Just After Sunset

You mention you originally tried to write Under the Dome much earlier in your career. What made you return to it now, and how is the finished novel different from the one you first intended to write?
I've got a pretty wild imagination, or so people say, and I have a lot of ideas for stories. A lot of them drop by the wayside, but the good ones stay in the neighborhood. Under the Dome is a novel I tried to write much earlier in my career, first in 1976, I think, and again in the early 1980s. The first try was close to the book; the second was to have a whole lot of people trapped in an apartment building. I was playing around with two titles for a while back then, Under the Dome and The Cannibals, and I guess the second one gives some indication of where I was thinking of taking it. Anyway, I couldn't wrap my head around it then, but it kept coming back, the good ones keep coming back. A few years ago I was flying to Australia for a motorcycle trip through the Outback-fourteen hours in a plane-and the thing just sort of took over my head, and I thought it through, decided I should try again, and by the time the plane landed I'd pretty much worked it out.

It has been said Under the Dome is a social allegory comparable in some ways to The Stand. What are some similarities between the two works?
They're both big novels, big canvases populated with many, many characters, and both deal with what I think of as Big Themes. The Stand of course is a road novel, or a novel of many roads across America, while Under the Dome is set within the confines of Chester's Mill, a small town in western Maine. I think they're both political and social novels concerned with the dynamic of power under the extreme pressure of crisis, how incompetency can rise to the top, how easy it is for evil to hold sway, how people when they feel threatened have a tendency to resist the call of sanity and surrender their will to someone they perceive as a strong leader-Flagg in The Stand, Big Jim Rennie in Chester's Mill. Big Jim, though, is entirely of our world. Not the case with Flagg.

Like some of your earlier work, Under the Dome deals with small towns and small-town politics. What aspects of small-town life and politics did you address with the book?
Small towns are what I know, and I've been writing about them pretty much my whole life. In some ways they're a microcosm for any community, but there's an intimacy-or a lack of anonymity-that makes things more interesting, for me at least. Junior Rennie can walk down Main Street in Chester's Mill and just about everyone knows him by sight, but nobody knows about these terrible headaches he's been having, or the terrible things they make him do. As familiar as people may be, they're unpredictable. Politics everywhere is personal, but in small towns the mechanisms of power are pretty easy to manipulate, probably easier for bad ends than for good.

If you found yourself in Dale Barbara's shoes, what would you have done differently?
That's an interesting question, because I look at Dale Barbara as my character, the one I identified with most as a way of getting inside the novel's world. So I don't know that I'd have done anything differently. Dale's heading out of town as the novel opens-he's been a drifter since his days in the army and Iraq, and he has reason to think his time is up in Chester's Mill-and given what happens as he's walking along Route 119, I guess I might have walked a little faster. Anyone would have, had they known what was coming. But the point is, we don't know what's coming, and in a larger sense, we're all under the dome whether we like it or not. What happens to the town and many of the people in it is awful, but for Barbie it's a test that he needs to take. And one that he passes.

What is the most important lesson Dale learns by the end of Under the Dome?
The most important lessons are pretty simple, I think, though they're hard to learn. This is going to sound a little hippie-dippy, but that's my generation, and I was a hippie, you know? All life is precious. So often we don't see that, don't feel it. We feel it with what we love, but that's not seeing it whole. All life is precious. I don't think there is a more important lesson than that.