Cujo eats The Dome

I love Stephen King. At his best, King creates wonderful vignettes of characters, moments where you see into their lives for one brilliant, lucid second, and then they are gone. Drove down the road, missed the monster, or gruesomely killed. But King is also at heart a softy. Death may come to the innocent, but it comes quickly. The evil are always punished, and punished terribly.

I recently read two King books in quick succession, Cujo and the Dome. Cujo is the tightly written and suspenseful story of a dog gone rabid, holding a woman and her young son hostage in a hot car. The story is tightly paced, keeps you interested, leads you down some unexpected roads, and ends on a tragic, but somewhat uplifting moment.

Now I make it a point to read all the King I can get my hands on except for the Dark Tower series, which are godawful. So when I got a chance to buy The Dome for a couple of dollars at a thrift store, I was pretty happy. I thought it might be like The Stand, a journey into a world that actually seems to be real, moments in human lives that are believable and a satisfying ending. The Dome is gruesome. The characters are nearly impossible to engage with, except for a couple of teenagers who start out appealing and then seem to vanish from the narrative. I wish I could say that I enjoyed it, I love interesting investigations into human behavior under stress, but I ask you, dear reader, did itreally need the aliens?