Over the last 30 years or so Stephen King has metamorphosed into a human landmark on the pop culture map, his name an icon for a genre of populist American horror and suspense fiction that many people only experience via inferior movie adaptations. Almost everyone knows King’s name by now but as time goes on it gets easier to forget what put that name on the map in the first place: the work, the novels, novellas, short stories and essays, which fill over 50 volumes and counting.
The release of his latest novel, Under the Dome, is a perfect opportunity to re-acquaint yourself with the power of the best of King’s work. Weighing in at just under 1,100 pages, the novel, which follows the descent into savagery of a small Maine town sealed under a mysterious, impenetrable dome, is remarkable for its almost total lack of narrative fat. King nails the reader with a few surreally violent set pieces in the first 30 or so pages and then leads a cast of over 50 characters of varying classes, ages, genres and life experiences through a grueling tour of human potential and degradation without making a misguided or superfluous detour along the way. King is more than just a story teller, though. Unlike shlockmeisters like Dan Brown, whose cliche-infested prose reads like a hack movie script with a bunch of gooey adjectives thrown in for “literary effect,” King knows how to craft a sentence and nail down a character or emotion with an original image or simile. Under the Dome also does double duty as an extended metaphor of American life under the Bush regime.
If all that weren’t enough to get readers back on the King bandwagon, the man himself is making a rare public appearance tonight in Toronto at the Canon Theatre (8 p.m. 244 Victoria St.) in conversation with Toronto’s own misunderstood genius, David Cronenberg. There are still a few tickets available through Ticket King or at the theatre, but the time to act is now.
