I put Stephen King’s latest novel, “Under the Dome” on my Christmas list because the premise of a town getting cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious invisible dome sounded like fun, and because although it had been a long time since I’d read one of his books, I had enjoyed every one I’d read. I say this by way of saying that it is with a heavy heart that I come not to praise Stephen King, but to bury him.

Admittedly, no one expects Stephen King to be a prose stylist. If you want, say, Henry James, you know where to turn. But we do expect Stephen King to be a master storyteller; that is his métier. It is also his reputation. Google “ ‘Stephen King’ ‘master storyteller’ ” and you’ll get 11,000 citings. Go ahead, try it.

And yet, “Under the Dome” is not a story masterfully told. It isn’t even well-told. In fact, it’s very badly told, in the plotting, in the characters, and yes, in the truly awful prose. Perhaps worst of all, a wonderful premise rife with possibility is squandered on one-dimensional characters and a truly deus ex machina ending.

First, the prose. Again, I didn’t go into this book looking for literary prose. But it’s fair to expect more than what’s here from someone who has been behind the typewriter for 35 years, who has written 70 books, and who is the 18^th best-selling fiction writer in history. It’s not that the writing in “Under the Dome” isn’t gifted; it’s that it’s truly terrible.

Some samples drawn from the book:

1.

Like Piper, Lester mentioned the testing concept – an ecclesiastical hit during all the great clustermugs of history – but his major theme had to do with the infection of sin, and how God dealt with such infections, which seemed to be squeezing them with His Fingers the way a man might squeeze a troublesome pimple until the pus squirted out like holy Colgate.

Evidently, God squeezes the infection of sin the way man might squeeze a pimple filled with holy toothpaste.

I didn’t know God was concerned with infections.

If he is, I’m not sure he squeezes them. How does one squeeze an infection?

I’m not sure sin is an infection.

Pimples contain pus, but pus isn’t like toothpaste.

Pus erupts from pimples; toothpaste flows from tubes, it doesn’t erupt.

How is toothpaste holy? Or is it only Colgate?

Setting aside the metaphor of infected holy toothpaste of sin, exactly what does the aside (“an ecclesiastical hit during all the great clustermugs of history”) add to our understanding of this sentence? Nothing. The book is filled with roadway disasters like this that pull our eye away from the cars in front of us.

2.

A young mother has just fallen over unconscious on the side of a road, her baby strapped onto her back. The baby strikes his head and begins to bleed. Here’s how King depicts this:

A fly settled on his forehead, sampled the blood oozing through the cartoon images of SpongeBob and Patrick, then flew off. Possibly to report this taste-treat at Fly HQ and summon reinforcements.

Rather than arousing our sympathy for the baby (or his mother), we’re asked to speculate about the motivations and movements of a fly. That is, when we’re not cheerily dwelling on the cartoon bandage. The point of view – that of the author, thinking about the fly! – provides a clue into something else that’s so completely wrong with this book:  its utter lack of empathy for the characters. The author doesn’t invest in their plight because he doesn’t believe they’re real, and so neither do we.

3.

He was as happy as a maggot in dog-puke.

We don’t normally associate maggots with dog puke. (Or “dog-puke.” Why this is hyphenated, I don’t know. It’s not a compound adjective. “Dog” is an adjective modifying the noun “puke.” Like most of the book, this error leaves me feeling that the book is simply unedited.) I don’t know if maggots in “dog-puke” are happy, so it’s difficult to gauge how happy “he” is. Here’s what I suspect:  King was going to write “as happy as a fly in shit” – a cliché we all know – but then thought that precisely because it was a cliché, he’d better make it new. And so he turned it into something that isn’t so much new as a second cousin, and one that doesn’t quite make sense. Dog shit hangs around – I’m sure you’ve seen it near sidewalks everywhere. But how often have you seen “dog-puke” out in society? And how long does it last? There’s no way to associate it with maggots.

4.

The head was burlap with eyes that were white crosses made from thread. The hat was like the one the cat wore in the Dr. Seuss story. It had garden trowels for hands (bad old clutchy-grabbing hands, Janelle thought) and a shirt with something written on it.

Kids can write better than this. And doesn’t it sound like an adolescent wrote it? Note the slack verbs – “was,” “were,” “was,” “had” – three instances of “to be” and one of “to have,” leaving me wondering if King was the one writer who somehow missed out on reading Hemingway. Action verbs propel a sentence; one would think that a horror/fantasy writer would know this, and part of me believes that at one time King did know this, and has just forgotten. The subject of the third sentence, “It,” seems to refer to “The hat” in the previous sentence, meaning that it’s the hat that “had garden trowels for hands,” but that’s not his intention. He means the overall scarecrow. Finally, the lack of specificity points up the falseness of the entire description:  the thing has a shirt with “something” written on it. Oh. That explains it.

5.

“The Bushey girl,” Big Jim said. “How was she? Was she good?”

Carter hesitated, then said: “A little dry at first, but she oiled up a-country fair.”

Big Jim laughed. The sound was metallic, like the sound of coins dropping into the tray of a slot machine.

Lately, as a party game of my own devising, I’ve been asking friends to duplicate a laugh that sounds metallic, “like the sound of coins dropping into the tray of a slot machine.” So far, no one has been able to do it. Actually, no one has been able to understand what it would sound like. One writer friend visibly winced when I read the line, and looked confused when I asked him to laugh that way. When he asks us to imagine this laugh, I have no idea what Stephen King is asking for, and neither does anyone else I know. Leaving aside a “metallic” laugh, which I suppose would be grating in the way of a rusty hinge and which might be duplicable, I think about the sound of those coins, as replicated by a human throat, and wonder why King didn’t go for the full monty and throw in the sound of the jackpot alarm that summons security guards and onlookers. No, no one can laugh that way – but they can’t do the rest of it either.

6.

She pulled his arm tighter around her, although it wasn’t cold.

This is another example of a pronoun-antecedent disagreement. What he means to say is that even though it (the temperature) wasn’t cold out, she pulled his arm tighter around her. But because of the way he’s constructed the sentence, it would seem that even though his arm isn’t cold, she pulled it tighter around her. This, again, seems the sort of thing an editor should catch.

7.

A minute later he was poised above her, resting on his elbows. She took him in hand to guide him in. “Take it easy on me, Colonel Barbara. I’ve kind of forgotten how this thing goes.”

“It’s like riding a bicycle,” Barbie said.

Turned out he was right.

This is another example of tonal mismatch. Read it out loud and cringe. Given the context, I think we’re supposed to feel glad for these characters that they’ve gotten together. But it’s written like low comedy, or an entry for one of those contests of bad writing.

8.

One overweight woman (Mabel Alston; she also suffers from what she calls the dia-betties) sprains her ankle and lies there hollering until a couple of men come over and get her on [sic] remaining good foot. Lennie Meechum, the town postmaster (at least until this week, when delivery of the U.S. mail was canceled for the foreseeable future), borrows a cane for her. Then he tells Henry that Mabel needs a ride back to town. Henry says he can’t spare a car. She’ll have to rest in the shade, he says.

This is not storytelling. These are notes for storytelling. The paragraph reads like an index card plucked off the plotting board, transcribed, and filed away. The parentheticals are in the way and add nothing. And the typo, of eliding the word “her,” which is precisely the sort of error that crops up more frequently as the book moves past page 700, contributes to my sense that the book isn’t properly edited.

The writing is bad. It’s also reflective of what is a very bad novel.

The book shifts verb tenses many times, from past tense to present. At first I thought this was because sections of the story were being told in past tense by a survivor. But no, it appears to be a mistake.

The author constantly interrupts the narrative with asides and judgments that are distracting and wearisome.

The characters are thinly drawn. Jim Rennie, one of the town selectmen, is so transparently bad that every voter in town must be either a reprobate or a fool. Both church pastors are cartoons – one is a hypocritical porn hound who’s been involved in crime; the other is a liberal female do-gooder with a soft touch on God. The heightened fantasy of every character’s situation highlights their innate falseness. Rennie doesn’t just operate a meth lab; no, he’s operating the world’s biggest meth lab with a network extending across the nation. The unbelievability of the situations harms the believability of the characters, which wasn’t strong to begin with.

As for suspense, on which King’s reputation rests, there is little. The mysterious dome that cuts off the small town in rural Maine from the rest of civilization, it transpires, has been put there by alien space children toying with humans for their amusement. No, I am not kidding you. How, then, is the book resolved? One of the townspeople gets to the transmitter and begs a little alien girl to let them go, and the dome magically vanishes into the atmosphere. This is so shameless a deus ex machina I’m surprised the author isn’t embarrassed by it. And what is the role of our hero in the climax of the story? None. He’s not the one who makes the effort to beg the alien girl.

Why, given all this, did I read every word on the 1100 pages of this book?

Part of it was shock. I couldn’t quite believe how had this was. Some years ago, I had read several books by this same author and enjoyed them. This wasn’t just a bad book, this was a very bad book, a book seemingly written by someone who patently couldn’t write. Surely, I thought, this is a hoax of some sort; there is a twist awaiting me past page 1000 that reveals that the story has been narrated badly by some character for a reason.

Another part was that I like to end things I finish. When I shared this with my son, he shared his opinion of that:  “That’s stupid.” In retrospect, he may have been right.

A final part was that there are lessons to be learned here. Words mean things. Writing is important. Good writing makes an impact that bad writing cannot. It’s important to know this and to practice it. Put this way, reading “Under the Dome” was like performing an autopsy to learn how the patient could have survived.

As I got further and further into the book and my shock at its awfulness mounted, as I scribbled notes and stuck markers in pages that were especially bad, my wife finally said, “Yeah, I know, it’s terrible.” This was surprising. Not that she had read my Christmas gift before giving it to me, which was fine, but because she plows through genre novels with a gleeful abandon, and she hated this one. “Wait ‘til you get to the end,” she said. “It gets even worse.”

True. Because when I finished the book I was left to wonder this:  Did Stephen King’s editor, whom he thanks in the afterword, think this was acceptable (or even good) writing? Or was she sufficiently cowed by his reputation to let it all go? And which of these two alternatives is worse? That’s what I’ve been thinking about since.

Today in my playwriting workshop we again discussed unreliable narration, and twist-ending plotting — and then later I took my daughter to see a movie that turned out to exemplify the perils therein.

Unreliable narrators (or protagonists) have made for some of the best debates drawn from literature. Is the knight in the Canterbury Tales the most accomplished hero in medieval history, or is he a boaster with few actual accomplishments? It’s difficult to read Chaucer’s tone on this, and the evidence seems fifty-fifty. In “Turn of the Screw,” is the governess haunted by those ghost children, or is she insane? In Richard Nixon’s autobiography, does he actually believe his lies and justifications, or is he brain-damaged?

But a truly unreliable narration demands that the argument be split both ways so that we doubt. If we can decide early on one way or the other, the game’s over. The narration — or protagonist — can be unreliable, but our conclusion has become definitive. Once that happens, everything afterward starts to look like transparent writing tricks.

The same goes with twist endings. If you can sniff out the twist early on, everything else becomes drudgery. Today in my workshop one writer asked for advice — to pursue writing an unreliable character and a twist, or to expose the device early on and approach the material from a different angle.  Do these twists well and you wind up with “The Sixth Sense.” Do it badly and you wind up with “The Village.” (Or, someone else chimed in, any other M. Night Shyamalan movie.)

So there I was at 2:15 for the beginning of this week’s big new movie, and by the first scene I was sure I knew what was up. By the third scene, I had confirmation. The obvious problem with relying on gimmicks is that if they fail, you have nothing else to entertain people with. The leading man still looks like a rat-faced little boy to me, and his acting in this movie is stapled together from 50’s B-movies and James Cagney, circa the grapefruit-in-your-face era. Even the first scene looks utterly fake, and for reasons that mystify me:  It’s merely of people talking on a boat, and yet the background rolls past like a canvas in a stage melodrama. Is it so difficult to film people on a boat that you need to Photoshop every frame? If you know your lead character can’t be trusted, and that leads you to an immediate conclusion about the unsurprising twist awaiting you an endless two hours and ten minutes in the future, and your popcorn has already run out, what’s left to be enjoyed?

Whenever this happens to me in the movies (and it happens all too often), I wonder if others see things this way. The woman two seats to my left gasped and murmured throughout the movie like a lady with a hand up her skirt. At one point I actually looked over to see if she had been signed out for the day from a nearby facility. But no; she was just slack-jawed in absorption with a truly dumb  and patently phony bit of hooey made by supposedly the greatest living American director. Which left me remembering this exchange from “Annie Hall”:

Alvy Singer (the Woody Allen character):  Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?
Female street stranger:  Yeah.
Alvy Singer:  Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?
Female street stranger: Uh, I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Male street stranger: And I’m exactly the same way.

How much time do writers actually spend writing? This writer estimates his output at between 2 and 5% of his time. If that holds true for most writers, then most writers would be better off holding a job and writing on the side — which is precisely counter to the conventional wisdom.

J.D. Salinger wasn’t seen in public again today, a trend that is expected to continue indefinitely.

The LA Times’ Scott Timberg provides a basic overview of Philip K. Dick’s final years, which Dick spent living in Orange County when it was in its late Reagan period.

This piece makes mention of the forthcoming film adaptation of one of Dick’s finest novels, “Radio Free Albemuth.” I’m always torn when it comes to filmed versions of novels I love.  As a playwright, I love what actors and directors bring to words — the good actors and directors, anyway. But film is a different medium; a novel doesn’t need anyone but the writer. So, in general, I stay away. That didn’t prevent me from seeing the filmed version of “The Road” (more about that later), and I’m still itching to see that film version of “Anna Karenina,” because Alfred Molina seems as though he’d be so perfectly cast as Levin. Of course, once I heard that Molina was playing Levin, I haven’t been able to think of Levin in any other form — and that’s part of the problem.

This story also mentions Dick’s “realist” novels. For many years, I eagerly awaited their posthumous publication; then, unfortunately, they started to get published. “Confessions of a Crap Artist,” which was published in Dick’s lifetime, is an ingenious and completely captivating postmodern story told from three different points of view; ultimately, the entire story may be a lie (or fiction) told by the self-professed “crap artist” of the title. It’s a book that should stand alongside far better known literary American novels of the 20th century.  “Mary and the Giant” has the benefit of an explosive story — a young white girl takes up with a large African-American singer and then an elderly shopkeeper — but is utterly lacking thematic unity; its ending leaves you wondering what it was all about. “Voices from the Street,” written in 1952 and finally published in 2007, makes for less engaging reading than the Chinese phone book. Characters natter on endlessly about nothing. I tried twice to read it and got only halfway. Here’s a review from “In Milton Lumky Territory” that might speak for most of the non-science-fiction books Dick wrote:

Like many of Dick’s main characters in his realistic novels, Bruce and Susan decide they need to move to start again—but missing from most of these novels is what happens to the characters after they have moved. Similarly, the tone of In Milton Lumky Territory is not very adroit; as in his science fiction novels, the story can feel sparse and padded with unneeded adjectives. There is little of the wild conjecture that one finds in Dick’s more popular books; rather than oppressive and violent governments of the future, there are toxic personalities to avoid.

That sounds about right:  Nothing happens in these books.  And no, not much happens in Philip Roth’s latest book either, but it happens far more interestingly because the internal life of the protagonist is so deeply plumbed.

These negatives about the realist novels  aside (and, again, one of them is excellent), I’m confident that Philip K. Dick’s legend and influence will grow even higher. Edgar Allan Poe was a far worse writer, one given to lugubrious prose in his fiction and overstressed cadences in his poetry, but we remember him for inventing the detective story and the gothic horror tale. Dick has made no less an impact in his paranoid but telling vision of an overcommercialized culture controled by the colation of government, business, and celebrity. This vision is best expressed as a whole in three books — “Ubik,” “Radio Free Albemuth,” and “Confessions of a Crap Artist”– and they remain recommended.

There are two kinds of bad books:  the badly conceived and the badly written.

The former can be insidious, inciting war, genocide, civil unrest, poverty, and more. The past century is a catalog of such writing.

Bad writing can be symptomatic of bad thinking, but usually no one dies as a result. That said, though, the novel I just finished reading almost killed me. I have read countless books in my life, including many bad books and very many badly written books. But I’m thinking that the book I just finished is the worst written book I’ve ever read. And it’s by one of the most popular authors in history:  Stephen King.

More soon about the awful time I spent Under the Dome. I have flagged many pages and I will have much to say about them.

Some years ago I made my living as a freelance writer.

While I still make my living as a writer, this column reminds me why I’m glad I’m not counting on freelance magazine and newspaper revenue any more.

By the way, one of the low rates listed in this column comes out to six cents a word. I recall getting paid one cent  a word by The Comics Journal (or a bounteous $25 for an interview) — and constantly having to cajole and threaten to collect that.

Last year, Google released the Android platform for smartphones.

Now it’s releasing the Nexus One phone.

This is not sitting well with the estate of an author who wrote a book about a bounty hunter pursuing androids of the Nexus-6 model class.

Today I was delighted to have lunch with the well-known photographer Harry Langdon. Go to his website and you’ll see that Harry has a long and legendary career as a celebrity photographer. He’s done sessions for people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Foxx, Ronald Reagan, Stevie Nicks, B.B. King, and so forth. But when a mutual friend told me some months ago that her photographer was Harry Langdon, I said:

“Is he related to the Harry Langdon?”

She thought he was “the” Harry Langdon. But I was thinking of the great silent-film comedian often ranked with Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd:  Harry Langdon, the gifted clown who had run away to join the circus as a boy, became (briefly) one of the highest-paid stars of his era, wound down his career writing jokes for Laurel and Hardy (and, once, substituted for Laurel in an “& Hardy” film), and made a total of 96 films. That Harry Langdon.

She didn’t know. She’d never heard of that Harry Langdon.

A  few days later she emailed to say that yes, he was the son of that Harry Langdon, and would I like to have lunch with Harry Langdon, Jr?  So, today, there I was in Beverly Hills pulling mussels from their shells while discussing senior with Harry Langdon, Jr.   Lunch today was on a near par with the evening 15 years ago I spent in the company of Eleanor Keaton.   I may not care about what Tiger Woods or Lady Gaga are up to, but summoning the distant celebrity past of the silent comedy era is something I can get into.

We talked for a bit and Harry Langdon, Jr. said, “You do seem very well informed about my father.” I told him how much I love silent film comedy; how it represents a specific style of comedy that cannot be done since the introduction of sound; how I grew to love it when watching it as a small boy with my own father; how thrilled I was in college to learn of the connection between silent film comedy, vaudeville, theatre of the absurd, and existentialism (Beckett, who grew up admiring vaudevillians and clowns, based Didi and Gogo on Laurel & Hardy; Keaton’s deadpan comedy of menace is purely existential; Beckett made just one film — and it was with Keaton as the star); and how wonderful and funny an actor I thought his father was. Finally I let the subject wind down because I was afraid I was starting to come across as an obsessive. But then Harry told me where he was last night:

“I was a holiday party. At Stan Lee’s.”

“You were at Stan Lee’s holiday party?” I asked.

“You know him? He made a lot of money in comic books.”

Trying not to do a spit take, and worried again about how I was going to come off, I said, “Um… the other thing you should know about me is that I’m a huge, huge comic-book fan.”

And then that topic went on for at least several minutes.

Last night, this year’s Moving Arts one-act festival closed. Afterward I hung around ’til 1:30 in the morning with a few other people and dismantled the set flats for pickup and storage the next morning. I was sad to see the festival close, especially because I was proud of so much of the work, including the three plays I was most closely involved with: one that I wrote, and two that I directed. (I wrote a scene for the event at the Natural History Museum, too, but never got to see it. I hear it was good.) But while I was sad to see it close, another side of me wasn’t sorry at all. To give you an idea why, I share my Halloween costume this year:

This was our 15th annual one-act festival, so I think at this point we know how to do such events. But we had so many problems it’s like we were cursed:

• an actor in one of my plays was hospitalized with a heart infection
• another actor was hospitalized after passing out in a bus
• the understudy I cast to take over for actor #1, above, suddenly came down so ill he was laid up with an IV drip
• another actor almost broke her wrist because a flat was moved into a position it didn’t belong, blocking her entrance in the dark
• another actor slipped and fell outside on the cement — twice
• the lead in my play was in a car accident just prior to opening
• a supporting actor in one I directed was in a car crash and hospitalized with a concussion

You might (somehow!) chalk that up to actor problems, but we had major ongoing tech problems, too.

• At the end of an 8-hour cue-to-cue rehearsal in which all the light and sound cues were programmed, they mysteriously disappeared. All of them had to be reprogrammed, which added nine hours onto the day. (I said, “I won’t be here at 2 a.m.” And wound up leaving at 1:56 a.m.)
• Some nights the stage lights would seize, stranding the actors in the dim lights set for scene change. After this happened a second time, the tech crew spent an entire day checking every cord and cable and instrument and all the impressive buttons and levers on all the tech equipment, but couldn’t duplicate the problem.
• One night prior to opening when we’re getting our press photos taken, it starts to rain. Water starts to drip onto the stage floor. Our producer wisely puts down a bucket and a towel. Naturally, in all the press photos for my play, the bucket and towel are front and center. Later someone Photoshops them out (but not before we nickname them Mr. Bucket and his sidekick, Towelly). But more editing is necessary later, because the actor on the left is one of those who wind up hospitalized.
• Props and set pieces and costumes would mysteriously vanish. One night the bottle of Rolling Rock so emblematic of my lead character’s small-town truck-mechanic milieu was gone, substituted quickly with a PBS-subscriber Heineken someone helpfully located. Another night the prop baby openly referenced in one play couldn’t be located, so the woman playing its mother had to mime carrying a baby. When the mother shared her distress about the baby, her fellow actor helpfully chimed in, “But Mom — the baby isn’t even there!”
• Previously, I shared the story of  the incredible professionalism of an actor who went on for one of those hospitalized actors, off-book, with no rehearsal, and who was absolutely terrific in his performance.  What I didn’t share at that time was the rest of the story. The play starts and I’m sitting in the house and I’m just blown away by how great this actor is — in fact, by how great all three cast members are. I’m very proud of this play and them and my work directing it, and I’m enjoying the stark lighting that I wanted, and then… I start to hear something. It sounds like… music. In Spanish. Like a Mexican radio station, slightly not tuned in. I pull out my iPhone and text the board op in the booth:  “Why is there music on stage?” I get a text back:  “I don’t know. It’s not coming from the booth.” In other words, she doesn’t show it and she can’t hear it. My actors, including the understudy who has taken over, bravely soldier on, but everyone in the theatre is well aware of this music now, and of course, it’s the night that we’ve got a critic from one of the more important papers. I sit there and seethe.I don’t know who, but someone must die. And so I go down the mental list of suspects and as I pick through that list scratching off one name after another because really none of them is to blame, I start to realize that it’s even worse than I’d imagined:  There is no one to blame. No one.

No one is responsible for the out-of-tune Mexican radio station providing lively background for what should be the searing drama about a passenger getting beaten to death on a commercial airliner. No one is to blame for the vanishing props and the tumbling actors and the car crashes and the deadly airborne toxins and the wandering electrical shorts and on and on. We’ve done a festival for 15 years, and many of the people involved in this festival have been involved in many of those years. No, we’re just somehow… cursed.

My friend Trey blamed his play “Move”:  “This is the last time I write a play with a ghost in it.” My wife picks up this theme and says that a la “Macbeth,” which theatre people superstitiously call “The Scottish Play,” Trey’s play should now be referred to as “The Motion Play.” That was funny — but whatever ghost might have been the root cause plagued all the plays in all three evenings.

The night of the Mexican radio broadcast, I figured that somehow the equipment in the booth had become a receiver. This can happen. (It never happened again, and no, we never figured out how it happened that once.)  But once I realized there was no one to blame, I did the smart thing after that night’s show ended:  I gave up. Uncharacteristic, I know, but it’s one thing to struggle against oneself or others, it’s another to shake your fist at the sky. We had surmounted every possible torment and soldiered on, and no amount of testing and retesting and trial and error had been able to replicate any of the tech problems — they simply happened or didn’t. So I gave in and guzzled wine in the courtyard with about 20 other Moving Artists and we all laughed and laughed great rolling waves of laughter, the cascading eruptions of people who’ve been electrocuted but lived. The only thing left to befall us would be a meteorite crashing from the sky, and if that was going to happen, well, there was no stopping that either. So we all just gave in and gave up.

And after that we never had another tech problem.