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Feb. 3rd, 2010 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreThings I have thought about posting in the last few days but never got around to:
- So. I finished reading Under the Dome the other day. I liked it. I liked it better than Duma Key and considerably better than Lisey's Story which I'm sorry but I did not care for at all. It's not his best, but it was fun.
I will say that I liked it a little better when it was called The Mist and was a novella, though. Not that I don't enjoy big sprawling Stephen King novels with huge casts - I read The Stand a distressing number of times in high school - but the kind of story this was really benefits from being shorter, I think. See, Under the Dome has, at its root, two basic plot threads. They are 1) What is the Dome and how do we get rid of it? and 2) How do people deal under the Dome? And, the thing is, #1 is really a subheading of #2. Plot thread #2 is the important one. By about 50 pages in, I no longer cared at all where the Dome came from or how to get rid of it. I realize that the characters have to care about those things because otherwise they wouldn't be human at all. But I don't have to. The Dome is fundamentally unimportant. It is a device - a pretty blatent one - to allow us to explore plot thread #2.
Plot thread #2 is the interesting one. Everything having to do with the origins of the Dome feels tacked on, silly, and superfluous. I mean, the Dome was put there by space aliens. That's ridiculous. But the novel is over 1000 pages long and after you've been through all that, I guess you have to give the reader some answers, even if those answers are silly.
In The Mist, I don't know where the titular fog and its accompanying menagerie of horrors comes from. I don't need to. The origins are not the point. The point is isolation and fear and the sudden loss of infrastructure and support. That's what I want to read about - I keep reading that story, no matter how many times I come across it, and have ever since I read Lord of the Flies for the first time. Both The Mist and Under the Dome give me that story in spades. It's just that Under the Dome is so big that it has to explain things and that explanation is unsatisfactory. Probably because Mr King realized that it was unimportant too.
(The Mist also has a leg up because its villain is scarier. Jim Rennie is plenty scary but Mrs Carmody beats him hands down. And she gets a better ending.)
However! I did quite like Under the Dome. (I had better have, because it was huge and I read the whole damned thing.) The cast is huge but well-handled and if plot thread #1 is a little unsatisfactory, plot thread #2 definitely makes up for it.
- I have been watching a lot of Twin Peaks lately. And okay, I realize that I am 20 years too late to be saying this but,
Dear the people who made Twin Peaks,
I know it's dramatic and pretty but I'm sorry. We just don't have thunderstorms like that in western Washington. No, really. (And despite the crazy geography in the pilot, the trees do imply western Washington.) Also, unless it's July, it really ought to be raining more. You made a really excellent show but stuff like that is distracting.
Love,
A Nitpicky Washingtonian
- Related to that last, you know how when you're kinda obsessing about a particular fannish source and you go through your music collection to find stuff that has the right feel to go with your fannish obsession. My brain has apparently decided that Twin Peaks means I should listen to Poe's Haunted album on repeat. Which, in turn, makes me want to reread House of Leaves. It feels kind of appropriate, somehow. Twin Peaks also makes me want to watch Dune but I can put that down to Kyle McLachlan. Also, that impulse is silly and should probably not be indulged.
Rereading House of Leaves is probably a good idea. I think it's been long enough since the last time that I've forgotten sufficient of the book to read it again. And I'm between books now that Under the Dome is over.
I wonder where I put that...
- So. I finished reading Under the Dome the other day. I liked it. I liked it better than Duma Key and considerably better than Lisey's Story which I'm sorry but I did not care for at all. It's not his best, but it was fun.
I will say that I liked it a little better when it was called The Mist and was a novella, though. Not that I don't enjoy big sprawling Stephen King novels with huge casts - I read The Stand a distressing number of times in high school - but the kind of story this was really benefits from being shorter, I think. See, Under the Dome has, at its root, two basic plot threads. They are 1) What is the Dome and how do we get rid of it? and 2) How do people deal under the Dome? And, the thing is, #1 is really a subheading of #2. Plot thread #2 is the important one. By about 50 pages in, I no longer cared at all where the Dome came from or how to get rid of it. I realize that the characters have to care about those things because otherwise they wouldn't be human at all. But I don't have to. The Dome is fundamentally unimportant. It is a device - a pretty blatent one - to allow us to explore plot thread #2.
Plot thread #2 is the interesting one. Everything having to do with the origins of the Dome feels tacked on, silly, and superfluous. I mean, the Dome was put there by space aliens. That's ridiculous. But the novel is over 1000 pages long and after you've been through all that, I guess you have to give the reader some answers, even if those answers are silly.
In The Mist, I don't know where the titular fog and its accompanying menagerie of horrors comes from. I don't need to. The origins are not the point. The point is isolation and fear and the sudden loss of infrastructure and support. That's what I want to read about - I keep reading that story, no matter how many times I come across it, and have ever since I read Lord of the Flies for the first time. Both The Mist and Under the Dome give me that story in spades. It's just that Under the Dome is so big that it has to explain things and that explanation is unsatisfactory. Probably because Mr King realized that it was unimportant too.
(The Mist also has a leg up because its villain is scarier. Jim Rennie is plenty scary but Mrs Carmody beats him hands down. And she gets a better ending.)
However! I did quite like Under the Dome. (I had better have, because it was huge and I read the whole damned thing.) The cast is huge but well-handled and if plot thread #1 is a little unsatisfactory, plot thread #2 definitely makes up for it.
- I have been watching a lot of Twin Peaks lately. And okay, I realize that I am 20 years too late to be saying this but,
Dear the people who made Twin Peaks,
I know it's dramatic and pretty but I'm sorry. We just don't have thunderstorms like that in western Washington. No, really. (And despite the crazy geography in the pilot, the trees do imply western Washington.) Also, unless it's July, it really ought to be raining more. You made a really excellent show but stuff like that is distracting.
Love,
A Nitpicky Washingtonian
- Related to that last, you know how when you're kinda obsessing about a particular fannish source and you go through your music collection to find stuff that has the right feel to go with your fannish obsession. My brain has apparently decided that Twin Peaks means I should listen to Poe's Haunted album on repeat. Which, in turn, makes me want to reread House of Leaves. It feels kind of appropriate, somehow. Twin Peaks also makes me want to watch Dune but I can put that down to Kyle McLachlan. Also, that impulse is silly and should probably not be indulged.
Rereading House of Leaves is probably a good idea. I think it's been long enough since the last time that I've forgotten sufficient of the book to read it again. And I'm between books now that Under the Dome is over.
I wonder where I put that...
