Under the Dome, by Stephen King

I think my infatuation with Stephen King's writing just ended.  I loved Misery, The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption and so my expectations for Under the Dome were high.  Unfortunately, King's latest novel suffers from the same problem as The Stand--the huge investment in time is not rewarded by the ending.

I enjoyed the beginning of the novel where a small town in Maine is trapped under a dome.  A political struggle ensues between a power-lusting local Selectman and a visiting ex-soldier picked by the U.S. government.  The first quarter of the book does a good job setting up the confrontation between these two, but then the plot slowly fizzles after this.

In the third quarter of the book when we want to see the ex-soldier on the attack and fighting back against the bad guy, he spends most of the time in a jail cell while minor characters run around mostly responding to the bad guy.  When the good guys finally do show some initiative in the fourth quarter, much of their plans are overtaken by other events and they are never really controlling the situation.  The final resolution was also not satisfying and was too deus ex machina for me--the final resolution was not set up in the first part of the book and was not even really connected to the main story.

One final complaint was that I wasn't really drawn to any of the characters like I was in The Stand (a very comparable book).  The bad guys were actually portrayed more fully than the good guys in that we understood their motivations better.

Its too bad, really, because I had been looking forward to reading this book for quite some time.  But perhaps that is part of the problem--my expectations were just too high.