In Praise of Stephen King

Just finished reading Under The Dome, the latest from a long-time favourite of mine, Stephen King. For some reason that I can't quite explain, I've always had a real respect for his writing, probably ever since reading Pet Semetary under the covers as a young teenager being utterly terrified, then reading Misery while supposed to be revising for exams and being ... utterly terrified.

His latest, on paper, really doesn't sound as good as it turns out to be: huge unexplained (alien?) dome descends over small Maine town. Residents can't escape, go crazy, martial law comes to the fore, old grudges resurface and most end up dying horribly. Then dome mysteriously disappears.



But there's something about King's writing that is so good that even after 900 pages you just don't want it to stop... The thing is so long that King even publishes a map of the imagined town, and a full list of all the protagonists, like the great Russian novelists of the 19th and 20th Centuries, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn. Am I comparing King to these greats? Actually maybe I am - although the veneer may be thriller / horror / gore, there's a lot he says about how people's deepest secrets, desires and fears seep out when circumstances change. The vilains of the book are all the kinds of folk who Raskolnikov runs into in Crime and Punishment - as archetypal and as disturbingly single-minded.

The portrait of small town America is not flattering, but at least it doesn't play to any contemporary political agendas; instead King's always spoken of Maine with that mix of love, respect, and the utter helplessness of someone who just can't leave his home town. When he's being elegiac he's magnificent (he's written pieces about Maine for the New Yorker); when he's in thriller mode you can't put him down; when he's in horror mode it's all you can do to turn away...

Go read Under The Dome - it's brilliant.