Pocketbok, 566 sidor
På French
Publicerades 1 mars 2011 av Albin Michel.
It’s over a thousand pages long but he never takes his foot off the gas and never really loses his way. Honestly one of his best books.
Small town (in Maine, duh) suddenly gets sealed off from the outside world by an invisible force field. After the initial shocks and a few grisly deaths, things get worse as the local republican bigwig seizes the opportunity to convince people to give up freedom for safety and quickly and efficiently sets himself up as dictator. Leading to more grisly deaths, an incredibly unsubtle parable about paranoia in Bush-era US, and funnily enough one of King's most entertaining novels in a while.
Which isn't to say it's great, by King standards or otherwise. Even if you shrug and accept the blatant political subtext (whether you agree or disagree, getting hit with the Message Bat always hurts), you're still stuck with a story that repeats a number of old King storylines without necessarily adding anything new to them; it's basically The Mist (one of the characters even compares it to the …
Small town (in Maine, duh) suddenly gets sealed off from the outside world by an invisible force field. After the initial shocks and a few grisly deaths, things get worse as the local republican bigwig seizes the opportunity to convince people to give up freedom for safety and quickly and efficiently sets himself up as dictator. Leading to more grisly deaths, an incredibly unsubtle parable about paranoia in Bush-era US, and funnily enough one of King's most entertaining novels in a while.
Which isn't to say it's great, by King standards or otherwise. Even if you shrug and accept the blatant political subtext (whether you agree or disagree, getting hit with the Message Bat always hurts), you're still stuck with a story that repeats a number of old King storylines without necessarily adding anything new to them; it's basically The Mist (one of the characters even compares it to the movie) meets The Stand. And if you start picking at the details, there are a number of things that make little sense (so the phones are cut off, but TV and Internet still work, and yet the citizens of the town immediately start acting as if there is no way at all to communicate with the outside world, or tell them what's going on in town...? What?)
That said, for a 1000+ page novel, it really zips. The advantage of King sticking to favourite subplots and character types is that he knows exactly what he's doing (unlike the ambitious but inept Lisey's Story) and while you could probably edit 100 pages or more out without losing much, he manages to juggle the dozens of main characters and their various story arcs well enough that there's never really a dull moment. King's approach to epic stories (put good guys and bad guys in the same pressure cooker, have the bad guys do awful things to the good guys until we beg him to stop torturing them, and then keep it up a while longer) is predictable but effective, and the thing that once helped make me a King fan - that you can never trust that the good guys will succeed, and certainly not escape unscathed - is still there. As political allegory, it's clumsy and overwritten; as straight-ahead action with blatant emotional manipulation, it works.
