Under the Dome

Stephen King is so successful because he understands the point of literature.  The characters aren't there to move along the plot, the plot is there to further the characters.
       Needless to say, in his recent, whopping thousand page novel Under the Dome, King's characters are stunning.  I was especially intrigued by the relationship between the coldly ambitious Big Jim Rennie and his sadistic son Junior, who together represented (I believe) pretty much all the evil possible in the world.
       The plot, despite being secondary to the characters, was also intriguing.  After all, who doesn't want to read a book about a backwards town trapped inside a giant shot-glass.
       There were somethings in the book that seemed to be missing, like say, an editor, and there were details I would've done differently...
       "SPOILER ALERT" somebody dies.  Actually, more than one, actually quite a lot of people die, pretty much in every chapter.  After a while it stopped feeling like a book and started to read like a well written synopsis of a thousand ways to die.  Two thousand ways actually.  The excessive death to survival ratios also started to make the book lose it's horrifying element, because I stopped counting the dead people stuffed in closets and started counting the people who escaped.  Then the book actually became kinda cheery.
      But overall I would definitely recommend Under the Dome as one of Stephen King's better books.  If you're on vacation and have a large chunk of reading time to kill, this book is like an assassin.
       It leaves everybody six feet below.
But no it's really good.