Huh? King's new doorstop 9$ hardcover?

$23.99 on amazon.ca but in truth I’ll either wait for the paperback or get the ebook version, anyway.

Oh, man, Stephen King fans are in heaven right now. Along with the release of his new novel Under the Dome (look for a review soon) has come the news that Dome is heading to HBO. In addition, we now know the tentative title of the eighth installment of King’s Dark Tower series as well as getting an update on the status of an adaptation of Cell.

King was in Dundalk, Maryland, yesterday, where he dropped the news that Under the Dome will be an HBO miniseries and that he has written a script for [I]Cell[/I] (review here). A video of his Q&A appeared on YouTube, which you can watch below for all the details.

Stephen has given me permission to pass along that he has an idea for a new Dark Tower book, the working title of which will be THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE

What?

I thought the Dark Tower was over with… uh… The Dark Tower. Because, y’know, it ended.

Nothing is over when there is still money to be made!

Hallelujah, I’ve found my new euphemism for a person of exceedingly loose morals.

Supposedly it’s will be a sort of Dark Tower book 4.5 (taking place sometime between books 4 and 5), starring different people than the regularly scheduled Ka-Tet, oh it is supposed to have Oy too.

I just got Under the Dome in the mail today (along with a book called The Blade itself). I’ve read 1000+ page books before, but unlike this one they were all paperback. This thing is a freaking dictionary. My god, I wish it were split into 3 different bindings.

There’s a map in the front showing the layout of the town, and a couple pages of names listed for various characters in the story – I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Typically when there’s a list of characters at the start of a book it means I’m probably going to be confused about who everybody is. Also, I never, ever look at the maps typical in fantasy type books either because they never seem to match anything in the story, ever.

I’ll be reading Under the Dome once I finish Return of the King, (the third LOTR book) which I am 120 pages into.

Yay, time to drag the Dark Tower series further into the hole!

Also, while I have no particular objection to HBO miniseries, since when do they make them based on books that have -just- come out?

I just re-read Swan Song which is 1000 pages, and realized how much could have easily been edited out without messing with the story at all. And that’s usually how I feel about King books. I can’t think of a single one written after Cujo that wouldn’t have been better with 100+ less pages.

Sounds like “The Bubble”.

They also proposed building a dome over the city of Winooski, Vermont, back in the late 70s. I say city because that’s how it’s chartered, not because it’s a particularly big place. Only one square mile, though, so it is densely packed.

Why did HRose call it a doorstop? Have King’s books been universally reviled lately?

Under the Dome is big enough to be used as a doorstop. Seriously, it’s a flippin’ huge book.

Throw on a few hinges and you could make a pretty solid door too.

Not to speak for HRose, but I think doorstop is just a descriptor of the sheer size of the book, not an indication of it’s quality. Even something like Infinite Jest could be described as a doorstop.

I finished Under the Dome Friday night. Don’t worry, I won’t post blatant spoilers in this post:

My overall reaction sits pretty well over on the negative side. I didn’t like the characters (almost every one of them a typical King archetype in everything but name), the pacing, the predictable plot or the big reveal. The mere fact I finished the book at all means that certain bits of the story were interesting enough to put up with (or at least not too horrible to cause me to stop), but on the whole this book really doesn’t need to be 1067 pages long to tell its story because it was obvious where major plot-lines were headed less than 100 pages in.

I did a lot of waiting for certain situational elements to come to a head that had been building the entire book. It was obvious certain events were coming, but god damn if King didn’t make us work for them only to see them delivered exactly as expected hundreds of pages later, as if there were any other way the story could possibly have progressed.

I’m considering starting a spoilerific thread about the book, but I haven’t decided if I want to put forth all the effort to breakdown (point for point) a book I didn’t particularly care for.

Come on, Angie does it all the time!

God, how can anybody read King these days. More power to you guys.

Define “these days”… From a Buick 8 (2002) was great, and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (2004) wasn’t too bad, but that’s about as recent as my King goes. Has he lost it after those, or does your taste in pulp fiction just suck?