Yet, also like Dickens, he's not simply repeating himself. A deranged character, Phil Bushey, is similar to the crazy Trashcan Man in The Stand. His hero, Dale Barbara, a stoic, Iraq-War vet/loner who ends up being a natural leader, is a variation on Stu Redman, the stoic hero of The Stand. The narrative of this long, never dull, heavy (as in literally heavy: it weighs about 15 pounds) book only covers a little over a week, yet within that time, King brilliantly illustrates how civilized society can unravel and opportunists and petty dictators can arise.Īgain like Dickens, King works with characters he's explored before. It is a situation where the best and absolute worst will come out in people. As with the best of fantasy, horror and science fiction, this isn't about it's premise or setting, it's about what happens when a group of people are isolated from the rest of society and forced to fend for themselves. The premise is simplicity itself: one fine autumn day in the little Maine town of Chester's Mill, a huge, impenetrable invisible glass dome descends over the town cutting off everybody within it from the rest of the United States. Which brings me to King's latest endeavour, the 1074-page long Under The Dome. Why? If you want to understand the era these books were written in, I submit you will come away with a better understanding reading Dickens or King than trying to wade through most literary fiction or history books published at the same time. I predict in a century they will still both be widely read and studied. Most of Dickens 20+ books have never been out of print and to date neither has King's. Forgetting this joke about his prolific ways for a second (he's written/co-written over 65 novels, short-story collections or works of non-fiction since 1974 - I've read over 30 of them), I think that Stephen King is the Charles Dickens of the late 20th/early 21st centuries.īoth were/are successful populists, both wrote/write about societal ills (Dickens' set in a version of the real world of England King's generally from within the horror or science fiction genres), both were/are always concerned with writing a good story that would appeal to the largest number of readers. He freezes for THREE SECONDS and then starts typing like mad again. There's an old joke about Stephen King: He sits at his typewriter, pounding out reams of pages for his latest book.
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