhaps the best thing King ever wrote and the source of the movie Stand by Me, the average, yet dire, boyhood of Gordon LaChance in small-town Maine is captured in earthy, personal detail. Gordon’s teenage disequilibrium is wonderfully conjured when he crosses a trestle in front of an oncoming train and hears “the steady thump of my heart, the bloodbeat in my ears like a drum being played with brushes, the creak of sinews like the strings of a violin that has been tuned radically upward.” He eventually finds the dead body of a boy from his town, and though the image itself is striking (“There were black ants crawling back and forth across the hand”), we connect on a deeper level to the fearful awakening to death it triggers in Gordon’s life.

In his succeeding books, with his popularity exploding, King tilted his focus to scheming up ingenious guises for his malevolent forces to assume. We got a murderous Plymouth, Saint Bernard, zombie child, spinster nurse, and so on. The evil tended to be explained in terms of psychosis, which relieved King from the burden of providing any rationale for his killers (later he would make them aliens, who are equally inexplicable). People turned to these books for shrieking and viscera, and they left satisfied. In the 1990 doorstopper IT, for instance, about an evil shape-shifting clown who exists in the portals of children’s imaginations, King’s most vivid writing is devoted to describing the “warm and painless gout” that splashes from a dismembered child’s carotid artery, or the exposed tendons and ligaments of a suicide’s sliced arms that look like “cuts of cheap beef.”

There’s nothing at all the matter with this, but a little perspective is in order. As the attention turned to scalpel murders and live amputations, the human dramas, intended to give emotional depth to the carnage, were written in such unreflective haste that they’re never credible. Here’s an example of a scene from IT, in which an abusive husband reacts to his defiant wife:

And suddenly—maybe it was because of the utter loathing on her face, the contempt, maybe because she had called him a tub of guts, or maybe only because of the rebellious way her breasts rose and fell—the fear was suffocating him. It was not a bud or a bloom but a whole goddam garden, the fear, the horrible fear that he was not here.

Thus, as early as 1990, a shorthand had emerged in King’s writing, in which massaged clichés (a garden of fear, suffocating fear), redundancies (utter loathing and contempt), laundry-list sentences, italics, and, elsewhere, the CAPS LOCK key do all the work on the writer’s behalf. In these books even the dialogue, once original and often comic, begins to parody itself, exaggerating the New England dialects and salt-of-the-earth aphorisms. King’s small-town backdrops feel increasingly like movie sets that he can trundle from one book to the next.

It’s no exaggeration to say that in the years that have passed, every single one of these lazy writing habits has metastasized to ugly proportions, so that the same Stephen King who wrote a pietistic memoir about his craft (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000) and was anointed in the country’s most-read book pages as a modern-day Hugo also became capable of the following exchange, from his newest novel Under the Dome:

She snapped off the Penlite and looked up. “See the stars,” she said. “So bright. There’s the Dipper?.?.?.?Cassiopeia?.?.?.?the?Great Bear. All just the same. I find that comforting. Do you?”
“Yes.”

They said nothing for a little while, but only looked up at the glimmering sprawl of the Milky Way. “But they always make me feel very small and very?.?.?.?very brief.”

This is one of our moments of humanity in Under the Dome—the stars make someone feel small—and if it seems a trifle phoned-in, you’ve got a sense of what it’s like to read all 1,072 pages of this book. Nobody since Sancho Panza has relied on clichés as much as King does here. Characters get out in one piece, are prepared for the worst, and watch each other like hawks; they get egg on their faces, see stars, find laughter to be the best medicine, and greet good news as music to their ears; hearts are chilled, drop, and rise in throats; dust settles, cats are out of bags, other fish are fried. “Big Jim was exultant,” we’re told, and why? “He had them exactly where he wanted them: in the palm of his hand.”

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The premise of Under the Dome is the old standard of chaos breaking out in an isolated setting, best known from Lord of the Flies and adapted more recently in such books as Alex Garland’s exhilarating The Beach and S.?M. Stirling’s multivolume fantasies known as The Change series. A glass dome drops on Chester’s Mill, trapping its residents inside and forcing them to work together to survive the freakish catastrophe. But anarchy is sown by the tyrannizing Big Jim Rennie, who sets out to rule Chester’s Mill even if it means killing his opponents and thwarting the chances to remove the dome. Rennie is likened in turn to Nixon, Hitler, and Darth Vader, and he also runs “America’s biggest methamphetamine lab,” so you know he’s bad; but mostly he’s meant as King’s analog to Dick Cheney, a scheming, self-righteous megalomaniac pulling the strings of the bumbling police chief and first selectman. The embryonic idea is to make Chester’s Mill a Petri dish in which we witness the time-lapsed growth of fascism in the American heartland.

The first problem is that this particular conceit is stolen from the famous Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” in which an ordinary suburban neighborhood is toyed with by aliens. But the larger trouble is that developing an idea like that requires writing, and King doesn’t write his books any more. He assembles them from an all-pervading cheat sheet of clichés. As hackneyed as the prose is on the sentence level, the characters are even worse. Nearly everyone is a Hollywood archetype. Dale Barbara, aka Barbie, is our Steven Seagal-esque hero, a former Army captain working as a cook who at one point runs around a jail cell literally dodging bullets. He’s aided by an intrepid newspaper editor named Julia Shumway (presumably to be played by Julia Roberts) who’s intent on exposing Rennie’s machinations. One sub-story follows a few spunky preteens in their Spielbergian quest to uncover the origin of the dome, and much fist-bumping and tin-eared slang ensues (was there no one to tell King that a 13-year-old in the iPod era is unlikely to exclaim “Jeepers”?). When Army soldiers aren’t yelling, “Don’t you dare die on me, cow-kid!” they’re saying, “Your side of 119 is totally FUBAR.” And for no reason except that it’s an easy horror gimmick, other children have seizures during which they prophesy about the future.

Baffling claims have been made that King is providing an astute vision of modern American life; but really, from the first pages of Under the Dome, you feel trapped in King’s private and intensely self-referential echo chamber, bouncing back and forth between famous movies and King’s own books. I found no less than three directmentions of King’s prior work, including the depressingly accurate observation that what’s happening here is “exactly like in that movie The Mist.” King loves his cultural ephemera and has made strenuous arguments for using brand names in depicting a scene, but this habit has become a mindless reflex; there’s simply nothing going on but the myna bird repetition of the TV in the next room when he writes of “murder’s similarity to Lay’s potato chips: it’s hard to stop with just one.”

Ultimately, the investigation of Rennie’s power grab is sidetracked by King’s favorite narrative crutch, rampaging lunatics. One is a messianic meth addict who quotes Scripture like a Tarantino villain before setting off plastic explosives, and the other is Rennie’s son, whose psychosis is apparently the result of a brain tumor. And somehow, from this verbose havoc comes an ending that is sure to displease even readers who demand nothing more than a few good disembowelments. The dome, you see, is allegorical, a kind of intergalactic lesson in human kindness. The novel ends with a chapter of sententious moralizing about the importance of empathy that would be awful in any book but that is doubly galling from an author who has shown such sophomoric gusto in crashing things into his glass dome, including a fully loaded 767 passenger plane.

When Max Brooks, -author of the surprisingly provocative zombie novel World War Z, was asked why he chose his subject, he answered simply, -“Because zombies are scary!” I suspect that a younger Stephen King would have had a similar attitude about his work. But now King is the decorated bridge builder between popular and serious fiction, a man completely unaware of how arrogant it is to mention himself in his books or to send his readers away with a 20-page sermon on goodness. In the English departments that once derided him, earnest dissertations are now being written about his vision of post-secular America and, presumably, parataxis in The Tommyknockers. In his Paris Review interview, he piously said that “our interactions with others and the society interests me a lot more than monsters and vampires and ghouls and ghosts.” If I were one of King’s faithful readers who had paid good money to read about the psychotic dog and car and clown, I would feel badly used by this comment. Rather than bridging anything, King has leveraged his popularity to ascend to the ranks of important writers—and he’s achieved those heights while his own prose has, as he might say, scraped the bottom of the barrel.