Stephen King’s lengthy, ambitious novel traces what happens after a dome-like, invisible force field cuts off Chester’s Mill, Maine, from the rest of the world, announcing its sudden arrival one October day when a plane crashes into it. With no power or food supplies coming in, and no outsiders able to enter, the small town becomes of necessity self-governing and self-sufficient.

Isolated by this bewildering para­normal phenomenon, Chester’s Mill is presented for inspection as if displayed in a glass dome in a museum (presumably the title’s intended secondary meaning). King creates around 100 characters, with every generation from young children to the elderly convincingly represented, and takes in the town’s council offices, police station, churches, medical centre, dental surgery, funeral home, radio station, newspaper, farms, shops and restaurants.

Prevented from quitting New England for a new life down south by the dome’s descent, Dale “­Barbie” Barbara — a guilt-stricken Iraq war veteran now working as a cook — is swiftly established as the novel’s hero. His army background means he’s known to the colonel in charge of military efforts to penetrate the force field (the cause of which is only revealed, not very satisfactorily, towards the end); and within the town his allies include Julia Shumway, the local paper’s editor, Rusty Everett, a doctor, and Andrea Grinnell, a council official.

Ranged against them are enemies led by “Big Jim” Rennie, a car salesman and Chester’s Mill’s “Second Selectman” or deputy mayor. With the feeble First Selectman sidelined, Rennie becomes the town’s tyrannical ruler. His son Junior, a rapist and double murderer, is one of a group of young special deputies recruited to enforce his reign of terror, in which all opposition is ruthlessly eliminated: Brenda, widow of a police chief who stood up to him, is killed by Rennie himself; Barbie and Rusty are jailed on trumped-up charges; Julia’s office is firebombed.

As the town hurtles with alarming speed via factional strife, riots and killings towards a symbolic apocalypse, you’re left to wonder: is this a fable about mankind’s ­corruptibility, like Lord of the Flies, or (as a miniature polis nominally run by a fool but really controlled by his sinister deputy, it appears designed to recall the Bush-Cheney regime) a political ­allegory, like Animal Farm?

A mixture of the two seems the likely aim. However, 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.

But as an evocation of a community, this is a remarkable achievement: few other post-war writers have attempted to portray small-town America so comprehensively.

Under the Dome by Stephen King
Hodder £19.99 pp880

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