AUDIOBOOK read by Raul Esparza

I am a long time Stephen King fan and have read most (if not all) of his books.  I started reading King when I was 16 (The Shining) and can classify all of his books into three categories: Amazing (Dark Tower Series, The Stand, IT, Bag of Bones), Good (Duma Key, Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, most of his short story collections), and Not Bad (Dolores Claiborne, The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon, Blaze).  My first reaction was to put Under the Dome in the middle category and the more I think about it, the more I think that’s right.  Under the Dome is the story of a small town in Maine (go figure) that is suddenly surrounded by a transparent dome.  Nothing can get in or out and no one knows how it got there or how to get rid of it.  While the story has the typical King spookiness to it (spoiler: it’s aliens), the main focus of the novel is not on the workings of the dome, but on the town’s reaction to it.  The story chronicles the fear of the town, the workings of the town selectman who wants total power and feeds those fears, and the irrational behaviors that result.  It is easy to draw the parallels to the willingness of Americans to give up freedoms in the wake of 9/11 out of fear.  The tale of how politicians and those in power use fear to control people is the moral to this story.

I think if I would have read the actual book, I would have enjoyed it a little more.  The audiobook clocks in at over 34 hours (the book is over 1,000 pages) and it tended to bog down at times, especially in the early going.  I am a fast reader and adept at skimming sections where King gets wordy, but that is not possible with an audiobook, so I sometimes felt trapped and wished I could fast forward a bit.  Despite that, the book is well read by Esparza and I ultimately enjoyed the tale.  Worth the listen if you’ve got 35 spare hours.