Stephen King's Under The Dome. Imagine you're hiking out of a small Maine town. There's the drone of a small private plane overhead, and you see a woodchuck shuffling along the road toward you. It hasn't yet made up its mind whether to duck out of sight, and suddenly it will never get to, as it's body is sliced in half by something invisible. Then, the plane you heard slams into the same invisible barrier, explodes, and rains debris all around you. In the next few hours, you find that you're not going anywhere, because the town of Chester's Mill is now trapped inside an upside-down bowl, and only air can get through. King examines how society breaks down when isolation is total and the societal leaders care only for how much power they can accumulate; he also examines how people of genuine good will confront the evil in human nature.
All of this is inside the most gorgeous book cover I have ever seen.
I've said before that the highest compliment I can pay a book is my eagerness to re-read it, to enter the author's world again and to see it through his characters' eyes. I haven't made that journey yet with Under The Dome, although I expect to relatively soon. For now, I'll have to settle for the second highest compliment I can give a book. Even though Under The Dome is over 1000 pages long, it's too short; I simply didn't want it to end.
