Under The Dome - Reception

Reception

The author Dan Simmons, to whom Stephen King sent the manuscript for Under the Dome as a gift, commented on it on May 5, 2009, calling the novel "huge, generous, sprawling, infinitely energetic, absolutely enjoyable and impressive." Publishers Weekly reviewed the novel on September 11, 2009, calling it "formidably complex and irresistibly compelling." The review said the book contains "themes and images from King's earlier fiction, and while this novel doesn't have the moral weight of, say, The Stand, nevertheless, it's a nonstop thrill ride as well as a disturbing, moving meditation on our capacity for good and evil". In a review for The Plain Dealer, Daniel Dyer calls Under the Dome "a massive cautionary novel", saying it is "busy, ambitious, overlong but addictively munchable, fundamentally a novel about human cruelty, animated by our desires for power, pleasure and sex." USA Today called the novel "propulsively intriguing", "staggeringly addictive", and stated that "eaders can wallow in this glorious novel's metaphoric and oh-so au courant messages about U.S. domination, freedom of the press, torture and environmental abuse, but they also can come to this novel just for the story." The Los Angeles Times called Under the Dome "impressive", containing "lucid prose and chilling precision." Janet Maslin's review for the New York Times said that Under the Dome "has the scope and flavor of literary Americana." Maslin says, "Hard as this thing is to hoist, it’s even harder to put down." Ted Anthony of The Associated Press states that "Under the Dome is one of those works of fiction that manages to be both pulp and high art, that successfully—and very improbably—captures the national zeitgeist at this particularly strange and breathless period in American history." On November 9, 2009, the author Neil Gaiman in his blog stated that "Under the Dome was one of my favourite books of the year so far."

James Parker of the New York Times noted in his review of Under the Dome that the novel contains lines that are "stinkers", which made him feel "the clutch of sorrow." Regarding King's "pulp speed" output, James Parker noted: "We shouldn’t be too squeamish about the odd half-baked simile or lapse into B-movie dialogue." The review in the New York Post states that Under the Dome "shares some of The Stand’s faults, like a left-field disaster that works almost as a reverse deus ex machina, randomly wiping out half the cast. In both novels, the climactic "battle"—if you can really call it that—pales to the buildup. King is better at characters and situations than causes and reasons. But at least The Stand feels like a saga . I won’t reveal the secret of the Dome, except to say that the payoff is more Star Trek (original series) than epic." John Dugdale, in a review for The Sunday Times wrote: "King's inability to raise his game—to relinquish the methods of his more straightforward tales of the paranormal—prevents you taking his socio-­political vision seriously. The simple division of characters into goodies and baddies, the use of magic, the homespun style, the sentimental ending, the vital role played by a dog in defeating the forces of evil—all of these belong in fiction for older children, not the grown-up novels he's bent on emulating."