



“No,” says the man from the E.P.A., “rats can’t be trapped this easily. (“We’re trapped like rats!” screams Moe the bartender. with its meth factory, its profusion of religious denominations and its atavistic police department - is about to, as the phrase has it, “go rogue.”Īccording to an author’s note, King took a first crack at “Under the Dome” in 1976, but gave it up “after two weeks’ work that amounted to about 75 pages.” An interesting sequence of expressions must have crossed his face when he watched “The Simpsons Movie” in 2007: here, in glowing animation, was a great glassy dome landing on a clueless municipality, a civic meltdown, etc. Secession has occurred! The “thug in the White House,” the “Blackguard in Chief,” is on the other side of the dome, and Anytown, U.S.A. For them this is Christmas Day in the morning. Bummer, right? Not for the tyrant-in-waiting Big Jim and his pet goon squad.
