Stephen King – Under the Dome Audiobook

But an interesting thing’s been occurring as King gets older: his audio books have been decreasing. Starting with 1987’s Misery, but especially with 1992’s Gerald’s Game, he has restricted himself more and more to one or two personalities in a single place (Dolores Claiborne, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon), and when he’s given us this epic scale and extent in audio books like Mobile, Lisey’s Story, Duma Key, and 11/22/63 he’s seen the action through the perspective of one or two characters. It is something he came to late (King didn’t even publish a first person book until Dolores Claiborne in 1992) but because Insomnia in 1994 he’s approached his epics from a more intimate perspective. Stephen King – Under the Dome Audiobook.
King has occasionally claimed that he initially started Underneath the Dome in 1972, however that I can’t find much evidence to back up that besides this one announcement to the New York Times. In 1976 or 1977, King wrote the opening chapter of a audio book called Beneath the Dome, and later lost the webpages. Back in 1981, while on location shooting Creepshow, King took another stab in the story, calling it The Cannibals about a big cast of characters trapped within an upscale apartment building. He wrote 500 pages (you can download the initial 122 of them on his site) “before hitting a wall.” In 2007, inspired in part by Ken Follett’s massive historic novels, he took a third run at the material, and now he composed the whole audio book in 15 months.
Some folks have pointed out that King’s novel, published in November, 2009 bears a close resemblance to 2007’s The Simpsons Movie where Springfield is placed under a giant dome, but in addition, it plays a theory explored in Clifford Simak’s 1965 novel, All Flesh is Grass, about a small town that wakes up one morning to find itself trapped beneath a dome placed by extraterrestrials who want to study their responses. Stephen King Under the Dome Audiobook Download. Then again, The Cannibals was pretty reminiscent of JG Ballard’s 1975 book, High-Rise, about a luxury high-rise whose inhabitants descend into anarchy and decadence whenever they seal themselves off from the external world. It’s also motivated at least in part by Lost, which was compelling peak popularity when King was writing Under the Dome, and also the mystery of the Dome with its rival characters trying to decode weird clues to escape their plight, felt more than a little like America’s one-time favourite TV show.
I’ve got a complex relationship with Beneath the Dome, since I recapped all three seasons of the TV version and lacked brain damage as a outcome. Personal injuries aside, Under the Dome is a nightmare of a audio book. Does it strain credulity by having a town of 2,000 descend to open warfare after being cut off from the external world for only a week? Yes. Is its own political message air in a volume so loud it could cause irreversible hearing loss? YES. Does it demonstrate once again that there’s not any top that Stephen King can’t vault over one-handed using a shout of “Geronimo!” Absolutely. Under the Dome Audio Book Free. But in addition, it answers the question of why Stephen King has sold 350 million copies of his audio books: the guy can tell a story.
Beneath the Dome starts with Dale Barbie, a noble drifter, leaving the tiny city of Chester’s Mill, Maine after getting jumped from the parking lot of a local bar by a lot of thugs, such as Junior Rennie, son of neighborhood bigshot and used dealership, Big Jim Rennie. This is pretty much how we first met saintly Nick Andros way back in The Stand, and both characters are virtually identical, save that Barbie can speak. Barbie is a primary character who’s as anonymous as they come, with no personality defects or traits to get in the way of our identification with him as he races through the breakneck storyline that kicks off from the very first chapter. Under the Dome Stephen King Audiobook. We are not on page when a impenetrable dome abruptly surrounds Chester’s Mill, reaching 47,000 feet into the skies and 100 feet underground. It triggers a plane crash and bisects a chipmunk, providing the TV show one moment when it topped the novel.
Capitalizing on city’s sudden isolation from the rest of the world, Big Jim Rennie (who is, obviously, a Republican) turns himself into a very small tyrant, deputizing his insane son, and putting the city under this control. A cardboard cut-out right-winger, Big Jim is not only a big fat hypocrite (the supreme evil for King) however he bemoans the neighborhood pub that he calls for a “sinpit”, refuses to use profanity even as he murders his opponents with his bare hands, drives a Hummer, hates President Obama (speaking to his middle name “Hussein” as “the terrorist man at the centre”), includes a secret porn stash, also bans liquor sales. His churchy exterior conceals the spirit of a monster who has been stealing the city’s propane to power his crystal meth plant hidden inside the Christian radio station he owns. He’s also gotten the local hellfire and brimstone preacher, Lester Coggins, to help him along with his meth business. These are not subtle characters.
Nevertheless subtle is not on the menu. Stephen King Under the Dome Audiobook Free. We first match Junior Rennie, Big Jim’s son, on page 19, delivering a whiny, self-pitying internal monologue, sunlight offering him a headache. Three pages later, he’s calling his girlfriend’s vagina her “goddam itchy breeding-farm”, biting through his own tongue, and bashing her brains out on the floor. Eighty pages after he murders Dodee, her best friend. Two hundred pages later, he’s having sex with their corpses, and there’s still 800 pages to go. Barbie, Julia Shumway, the local writer, and their allies are bland and colorless in contrast to Junior Rennie, Big Jim, the Rev. Coggins, and the remaining audio book’s bad guys, which makes it clear that while King may despise these villains and what they signify, they inspire his very best writing in ways his personalities do not. And it is not just the bad guys who are turned up to 11. King’s writing style is currently in full-on “Heeeere’s Johnny!” Jack Nicholson mode, as loudly and blaring as a strand beating through a bathroom door.
“Unexpectedly he had been caught by horripilation. The goosebumps swept up out of his ankles all the way to the nape of his neck, in which the hairs stirred and tried to lift. His balls tingled like tuning forks, and for a moment there was a sour metallic taste in his mouth.”
Musical balls apart, some of these ideas were there in the start. Under the Dome by Stephen King Audiobook. And there’s a simpering, god-fearing, obese, overly-religious lady with an “completely closed head” who seems to be on the brink of a nervous breakdown. Both of these appear marked to grow into villains later in the sound book. But despite its deep roots, Under the Dome is King’s answer to the Bush Administration, much in precisely the same manner that Cell was his response into 9/11 and the War in Iraq. Starting with an airplane crash (reminiscent of 9/11), Chester’s Mill descends into anarchy under its own criminal Republican leadership that uses religion to conceal its criminal actions. As they scramble to improve themselves and hide their offenses, the direction and its enemies both ignore dangerous greenhouse gases building up within the mantle which threaten to kill all of them. Worried that individuals might not receive the clear point, King even said, “that I want to use the Bush-Cheney dynamic for the people who are the leaders of this city.” Big Jim is obviously Dick Cheney, remaining in the shadows, manipulating elected officials with the best of ease, and profoundly dangerous. Politicians are helpless in the face of his iron will, allowing Big Jim to deal drugs, murder, and steal with total immunity. Only to really drive the point home, Barbie, a war veteran, is more prone to saying, “It’s like Iraq all over again.”
But since the political allegory gets, UtD is studded with huge set pieces that attract every personality crashing using a satisfying boom. When it’s the dome’s coming over Chester’s Mill, an external rally by the townsfolk that descends into farce and then tragedy, Junior Rennie and his debauched police buddies gang raping among the former friends. Stephen King – Under the Dome Audiobook (free online). A food riot in the neighborhood supermarket, or even the final firestorm that sweeps through town and absorbs all its oxygen, these scenes would be the kind of large Thanksgiving feasts that King creates for his readers, linking napkins around their necks, and forcing them up to the groaning table before allowing them dig. They’re deeply satisfying and he pulls them off with a great deal of invisible craftsmanship, juggling multiple characters and intense action without ever once dropping the ball.
Written in short, propulsive chapters of roughly 20 to 30 pages each, with each chapter divided into three or four subsections which can run as short as one webpage, UtD leavens its breakneck pace with a mordant sense of black comedy. Stephen King – Under the Dome Audiobook. The ending feels like a let-down as we discover the Dome was set in position by punky small alien children who were goofing around with their parents’ technology. When they learn that the ants on their ant are in fact getting hurt by their own game, they closed it down immediately. It is a letdown, but after the huge table we have gorged ourselves at, anything less than Junior Rennie crater-humping that the Moon until it stinks will feel to be an anticlimax. This is a lengthy audio book, but maybe not a repetitive one, and it rarely spins its wheels. After all, King must push civic society into the breaking point and beyond in just seven days. It took the Bush Administration at least a couple of years to do the same. Listen online Under the Dome Audiobook Free!