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Bridgton Setting for New Stephen King Book

December 07, 2009 - BRIDGTON -- What would happen if one day, without warning, an invisible dome descended on the small town of Bridgton, sealing off all its residents from the outside world? Would people come together, with neighbor helping neighbor, or would a nightmare of fear, greed and murderous cruelty prevail?


Stephen King imagined such a scenario in 1976, just after his earliest works "Carrie" and "Salem's Lot" were bringing him national attention. He was living on Long Lake, off the Kansas Road, taking his kids to school, sometimes on the back of his motorcycle. He wasn't really famous, not yet.


He got 78 pages into the notion, then dropped it. The idea was just too huge. A few years later, "The Mist" was published. In it Bridgton's Food City got a dose of the terror that comes from being sealed off from the outside world.


But now he's returned to his roots in a big way in the creation of Chester's Mill, the western Maine town is the setting for "Under the "ome, King's biggest, most riveting novel since "The Stand".


"It was Bridgton when I first tried the book, because I lived there," King said in an e-mail to the Bridgton News Monday, during a break in a hectic schedule of book signings and media appearances since the book's release November 10.


With over 1000 pages and more than 100 characters -- some heroic, some diabolical -- the book again features Food City, which gets trashed in a bloody food riot orchestrated by the evil town selectmen, Jim Rennie (a play on the Renys store name, of course.)


But with "Under the Dome", King goes so much further than "The Mist" in using the town of Bridgton as a template for a fictional town under the influence of a baffling and terrifying supernatural element. He includes a map at the beginning of the book that any local would quickly recognize as downtown Bridgton. Food City is right where it's supposed to be, at one end of downtown, with Catherine Russell Hospital, (Bridgton Hospital), at the other. On Main Street where the fictional routes 117 and 119 converge, the downtown is laid out with a movie theater (Magic Lantern,) bookstore (Bridgton Books), and the local newspaper office pretty much right where they're supposed to be.


"Bridgton is good for a book like "Under the Dome" because it's a thriving 'summer community', but just a regular Maine village after Labor Day (although it gets busier again ski season)," King wrote in his e-mail. "As for the townsfolk in my book -- I made them all up. I don't think Bridgton is controlled by evil selectmen and I probably wouldn't know it were" he said.


In another interview he did for Borders Books, King said, "I love this book, I love the people in it. And it was great to be working on a big canvas again. I do two kinds of books. I do books that are like murals -- they're big, and populated with all kinds of characters. And then I do the extreme close-up books, like 'Misery'," King said.


King's Chester's Mill is trapped inside its own borders by the translucent dome, which appears suddenly "on an entirely normal, beautiful fall day," cutting off nearly all communication with the outside world. Outsiders, like the United States military that sets up a perimeter, and look in, and insiders can look out, but it soon becomes clear that the town is completely on its own.


That gives big Jim Rennie his chance to be an even bigger fish in a small pond than he ever thought possible. And, in classic King fashion, the dome allows the free reign of the evil that lurks within us all.


"In small towns we think we know everybody else's business, but everybody hold something back," King said in the Borders interview. "There's a saying in Alcoholics Anonymous that you're only as sick as your secrets. Some of the people in this book are pretty sick indeed."


But King populates Chester's Mill with its share of heroes, like a Rose, owner of Sweet Briar Rose Café (apparently inspired by the diner King is fond of eating at in Lovell, near his summer home) and a physician's assistant at the hospital, no doubt inspired by Russ Dorr, the real-life physician's assistant in Bridgton who helped him research technical issues for the book.


When he returned to the theme of "Under the Dome", it was a post-9/11 world, and King has been candid that much of his anger at the Bush administration's decisions crept into the book. In fact, the artist rendering of Jim Rennie for the book's limited edition looks quite a lot like -- you guessed it -- Vice President Dick Cheney.


"In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration was like this angry kid walking down the street who couldn't find whoever sucker punched him, so turned around and punched the first likely suspect rather than finding out what was going on," King said. "I used the Bush -- Cheney dynamic and let it go where it needs to go."


The local newspaper editor is one of the quote "good guys" -- a middle-aged woman named Julia Shumway who carries on the century-old family legacy. Camera in hand, she doggedly chronicles the unfolding chaos over her hometown, trying to uncover the truth.


King said the Shumway character isn't based on anyone in particular although King says, "I always respected the Bridgton News' retired editor Eula Shorey as an editor, so I wanted to make my editor a woman. I like the paper because it's one smart weekly -- a serious newspaper."


Despite the serious themes of the book explores, King wants the book to be entertaining and fun -- and by the accounting of most reviewers, he hit a home run on this score.


"I don't want to get real heavy about this. But the fact is we all live under the dome," King said. "We have this little blue world that we've all seen from outer space and it appears like that's about all there is. It seems to be a very rare and wonderful and fragile thing, and one of the reasons that I came back to "Under the Dome" was I wanted to say something about that."


From the Bridgton News, November 19, 2009

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