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 18th 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.
