Under the Dome
Stephen King, 2009
Horror Science fictionMystery, thriller & crimeFantasy
A small Maine town is sealed under an invisible dome, and the people inside discover what they become without an outside.
Feels like dread and serenity. About power and freedom.
A page from the book
The moment care turns into a kind of ownership.
Denial gives way to acceptance; acceptance breeds dependence. Anyone who’s ever cared for a terminal patient will tell you that, too. Sick people need someone who will bring them their pills and glasses of cold sweet juice to wash them down with. They need someone to soothe their aching joints with arnica gel. They need someone to sit with them when the night is dark and the hours stretch out. They need someone to say, Sleep now, it will be better in the morning. I’m here, so sleep. Sleep now. Sleep and let me take care of everything. Stephen King.King first tried the idea in the 1970s and set it aside; he finally finished Under the Dome decades later, publishing it in 2009.
Books that feel like this
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A Maine town, a childhood summer, and the shape-shifting thing that hunts its children — a horror novel about memory as much as monsters.
The Stand
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A flu escapes a lab and empties America; survivors choose between a saintly old woman and a smiling dark man. King's big, bleak, compulsive plague epic.
Pet Sematary
Stephen King, 1983
A doctor moves his family to a Maine town where the local pet cemetery sits beside something older, and grief becomes a door that should stay shut.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Under the Dome like?
- Feels like dread and serenity. About power and freedom.
- What should I read after Under the Dome?
- If you liked Under the Dome, try Inferno (Dan Brown), Death Note, Vol. 1 (Tsugumi Ohba) and The Dragon Reborn (Robert Jordan).
A taste of the feed
The geography of a nightmare, mapped in blood and bodies.
Langdon took a step toward the river, but he could see the waters were bloodred and too deep to traverse. When Langdon raised his eyes again to the veiled woman, the bodies at her feet had multiplied. There were hundreds of them now, maybe thousands, some still alive, writhing in agony, dying unthinkable deaths . . . consumed by fire, buried in feces, devouring one another. He could hear the mournful cries of human suffering echoing across the water.
Inferno · Dan Brown
Certainty this total is usually the start of something terrible.
I AM RIGHTEOUS!! I’m the hero who’s liberating people from fear. I’m the savior who’s going to be like a god of this perfect new world!
Death Note, Vol. 1 · Tsugumi Ohba
The oldest trick in politics: invent a monster, then volunteer to kill it.
Do you know how to unite the people behind you, Child Carridin? The quickest way? Loose a lion - a rabid lion - in the streets. And when panic grips the people, once it has turned their bowels to water, calmly tell them you will deal with it. Then you kill it, and order them to hang the carcass up where everyone can see. Before they have time to think, you give another order, and it will be obeyed. And if you continue to give orders, they will continue to obey, for you will be the one who saved them, and who better to lead?
The Dragon Reborn · Robert Jordan
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