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My rating: 4 out of 5

If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you.

Stephen King is no stranger to putting more or less ordinary people in strange situations and let them deal with it. This book follows a similar recipe, cutting off a small town from the rest of the world completely. A drifter ex-soldier as one of the main heroes is not a novel idea. Neither is the “island” idea of being cut off from rest of the world. And of course neither is a despot trying to take over his little corner of the world. Put it all together and you get Under the dome.

Looking back at the story, the villains are quite easy to identify early on. But their slow change from small-town jerks to full on villains is nevertheless quite a thing to watch. I kept asking (and still wonder) why and how would ordinary people let someone grab so much power and misuse it so blatantly. But then I guess this is not the crazy part of the story, but the more realistic one.

One way or another, King is a master storyteller who can tell a story in a captivating way. At least it kept me up until 4:30 in the morning because I just had to finish those last 200 pages.

One thing I will admit (and for which I am giving 4 stars)… There are just too many characters which are not all that developed. Even by the end of the book I was mixing them up to some degree and realized I did not even care that much. I cared for the story itself, but not the heroes themselves.