Under the Dome

There were some parts of this book that I would rate at four stars, and some at two stars, so I split the difference and gave it three.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on here - there's the obvious ecological parable contained within the story, with the problems faced by those under the Dome being similar to the ones we all face in terms of global climate change and global warming. King's also commented that the story could be taken as a 9/11 parallel, with the first and second selectmen of Chester Mills filling in for Bush and Cheney. It also works as an exploration of the Stanford Prison Experiment and its real-life examples of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

At the end of the book, though, it kind of all falls apart. We go through hundreds and hundreds of pages about how horrible people can be when the constraints of society fall apart, and how we are, ultimately, our own worst enemies. Then we find out that we are our own worst enemies - except for the god-like alien beings that can place us under a dome at will and destroy an entire city. It's completely inconsistent with the rest of the book, and for me it cheapened the entire story.