Under the Dome

Under the Dome by Stephen King. 

If you've read King before then you know what you're getting into before you start this book and I would blurb this book "The Stand Lite". 

It's over a thousand pages long making it appear like The Stand in a visual sense, but it's nowhere near as good as The Stand was. That doesn't mean Under the Dome isn't good, it is good just not as good as The Stand was. 

King has this power to create and write about small towns that is truly remarkable and here that power is on full display as he creates this small town that one day gets this invisible dome put around the town that extends miles up, miles below, and miles around them. Basically encapsulating in something that amounts to a fish bowl.  Then King populates this town with characters that seem to live and breathe as he gives them a rich, full history that as the story goes on you really get to know them in a personal way. King has always been good at this, but this close examination of the town under a dome takes it to a whole other level, as we get to see how this town would react in such a crisis as being encased in a dome. It's interesting seeing how different people would respond in different ways if such a thing happened. As the story goes on the small town really becomes alive as you get to know the landscape, the stores, the buildings, the different houses, the small restaurants, the roads, the radio stations and the other things that make a small town run like clock work. But the real show is the Dome and seeing how it, from a fantastical point of view, would react in our real world makes the Dome come alive. I'm not going to get too crazy with telling you how, but reading about it was really cool as King brought a realistic perspective to the Dome that I would've never thought of and that realistic perspective really made the story more interesting than it would've been. That is a writer's job: to bring a different perspective to something that would either seem normal or abnormal and then write what happens.  Stephen King has done that here.