Under the Dome

Under the Dome is a 2009 novel written by Stephen King.

After a rural Maine town finds itself suddenly enclosed inside a mysterious and almost impenetrable barrier, a power-hungry selectman launches plans to take over the town while others try to avoid his wrath and find out what created the barrier. Looked at as an allegory, it comes off as unsubtle, with hints of Does This Remind You of Anything?, but taken as a straight story, is surprisingly fast-paced and touching given the Loads and Loads of Characters it has to handle.

A cable miniseries adaptation is currently in the works, with King and Steven Spielberg as producers.

The novel contains examples of the following:
"Soldier: Why don't y'all quit on the rocks and do somethin about those cows? Herd em into the barn and milk em or rub soothin shit on their udders; somethin like that.
 * Action Survivor: Almost everyone still alive at the end of the story earns this to some degree, but particularly
 * The Alcoholic: "Sloppy" Sam Verdreaux.
 * Almost Out of Oxygen: due to the fact that there is very little oxygen intake into the dome, it becomes very hard to breathe.
 * Anyone Can Die: on the cusp of baring Big Jim's machinations to the town, is summarily choked to death by Big Jim himself.  is gunned down in a town meeting. Most jarring, perhaps, is the gradual erosion of the Dinsmore family due to various and sundry Dome-related maladies: by accidental suicide, quite purposeful suicide, and another quite purposeful suicide; the remaining son survives. Barely..
 * King throws some final punches at the end when
 * To put it in perspective: Chester's Mill had a population around two thousand when the dome dropped.
 * Anticlimax:
 * Arc Words: "Stop the Great Pumpkin! Stop Halloween!"
 * "We all support the team."
 * Ascended Extra: Carter Thibodeau
 * The Atoner: Sam Verdreaux, the town drunk, was paid by Rennie (in booze) to initiate the riot at Food City. Later on he makes up for it by helping Barbie and Julia.
 * Barbie himself has shades of this, as it's revealed in flashbacks that he.
 * Ax Crazy: Junior Rennie
 * Badass Grandpa: Ernie Calvert
 * Bad Cop, Incompetent Cop.
 * Big Bad: Big Jim Rennie.
 * Bigger Is Better in Bed: Inverted. Mel Searles has a huge penis,.
 * Bodyguard Betrayal: At the end  turns on  in order to preserve oxygen. Didn't turn out the way he planned.
 * Berserk Button: Reverend Piper Libby has anger issues that she has managed to keep under control for most of her life. This, however, goes down the drain when she finds out that
 * Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: When Ollie throws rocks at the Dome, one of the soldiers from the other side starts a conversation with him:

Ollie: We don't need to herd them. They know where to go. Only now they don't need to be milked, and they don't need any Bag Balm, either. Their udders are dry.

Soldier: Yeah?

Ollie: Yeah. My dad says something's wrong with the grass. He says the grass is wrong because the air's wrong. It doesn't smell good in here, you know. It smells like crap.

Soldier: Yeah?

Ollie: Yeah. My mother killed herself this morning."


 * Breaking the Fourth Wall: In one particularly creepy piece of narration King describes the reader as being present among the town's inhabitants but invisible to them, perceptible as only a light breeze.
 * Break the Cutie - Julia after . Later, there's a traumatic incident from her childhood which she's forced to re-live.
 * During the events of the book Ollie loses his brother, then his mother and finally his father. He decids to stay at their farm. Soon after, it's destroyed and Ollie spends the rest of the book being very close to death.
 * Chekhov's Gunman:
 * Corrupt Politician: Big Jim Rennie.
 * Corrupt Hick: Also Big Jim Rennie.
 * Cosmic Horror: The Dome is
 * Covers Always Lie: The hardcover cover art depicts a much smaller Dome than what is described in the novel. Not to mention the fact that the dome is actually invisible (the cover art shows a glassy, reflecting dome) and isn't even round (the cover art shows it to be neatly spherical).
 * Do Not Call Me Paul: Chef dislikes being called by his real name, Phil.
 * Doomed Hometown
 * Doorstopper: The hardcover clocks in at about 1074 pages.
 * The Dragon: Junior,.
 * Driven to Suicide: Several people commit suicide after the Dome comes down, including Ollie Dinsmore's parents.
 * Dropped a Bridge On Him: Many of the characters who die,
 * . King spent a decent amount of time developing her character, what with her coming to grips with taking care of Aidan and Alice, and even deciding that she'd give them up to their original parents, if they were still alive. On paper, this isn't as bad until you take into account that she only went to the town meeting because Aidan and Alice begged her to take them to it, resulting in them getting a front-row seat for her death. The worst part about it is that it came out of nowhere, as she's murdered for absolutely no good reason. Would double as a Crowning Moment of Sadness if the reaction period wasn't so brief.
 * Due to The Dead:
 * Everybody's Dead, Dave: While it doesn't rack up the body-count of some of King's apocalyptic stories, the book.
 * Evil Cripple:  Also
 * Evil Versus Evil:
 * Extreme Doormat: Andy Sanders. While he's the town's first selectmen, technically outranking Big Jim Rennie, he's actually completely under Rennie's control.
 * Eye Scream: The death of and also a nasty side effect of
 * Family Values Villain: Big Jim Rennie. The guy's practically pure evil and selfishness down to his core, but he still refuses to swear, drink, or take the Lord's name in vain.
 * His so-called "refusal to swear" is more than a little hypocritical, considering all he does is swap swear words with less offensive varieties; such as calling a woman he doesn't like a "rhymes-with-witch." The only difference between what he does and swearing is letter substitution.
 * Fat Bastard: Big Jim Rennie.
 * Four Lines, All Waiting: Your Mileage May Vary. A) There are like, 10 lines minimum? B) Due to good writing and better editing, the pace manages to be breakneck for over 1000 pages.
 * Fox News Liberal: Julia Shumway is described as a Republican, although she drives a hybrid car, attends the liberal church, and never expresses any sort of conservative opinion. Dale Barbara often says things like, "Are you sure you're a Republican?", usually after she says something implying that she doesn't blindly follow Big Jim's authority, which seems to be the book's main qualification for a Republican. Which would just be a sign of Barbie's own personal biases, except that she never once responds to him with a coherent reason why she is one. It's clear some politics is slipping in on King's part.
 * This has more to do with the distinction between conservative and Republican. Julia Shumway is portrayed as conservative in a number of ways (one humorous example is her thought on what her historical hero's reaction would be to a world where civilians were required by law to pick up after their pet's poo), and she admits to having voted for Rennie when he was "saner" because she liked what he campaigned on. It's only when he shows his true colors as a power-hungry sociopath that she starts expressing more liberal misgivings about the abuses of power going on.
 * Perhaps a bit of Truth in Television: Maine's two Senators in real life are Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins: both Republicans that are left-of-center left of most Republicans.
 * Friend to Psychos: Big Jim is this to his son Junior.
 * The Fundamentalist: Lester Coggins, pastor of the Christ the Holy Redeemer church. When you consider other characters like this in Stephen King novels (like Mrs. Carmody of The Mist or Margaret White of Carrie), you might think he'd end up being a problem for the more reasonable inhabitants of Chester's Mill.
 * Get a Room: When Mel Searles sees kiss, he yells: "Hey, fags! Get a room! No, wait, I got a better idea! Get a room in hell!"
 * Going Cold Turkey: Andrea Grinnell beats her painkiller addiction that way. Rusty advises her against that, telling her that she'll suffer greatly and will have seizures, which does happen.
 * Godzilla Threshold: The government does everything in its power to free the town of Chester's Mill from its predicament. This includes firing a cruise missile at the invisible dome surrounding the town, then a second missile when the first one fails, using specially modified acid which can melt through two miles of bedrock, despite the possibility that it could set the dome on fire, and then attempting to use a 'pencil nuke', only to have it melt down and kill fifteen people before it could be used. The government continues trying to build a second pencil nuke, but by that point, things are so bad they finally decide they don't have time.
 * Good Feels Good: Junior of all people experiences this, when he rescues the Appleton children. As a consequence,
 * Goodnight, Sweet Prince: When is about to poison himself, he thinks that he will "just lie down on the bed, close his eyes, and then good night, sweet, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."
 * Gosh Darn It to Heck: Big Jim Rennie all the cotton-pickin' way.
 * Subverted; when things get really bad, he does rattle off a couple swears, although only one or two serious ones.
 * Hallucinations: Junior has these whenever his migraines are particularly bad; this is the first clue that his "migraines" may be something more.
 * (presumably) hallucinates that the various people he's killed over the course of the novel have come back to haunt him.
 * Happily Married: Rusty and Linda Everett.
 * Have You Told Anyone Else?: The number of times the plot relies on the only character that knows something confronting the perpetrator without a backup plan or weapon is staggering.
 * Hoist By His Own Petard / Karmic Death:
 * I Call It Vera:
 * I Love the Dead: Junior and his "girlfriends".
 * It Got Worse: All thanks to Big Jim Rennie.
 * Infant Immortality: Children and babies can and do die in this story, but Little Walter Bushey seems to emerge from potentially lethal situations with alarming regularity.
 * Interrupted Suicide:  is about to kill himself, when he's interrupted by a phone call.
 * Invisible to Normals: In a few short sections set from the viewpoint of Julia Shumway's corgi, it's stated that dogs are able to hear the voices of the dead due to their extra-sensitive hearing. A random ghost points the dog to the VADER file (which had fallen behind a couch, unbeknownst to anyone), which leads to Andrea Ginnell finding the file and finally finding out about Rennie's corrupt side businesses.
 * I Want My Mommy: cries out for his mother right before he's killed by.
 * Jerkass: The youths who have been recruited as temporary police officers — Frankie, Junior, Georgia, Mel, and Carter.
 * Kids Are Cruel:
 * Loads and Loads of Characters: A comprehensive list of them is provided at the beginning of the book, after the map of the town.
 * Even with the list, names keep popping out of nowhere and.
 * Lowered Recruiting Standards: The town's leaders make the decision to deputize some young adults in order to beef up the police force. These young adults? The town selectman's sociopathic son and his delinquent friends.
 * May-December Romance: Carolyn and Thurston. Several peope mistake them for father and daughter.
 * Manipulative Bastard: Big Jim. If you're not getting the pattern yet, he is not a nice guy. About five days into the Dome ordeal he has He'd be a Magnificent Bastard if he weren't so utterly vile.
 * Meaningful Rename: Chef
 * Murder-Suicide: kills  before turning the gun on herself.
 * Mythology Gag: The symbol on the.
 * One character gives a name to some of the creepy stuff happening inside the Dome - "the dead zone". He doesn't like the sound of it.
 * Never Speak Ill of the Dead:
 * Next Sunday AD: A specific date is never given, but it probably takes place during President Obama's second term as one car is described as having a faded Yes we STILL can bumper sticker on it. At one time, Carter reads about the 2012 BMW in Car and Driver. Also, there's free long-range Wi-Fi (WiMAX?) in rural Maine.
 * Don't forget a sequel to Lost (which is very clever).
 * Non-Indicative Name: Despite the title of the novel, and the cover art for the hardcover, the "Dome" isn't particularly round. You know, like the word "dome" would imply. Rather, it follows the town's borders exactly (and the town is constantly referred to as being shaped like a boot) and then extends up to five miles into the air.
 * Oh Crap: Rusty has a truly magnificent one when
 * Pet the Dog - Junior has exactly one decent moment, when he rescues two children separated from their mother. It's especially jarring as it happens mere moments after he and one of his cronies physically and verbally assault two people they practically dragged naked out of bed.
 * Big Jim Rennie has one of his own, after
 * Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Well, not everyone, but all of the children in town and anyone who experience unnerving dreams of something  bad going down in Chester's Mill.
 * Police Are Useless - Most of the nice cops are, anyway. Per Word of God, ineptitude is a theme.
 * Precision F-Strike: While other characters swear throughout the book, Jim Rennie utters a legitimate curseword exactly once.
 * Rape As Drama: is gang-raped by the new "cops" of Chester's Mill.
 * Reasonable Authority Figure: Colonel Cox.
 * Redemption Equals Death: makes up for his part in  by
 * who has been aiding Big Jim for years in exchange for drugs.
 * Refusal of the Call: Dale Barbara is in the midst of this as the story opens but the woman who's about to give him a ride out of town changes her mind and drives on at the last second. From then on, whenever he's in trouble he thinks of the woman and wonders what would have happened had she stopped for him.
 * Remembered Too Late: Getting body armor for raiding a meth lab.
 * Screaming Warrior: ''
 * Self-Deprecation: Carolyn Sturges thinks about what her career future would have been and she dismissed novelist as too risky. Why? "What if you wrote a thousand-pager, and it sucked?" Guess how many pages Under the Dome is.
 * Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The entire winding saga of
 * Shout-Out - Cox mentions a couple of times that one of the female police officers comes highly recommended by Jack Reacher.
 * One of the conspiracy theories mentioned about the cause of the dome is that it is a government experiment Gone Horribly Wrong, exactly like in the movie The Mist.
 * Strawman Political - Big Jim Rennie is powerfully conservative in many ways, and also the main villain.
 * Take That - Georgia Roux snarks on Sammy for being an avid reader of Nora Roberts and Stephenie Meyer (authors that King really hates) and says that Harry Potter rules (King loves the series). However, this is halfway to Take That Me, because Georgia Roux is clearly not a nice person.
 * Teens Are Monsters - Most of the teenage (or close-to-teenage) characters in the book are sociopaths.
 * Too Dumb to Live -
 * Also the multitude of people who underestimate Big Jim, over and over.
 * Totally Radical: Subverted. A early scene shows a teenager using some bizarre slang, at one point even saying "totally rad". The adult in the scene tries to reciprocate. The scene's end shows that the teen was mocking the adult's attempts to imitate him, and the teens speak normally for the book's remainder.
 * Unusual Euphemism: Big Jim Rennie.
 * What Could Possibly Go Wrong? - one of the cops think so about their . Naturally it went horribly wrong.
 * Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Little Walter Bushey, named after a blues musician. Yes, "Little" is officially the part of his name. Ginny Tomlinson (a nurse in the town's hospital) attributes this to his parents being potheads.
 * Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?: Little Walter Bushey, named after a blues musician. Yes, "Little" is officially the part of his name. Ginny Tomlinson (a nurse in the town's hospital) attributes this to his parents being potheads.