I'm not a huge fan of Stephen King by I have enjoyed some of his work in the past. Under the Dome is an alarmingly large book, which made the audio version of it an ideal way to read.

King is a craftsman and despite the length of the book he keeps things moving fast. It doesn't feel long while you're reading it. You also don't really notice any flaws until you have time to think about it afterwards.

And there are a few flaws in this story of a small town suddenly stuck under a mysterious invisible force field. The rate at which things escalate and the scale of the disasters are a little hard to credit when looked at calmly. The number of coincidences required to make everything work stretches credibility.

But King deftly side steps this by presenting us with a tense situation and just squeezing tighter and tighter. And then when you think things are impossibly bleak… he makes it even worse. He’s always had a knack for likeable characters so the ghastly things he visits on many of them hit hard and ramp the stakes up even more.

His sometimes over-descriptive style can be easily ignored because you are so eager to find out what happens to these people. Somewhat more irritating are the random interludes where we see things from the point of view of animals. These seem largely unnecessary and stick out from the rest of the narrative.

His town of Chester’s Mill is populated by Stephen King tropes, not least of which are the religious lunatics and corrupt politicians. But somehow it doesn’t matter. The loathsome people are incredibly loathsome but the heroes are more rounded and it just makes you want to see the villains finally get their comeuppance even more.

My only real disappointment was the ending which could not live up to the intense buildup that King achieved.