 I've never read a Stephen King novel before. This is my first and I picked a doozy. Look at the size of it. More than a thousand pages. But it took me a week to read it and that's lightening fast because I am a slow reader. The thing that made the difference was I couldn't put it down. I found it thoroughly entertaining. The character is entirely believable. It is about a small town in the state of Maine, USA that one day finds itself enclosed in an invisible impenetrable wall. It's not a dome actually. They call it a dome, but it's not a dome at all. And all the way through I was expecting it to turn out to be supernatural because this is Stephen King after all, but it isn't. This is actual science fiction. Big picture science fiction. Grand idea science fiction. Exactly the kind of thing that I and I think most of my followers like. All right, that's your 30 second review. Now I've got a few more things to say about this book. You would have heard me say before that I was not looking forward to reading Stephen King. I'd never read a Stephen King novel and I wasn't looking forward to it because he is such a household word. He is so popular. He is so successful and usually that's a sign to me that you're dealing with a really bad writer. I mean really bad. So Stephen King was never something I picked up. Plus he was a horror writer and I'm not into horror novels, but I saw a few episodes of the TV show and I liked the premise. I liked the show, but I was I was asking myself how can this premise be stretched out to three seasons because the third season was just starting. I didn't see how that could be possible. So I thought I should get the book since I like the premise and see what the book was about It arrived in the mail. I was shocked at how big it is. Like I said, more than a thousand pages but as soon as I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. I spent the whole week doing pretty much nothing else except reading this and it took me that whole week. It's unusual for me to be that hooked on a book. I was surprised at how readable Stephen King is. He has a very casual and approachable style, I guess you would say. In fact, I wouldn't call his writing style a style at all. It's not a flowery descriptive type. It's the kind of science fiction writing that I appreciate from old school sci-fi writers, Heinlein, Arthur C. Clark, Asimov. He just writes what happens and as I'm reading, I don't notice that I'm reading something that's been written and that's good writing, if you ask me. And again, like I said, this is not supernatural. All the way through it, I was expecting it, this dome, as they call it, to turn out to be supernatural in origin. Some sort of vengeance Halloween spirit or something. But no, it's genuine science fiction. I'm not going to say anything more about it. This is Stephen King, though, so it is extremely violent, very bloody. The chapters are very short. Each chapter is just a few pages long. There's hundreds of tiny little chapters. And within the first few of those little chapters, there were at least three times when somebody's bowels and bladder voided when they died. Each time somebody dies and a lot of people die in this book, he includes that particular detail. And I don't think I've ever seen any other writer bothered to include that detail. In an afterward, in this book, King wrote that he started writing this in 1976. 1976. And this was, I think, 2008, when this was published? 2009. That's a long gestation. He also says that a lot of people complained to him about being dissatisfied with the ending, about the the reveal of the dome and where it comes from. And I'm perfectly happy with the origin of the dome. As I call it in the short review, this is big picture science fiction. The humans involved don't know what happened, don't know why. They don't get answers. And we don't either. I had problems with the ending as well, but mostly because I had a bit of trouble understanding what exactly was happening and how things were unfolding. But there were minor complaints. I liked the book quite a bit. I'm not necessarily looking to read any more Stephen King. If you're a hardcore science fiction fan and you've never read Stephen King and you're wondering what to read first, I say give this a try. Because it is real science fiction.