Stephen King hates Dan Brown. Having famously labelled the books of the man who now outsells him as “the intellectual equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries”, Under the Dome, King’s biggest book in decades, is his attempt to regain the high ground.
At almost 900 pages this is not just a huge book — “I’ll be killing a lot of trees,” the author remarked last year, though his editors have cut the manuscript by half — it is one that has had an elephantine gestation. According to King’s publishers he has been working on it for 25 years.
The reality — revealed by King himself — is that he first had the idea back then but was so put off by the