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Apt Lord of the Flies comparisons aside, there are some fundamental weaknesses that are impossible to overlook about KingFest 2009, aka Under the Dome. Beautiful, lyrical prose--and there was a good deal of that, I won't deny it--ultimately do very little to disguise the elemental failings of this book. Let's get back to basics. CHARACTERIZATION: Cardboard, at best; cartoonish for many, caricature too often. It's been a long time since King did such a poor job of making his characters real people. Dale "Barbie" Barbara doesn't remotely ring true in my experience of Iraq vets, and I know a few. Barbie seems less creation than an idea-ation; nothing about him is fully believable. Indeed, for a LONG time, I kept thinking that we were going to discover that the Dome and its inhabitants were nothing but Barbie's nightmare. Maybe if they had been, I'd have liked the book better. Then, instead of an uninteresting, badly developed character, I'd have been dealing with an unreliable narrator. Big Jim Rennie is, for my money, King's least interesting villain--EVER. He's just a drug dealing psychopath for no discernible reason. The heavy handed over-paint of Hypocritical Christian Republican doesn't make Rennie either more evil, or better motivated. Instead, it serves to point up that Rennie isn't a real character--he's only a caricature, plugged into the service the "people will inevitably destroy themselves" plot that King commits himself to. Rennie doesn't need real reasons for the havoc he's wreaking, because he's just the device to get the havoc committed. Joe McClatchey, the child savior of the piece comes closest to being a real character--though his incidental pre-pubescent fantasizing about Norrie kissing him at wholly inappropriate moments gets old in a hurry. Julia Shumway is a completely incompetent boob of a woman, despite King's best efforts to make her seem like an intelligent East Coast Liberal Woman of Democratic Extraction. Seriously--if she were all that smart, she would have been smart enough to have outmaneuvered Rennie and his minions MOST of the time. The fact that she's so stupid that she doesn't foresee the burning of the newspaper, much less put any kind of plan to forestall it in place--Julia is just bone stupid. Frankly, everyone was bone stupid. NO WAIT--there was that one kid, there at the end, who dragged his grandfather's oxygen tanks to the potato bin. That kid had about a half a clue. But he seems to have been the ONLY one. PLOT: Pedestrian, predictable and to be honest, PLODDING. This book is a SOLID chunk of paper. If only the story were as solid as the physicality of the book, this would be a better review. Sadly, the plot is as recycled as the paper the book appears to be printed on. "The Aliens Did It" is the sci-fi/horror variant of The Butler. Unfortunately, Mr. King has blamed The Aliens before in his work, and done so more effectively--although it's not by ANY means one of his more effective deus ex machina. And the Deo (or should I call it the Mimsy?) running this particular Machina is just silly. At least as silly as the tommyknockers, IMNSHO, and maybe as silly as Duddits. In any case, it's not remotely successful, unless you're willing to count just being able to exit the plot/book as an accomplishment--which I don't. "Town Goes Fascist Under Influence of Bully" has been the basic plot of too many Lifetime Movies of The Week to generate any suspense. We all know this story, (Patrick Swayze usually played the Good Outsider) and King does nothing to change up the notes. Even the folding in of He Who Murders Slutty Girls as a device to frame the `protagonist' doesn't generate anything but disgust--though as a migraine sufferer, I certainly sympathize with the need to kill someone when they irritate you in the throes of a headache. If that piece of plotting had been left at that, Junior might have had a shot at a personality. As it stands, he's a dimestore Ted Bundy whose murder spree adds nothing to the plot. Worst of all, this mishmash drags out forever--and in the final analysis, it's ultimately unforgivable where the plot's concerned. This could have been a 100 page novella, and hit all the same notes, and done it far more effectively. In fact, I think King has DONE it in 100 pages more effectively, hasn't he? THE FINAL INSULT: LACK OF IMAGINATION Why, WHY does everybody in this stupid town KEEP DRIVING AROUND???? BURNING THEIR GENERATORS???? Seriously, even if an idiot like Jim Rennie were in charge of some little town that got trapped under a `dome', SOMEONE would be bringing up the fact that there's a limited amount of oxygen under there! Not in THIS book, though--even though there's a specific discussion about particulates, etc. outside the main action. Even the stupid newspaper editor, who supposedly understands that `nothing' is getting in or out of the Dome, keeps running her stupid copy machine. I wanted to smother them all. Why, why, WHY does not ONE person suggest taking any kind of INVENTORY? Not of food, not of gas, not of medical supplies, not even a census of people! Good lord, just the OFFICE I work for does an inventory of that kind of stuff if there's a particularly bad winter storm forecast, and Lord knows, our boss isn't Albert Einstein. Rennie would have been a much more believable villain if he'd involved everyone in an inventory, and then used the results to further his takeover. And most aggravating of all, WHERE ARE THE SENSIBLE PEOPLE? Under the Dome posits a small town where ONE SOLITARY PERSON has either any common sense, common decency, or spine and when King kills him off, everyone else is either so venal that they immediately jump on the Bully Bandwagon, or they blindly knuckle under to the bullies, until they get "pushed too far." Not one character--including the supposed protagonists--just flat stands up and says, "People, we are in trouble. Maybe we need to sit down and think things through for 5 minutes before we go off half cocked." Under the Dome had the potential to be about dealing with isolation, scarcity of resource, a community under extraordinary pressures, etc. and how the people/characters chose to deal with adverse circumstances and their own human nature. Certainly, there's a place for darkness in that story. Unfortunately, instead of telling that story, SK has tossed together a sad amalgam of stories told before, badly caricatured stock types and rabbit out of a hat solutions. Fans? ARE YOU SERIOUS??? FANS!?!?!?! I've rarely been more infuriated by a failed novel. FANS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!