Under the Dome
By Stephen King
Hodder and Stoughton £19.99, 896 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.99

Under the Dome reworks two novels Stephen King attempted to write earlier in his career. The first, also called Under the Dome, was a late-1970s draft he didn’t get far with. In the late 1980s he completed nearly 500 pages of the second book, The Cannibals, before abandoning that project too.

The Cannibals was, as King says, “a kind of social comedy” about a group of people trapped in an apartment complex. The title provides a hint about how things develop. The original manuscript of Under the Dome is long lost, but King’s memory of the first chapter remained so clear that, his afterword informs us, he was able to “recreate it almost exactly” when he sat down in 2007 to attempt the book one more time.

King has written more than 40 novels, but the new Under the Dome doesn’t read like a fix-up of old material. Understandably, though, it harks back to an earlier phase of King’s career, evoking the eschatological tone of The Stand and the small-town-in-peril framework of Salem’s Lot. Unlike more recent offerings such as Lisey’s Story and Duma Key, there is no sense of an author late in his career keeping an eye on posterity and his literary legacy. Instead, this is a well-paced, gutsy tale of lives in a pressure cooker and the evil done by bad men convinced they have the best of intentions.

King gets straight to work in the opening pages. A light aircraft crashes for no obvious reason; a truck collides with an unseen barrier on what appears to be an open road. An invisible force field has descended over the Maine town of Chester’s Mill, like a glass lid over a cakestand, cutting off the residents from the rest of the world.

The force field is as impenetrable as it is mysterious. The military try burning through from the outside, burrowing underneath, even deploying a cruise missile, all to no avail. Trapped, the townsfolk pull together, but caged-rat panic sets in soon enough. That’s when a figure emerges to exploit the situation. Big Jim Rennie, a Bible-quoting used-car salesman and local politician, is a splendid villain. He was running a lucrative sideline in crystal meth manufacture before the dome came down. Now, with the aid of a psychotic son and a makeshift police force, he grabs power.

Every good dictator needs a scapegoat, and Rennie picks on Dale Barbara, a diner cook and Gulf war veteran. One can easily imagine Barbie – his gender-disorientating nickname – as a long-haired drifter in the original novel, a peacenik trying to forget Vietnam, like Rambo. Now he is haunted by dreams of prisoner abuse in Iraq and, as an outsider, he’s the ideal fall guy for what’s going wrong in the town.

Through its long gestation, Under the Dome has matured into a critique of post-9/11 America. There are clear satiric parallels in a plot that centres on a self-deluded, religiously inspired leader pointing the finger at a spurious “enemy within” in order to control a frightened populace. When the atmosphere under the dome rapidly becomes polluted and overheated, global warming becomes another theme.

There are a few flaws. Prophetic visions experienced by a number of characters, principally children, serve as somewhat clumsy foreshadowing, and the explanation for the dome itself is the kind of ironic pay-off a Twilight Zone episode might conclude with. Set against that, though, is the aplomb with which King marshals a huge cast, his expert ratcheting of tension as he puts the people of Chester’s Mill through the, ahem, mill and his ability to sustain a lively narrative across almost 900 pages.

Towards the end, one character contemplates a possible future as a novelist, before balking at the idea. “What if”, she wonders, “you spent all that time, wrote a thousand-pager, and it sucked?” Fortunately, Under the Dome doesn’t suck.

James Lovegrove is author of ‘The Age of Ra’ (Solaris)