History Main / UnderTheDome

* [[Literature/UnderTheDome a novel]] by Creator/StephenKing.

[[redirect:Literature/UnderTheDome]]

''Under the Dome'' is a 2009 novel written by Creator/StephenKing.

After a rural Maine town finds itself suddenly enclosed inside a mysterious and almost impenetrable barrier, a power-hungry selectman launches plans to take over the town while others try to avoid his wrath and find out what created the barrier. Looked at as an allegory, it comes off as unsubtle, with hints of DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything, but taken as a straight story, is surprisingly fast-paced and touching given the LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters it has to handle.

A cable miniseries adaptation is currently in the works, with King and Creator/StevenSpielberg as producers.
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!!The novel contains examples of the following:

* ActionSurvivor: Almost everyone still alive at the end of the story earns this to some degree, but particularly [[spoiler:Ollie Dinsmore. Minutes from being consumed by an advancing wall of fire he improvises a life support system from an old oxygen tank and some potatoes.]]
* AintTooProudToBeg: [[spoiler:After everything else failed, Julie goes to the box generating the Dome, and begs one of the aliens to let them live. It works.]]
* TheAlcoholic: "Sloppy" Sam Verdreaux.
* AlmostOutOfOxygen: [[spoiler:A giant fire is consuming the entire town and, ]]due to the fact that there is very little oxygen intake into the dome, it becomes very hard to breathe.
* AnyoneCanDie: On the cusp of baring Big Jim's machinations to the town, [[spoiler:the dearly-departed police chief's wife]] is summarily choked to death by Big Jim himself. [[spoiler:Andrea Grinnell]] is gunned down in a town meeting. Most jarring, perhaps, is the gradual erosion of the Dinsmore family due to various and sundry Dome-related maladies: by accidental suicide, quite purposeful suicide, and another quite purposeful suicide; the remaining son survives. Barely..
** King throws some final punches at the end when [[spoiler: he kills young'uns Benny Drake and Aidan Appleton, old man Ernie Calvert and out-of-towner Thurston.]]
*** To put it in perspective: Chester's Mill had a population around two thousand when the dome dropped. [[spoiler:There are ''26'' survivors all in all.]]
* {{Anticlimax}}: [[spoiler:The build-up of the conflict between Big Jim Rennie and the heroes doesn't lead to a final battle. Instead, Big Jim is brought down by an explosion that destroys the town, so he has nothing to rule over anymore, and eventually dies of a heart attack.]]
* ArcWords: "Stop the Great Pumpkin! Stop Halloween!"
** "We all support the team."
* AscendedExtra: Carter Thibodeau
* TheAtoner: Sam Verdreaux, the town drunk, was paid by Rennie (in booze) to initiate the riot at Food City. Later on he makes up for it by helping Barbie and Julia [[spoiler:make their way through the poisonous air to the alien "box" generating the Dome]].
** Barbie himself has shades of this, as it's revealed in flashbacks that he [[spoiler:participated in the brutal beating and killing of a random innocent Iraqi in retailiation for a squadmate's death by IED]].
* AxCrazy: Junior Rennie
* BadassGrandpa: Ernie Calvert
* BadCopIncompetentCop.
* BigBad: Big Jim Rennie.
* BigDumbObject: The Dome is [[spoiler: a toy for spiritual alien kids, who are playing with us like we play with ants.]]
* BiggerIsBetterInBed: Inverted. Mel Searles has a huge penis, [[spoiler: so when he rapes Sammy, it's more painful for her]].
* BodyguardBetrayal: At the end [[spoiler: in the Town Hall's bomb shelter, Carter]] turns on [[spoiler:Big Jim]] in order to preserve oxygen. Didn't turn out the way he planned.
* BerserkButton: Reverend Piper Libby has anger issues that she has managed to keep under control for most of her life. This, however, goes down the drain when she finds out that [[spoiler:Sammy Bushey has been gang-raped.]]
* BreadEggsMilkSquick: When Ollie throws rocks at the Dome, one of the soldiers from the other side starts a conversation with him:
-->'''Soldier:''' Why don't y'all quit on the rocks and do somethin' about those cows? Herd em into the barn and milk em or rub soothin' shit on their udders; somethin' like that.
-->'''Ollie:''' We don't need to herd them. They know where to go. Only now they don't need to be milked, and they don't need any Bag Balm, either. Their udders are dry.
-->'''Soldier:''' Yeah?
-->'''Ollie:''' Yeah. My dad says something's wrong with the grass. He says the grass is wrong because the air's wrong. It doesn't smell good in here, you know. It smells like crap.
-->'''Soldier:''' Yeah?
-->'''Ollie:''' Yeah. My mother killed herself this morning.
* BreakingTheFourthWall: In one particularly creepy piece of narration King describes the reader as being present among the town's inhabitants but invisible to them, perceptible as only a light breeze.
* BreakTheCutie: Julia after [[spoiler: her newspaper and apartment are destroyed]]. Later, there's a traumatic incident from her childhood which she's forced to re-live.
** During the events of the book Ollie loses his brother, then his mother and finally his father. He decides to stay at their farm. Soon after, it's destroyed and Ollie spends the rest of the book being very close to death.
** Sammy Bushey [[spoiler: being gangraped]]
* CelebrityCrush: Rose Twitchell has a crush on Wolf Blitzer whom she calls "Wolfie".
* CensorshipBySpelling: Carolyn does it with the word "dope" in front of Alice and Aidan, but it doesn't work:
-->'''Carolyn:''' Before we go making any charges, Thurse, you want to remember that we had D-O-P-E.
-->'''Alice:''' Dope! Our mom smokes marijuana some­times, because it helps when she's having her P-E-R-I-O-D.
* ChekhovsGunman: [[spoiler: Sam Verdreaux, the town drunk. At the end of the story, Sam comes up with up with the plan to get Barbie and Julie to the dome-generating box, sacrificing his life to do so.]]
* ChemicalMessiah: There's a character known as the "Chef" who cooks meth for the Big Bad. He regular uses his own product and spends the majority of his time in a meth-induced hyper-religious haze, wherein he believes he's doing God's work.
* CorruptPolitician: Big Jim Rennie.
* CorruptHick: Also Big Jim Rennie.
* CoversAlwaysLie: The hardcover cover art depicts a much ''smaller'' Dome than what is described in the novel. Not to mention the fact that the dome is actually invisible (the cover art shows a glassy, reflecting dome) and isn't even ''round'' (the cover art shows it to be neatly spherical).
* DecoyAntagonist: [[spoiler: Junior Rennie is built up as a dangerous wild card, and the unspecified source of his migraines is hinted to have some kind of alien/supernatural origin. Ultimately it turns out to just be a brain tumor, and Junior is unceremoniously shot in the back about two thirds of the way through the book.]]
* TheDogBitesBack: [[spoiler: After being gangraped Sammy Bushey kills two of her tormentors. Then herself.]]
* DoNotCallMePaul: Chef dislikes being called by his real name, Phil.
* DoomedHometown
* {{Doorstopper}}: The hardcover clocks in at about 1074 pages.
* TheDragon: Junior, [[spoiler: and later Carter Thibodeau]].
* DrivenToSuicide: Several people commit suicide after the Dome comes down, including Ollie Dinsmore's parents.
* DroppedABridgeOnHim: Many of the characters who die, [[spoiler:including Andrea Grinnell.]]
** [[spoiler:Carolyn Sturge]]. King spent a decent amount of time developing her character, what with her coming to grips with taking care of Aidan and Alice, and even deciding that she'd give them up to their original parents, if they were still alive. On paper, this isn't as bad until you take into account that she only went to the town meeting because Aidan and Alice begged her to take them to it, resulting in them getting a front-row seat for her death. The worst part about it is that it came out of nowhere, as she's murdered for absolutely no good reason. Would double as a Crowning Moment of Sadness if the reaction period wasn't so brief.
** [[spoiler: Junior]] as well. See DecoyAntagonist above.
* DueToTheDead: [[spoiler:Even though Chef left his wife, Sammy, became a meth addict and went completely insane, he still considered his duty to bury her body.]]
* EverybodysDeadDave: While it doesn't rack up the body-count of some of King's apocalyptic stories, the book [[spoiler: wipes out almost the entire town's population, plus all the passengers on a jumbo jet]].
* EvilCripple: [[spoiler: Junior has a brain tumor.]] Also [[spoiler: his father has a heart condition.]]
* EvilVersusEvil: [[spoiler: For given values of 'evil', but neither side is really ''good'': Big Jim Rennie sends eleven of his cops over to the Holy Redeemer church to take out Chef and Andy Sanders, and take possession of the propane stored there. Chef and Andy, who knew Big Jim would send men after them eventually, were lying in wait, and they kill every last one of the cops, except the one who really deserved it, Melvin Searles, who raped Sammy Bushey, who was Chef's wife back when he was still Phil Bushey and relatively sane. However, Melvin does buy it when Andy and Chef blow the stored propane and pull a TakingYouWithMe on the entire town.]]
* ExtremeDoormat: Andy Sanders. While he's the town's first selectmen, technically outranking Big Jim Rennie, he's actually completely under Rennie's control. [[spoiler:After reaching his DespairEventHorizon, he meets Chef, and starts blindly following him, even to death.]]
* EyeScream: The death of [[spoiler:Rory Dinsmore]] and also a nasty side effect of [[spoiler:Junior Rennie's brain tumor.]]
* FamilyValuesVillain: Big Jim Rennie. The guy's practically pure evil and selfishness down to his core, but he still refuses to swear, drink, or take the Lord's name in vain.
** His so-called "refusal to swear" is more than a little hypocritical, considering all he does is swap swear words with less offensive varieties; such as calling a woman he doesn't like a "rhymes-with-witch." The only difference between what he does and swearing is letter substitution.
* FatBastard: Big Jim Rennie.
* FourLinesAllWaiting: A) There are like, [[HypocriticalHumour 10 lines minimum]]? B) Due to good writing and better editing, the pace manages to be breakneck for over 1000 pages.
* FoxNewsLiberal: Reversed. Julia Shumway is described as a Republican, although she drives a hybrid car, attends the liberal church, and never expresses any sort of conservative opinion. Dale Barbara often says things like, "Are you sure you're a Republican?", usually after she says something implying that she doesn't blindly follow Big Jim's authority, which seems to be the book's main qualification for a Republican. Which would just be a sign of Barbie's own personal biases, except that she never once responds to him with a coherent reason why she ''is'' one. It's clear some politics is slipping in on King's part.
** This has more to do with the distinction between conservative and Republican. Julia Shumway is portrayed as conservative in a number of ways (one humorous example is her thought on what her historical hero's reaction would be to a world where civilians were required by law to pick up after their pet's poo), and she admits to having voted for Rennie when he was "saner" because she liked what he campaigned on. It's only when he shows his true colors as a power-hungry sociopath that she starts expressing more liberal misgivings about the abuses of power going on.
** Perhaps a bit of TruthInTelevision: Maine's two Senators in real life are Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins: both Republicans that are [[strike:left-of-center]] [[RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment left of most Republicans]].
* FriendToPsychos: Big Jim is this to his son Junior.
* TheFundamentalist: Lester Coggins, pastor of the Christ the Holy Redeemer church. When you consider other characters like this in Creator/StephenKing novels (like Mrs. Carmody of ''TheMist'' or Margaret White of ''{{Carrie}}''), you might think he'd end up being a problem for the more reasonable inhabitants of Chester's Mill. [[spoiler: He turns out to be a RedHerring, though, as he gets killed by Big Jim less than a third of the way through the book, when he tells Jim he feels that he must confess to the congregation that they've been running a meth lab.]]
* GetARoom: When Mel Searles sees [[spoiler:Chef and Andy]] kiss, he yells: "Hey, fags! Get a room! No, wait, I got a better idea! Get a room in hell!" [[spoiler:Those turn out to be his last words.]]
* GoingColdTurkey: Andrea Grinnell beats her painkiller addiction that way. Rusty advises her against that, telling her that she'll suffer greatly and will have seizures, which does happen.
* GodzillaThreshold: The government does everything in its power to free the town of Chester's Mill from its predicament. This includes firing a cruise missile at the invisible dome surrounding the town, then a second missile when the first one fails, using specially modified acid which can melt through two miles of bedrock, despite the possibility that it could set the dome on fire, and then attempting to use a 'pencil nuke', only to have it melt down and kill fifteen people before it could be used. The government continues trying to build a second pencil nuke, but by that point, things are so bad they finally decide they don't have time.
* GoodFeelsGood: Junior of all people experiences this, when he rescues the Appleton children. As a consequence, [[spoiler:protecting them even becomes his final goal in life (after killing Barbie and his dad, that is) - although by the time he decides on this, he's gone [[AxCrazy completely mad]] and the safest place for the children would be as far away from Junior as possible.]]
* GoodnightSweetPrince: When [[spoiler:Andy]] is about to poison himself, he thinks that he will "just lie down on the bed, close his eyes, and then good night, sweet [[spoiler:pharmacist]], may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."
* GoshDarnItToHeck: Big Jim Rennie all the cotton-pickin' way.
** Subverted; when things get really bad, he does rattle off a couple swears, although only one or two serious ones.
* {{Hallucinations}}: Junior has these whenever his migraines are particularly bad; this is the first clue that his "migraines" may be something more.
** [[spoiler:Big Jim Rennie]] (presumably) hallucinates that the various people he's killed over the course of the novel have come back to haunt him.
** Possibly with Lester Coggins who hears the voice of God. However since what the voice prophesies actually happens [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane possibly it's the real thing]].
* HappilyMarried: Rusty and Linda Everett. Also the police chief and his wife.
* HaveYouToldAnyoneElse: The number of times the plot relies on the only character that knows something confronting the perpetrator without a backup plan or weapon is staggering.
* HideYourLesbians: The relationship between Dodie Sanders and Sammy Bushey is referred to in conversation and in Dodie's thoughts as "you-know" and as "kid stuff" that they should have grown out of by now. Sammy has been married and has a baby, but it's also implied that many people in town know she has inclinations towards the other team; Dodie mentally equates her lesbian experiences with other immature and possibly immoral things she has a weakness for, such as smoking weed. The whole relationship is quickly obscured when Dodie is killed very early on. [[spoiler:Sammy later kills herself, which could make this a case of BuryYourGays if almost ''everyone'' in the town didn't also eventually die]].
* HoistByHisOwnPetard / KarmicDeath: [[spoiler: Big Jim Rennie. After Phil/Chef blows the stored propane, Jim and Carter Thibodeau retreat to the fallout shelter to avoid the ensuing firestorm. Carter eventually decides to kill Rennie because of Rennie's ungrateful behavior (and because he feels that he'll live longer if Big Jim isn't alive to breathe his share of the air in the shelter), but he makes the mistake of turning off the lights and Rennie kills him. However, this leaves Big Jim alone in the shelter, and he's unable to get the propane tank changed on his own. Alone in the dark with the body of his former bodyguard and suffering from heart flutter, he's haunted by visions of his victims claiming revenge against him. In blind panic, he makes his way to the exit of the fallout shelter, opens the door, and promptly chokes on the smoky, oxygen-starved air. And of course, it's only through Big Jim Rennie's actions that the town is in its current state in the first place.]]
* {{Hypocrite}}: Big Jim, big time.
* ICallItVera: [[spoiler: Chef Bushey names his AK-47 "God's Warrior". When Andy Sanders ends up joining him at Holy Redeemer and becoming his meth-smoking buddy, he takes another AK that Chef had stored, and names it "Claudette", after his dead wife.]]
* ILoveTheDead: Junior and his "girlfriends".
* InfantImmortality: Children and babies can and do die in this story, but Little Walter Bushey seems to emerge from potentially lethal situations with alarming regularity.
* InterruptedSuicide: [[spoiler: Andy Sanders]] is about to kill himself, when he's interrupted by a phone call.
* InvisibleToNormals: In a few short sections set from the viewpoint of Julia Shumway's corgi, it's stated that dogs are able to hear the voices of the dead due to their extra-sensitive hearing. A random ghost points the dog to the VADER file (which had fallen behind a couch, unbeknownst to anyone), which leads to Andrea Ginnell finding the file and finally finding out about Rennie's corrupt side businesses.
* IWantMyMommy: [[spoiler:Frankie [=DeLesseps=]]] cries out for his mother right before he's killed by [[spoiler:Sammy Bushey]].
* {{Jerkass}}: The youths who have been recruited as temporary police officers — Frankie, Junior, Georgia, Mel, and Carter.
* KidsAreCruel: [[spoiler: Turns out this is the only reason behind the EldritchAbomination's actions.]]
** [[spoiler: And the kids who attacked Julia when she was a kid.]]
* LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters: A comprehensive list of them is provided at the beginning of the book, after the map of the town.
** Even with the list, names [[SerialEscalation keep popping out of nowhere]] and [[spoiler: several people on the list die within the first ten chapters]].
* LoweredRecruitingStandards: The town's leaders make the decision to deputize some young adults in order to beef up the police force. These young adults? The town selectman's [[WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong sociopathic son and his delinquent friends]].
* MayDecemberRomance: Carolyn and Thurston. Several people mistake them for father and daughter.
* ManipulativeBastard: Big Jim. If you're not getting the pattern yet, he is ''not'' a nice guy. About five days into the Dome ordeal he has [[spoiler:instigated a riot, framed one of the few men who could save the town for murder, burnt down the newspaper offices and effectively turned the whole town into a police state.]]
* MeaningfulRename: Chef
* MurderSuicide: [[spoiler:Sammy]] kills [[spoiler:Frankie and Georgia]] before turning the gun on herself.
* MythologyGag: The symbol on the [[spoiler: box emitting the Dome vaguely resembles the symbol on the door to IT's lair in the sewers beneath Derry, Maine—another King haunt]].
** One character gives a name to some of the creepy stuff happening inside the Dome - [[TheDeadZone "the dead zone".]] [[LampshadeHanging He doesn't like the sound of it.]]
* NeverSpeakIllOfTheDead: [[spoiler:Subverted by Rennie when Junior dies. Whe Carter says that he was a good guy, Rennie responds: "No he wasn't. But he was my son and I loved him".]]
* NextSundayAD: A specific date is never given, but it probably takes place during President Obama's second term as one car is described as having a faded ''Yes we STILL can'' bumper sticker on it. At one time, Carter reads about the 2012 BMW in ''Car and Driver''. Also, there's free long-range Wi-Fi ([=WiMAX=]?) in rural Maine.
** Don't forget a sequel to ''Series/{{Lost}}'' (which is very clever).
* NonindicativeName: Despite the title of the novel, and the [[CoversAlwaysLie cover art for the hardcover]], the "Dome" isn't particularly round. You know, like the word "dome" would imply. Rather, it follows the town's borders exactly (and the town is constantly referred to as being shaped like a boot) and then extends up to five miles into the air.
* OhCrap: Rusty has a truly magnificent one when [[spoiler:he realizes that the Propane Supply is about to explode and flash-fry the town.]]
* PetTheDog: Junior has exactly one decent moment, when he rescues two children separated from their mother. It's especially jarring as it happens mere moments after he and one of his cronies physically and verbally assault two people they practically dragged naked out of bed.
** Big Jim Rennie has one of his own, after [[spoiler:Junior dies.]]
* PsychicDreamsForEveryone: Well, not ''everyone'', but all of the children in town and anyone who [[spoiler:passes through the radiation belt near the orchard]] experience unnerving dreams of something '' bad'' going down in Chester's Mill.
* PoliceAreUseless: Most of the nice cops are, anyway. Per WordOfGod, ineptitude is a theme.
* PrecisionFStrike: While other characters swear throughout the book, Jim Rennie utters a legitimate curse word exactly once.
* RapeAsDrama: [[spoiler:Sammy Bushey]] is gang-raped by the new "cops" of Chester's Mill.
* ReasonableAuthorityFigure: Colonel Cox.
* RedemptionEqualsDeath: [[spoiler:'Sloppy' Sam Verdeaux]] makes up for his part in [[spoiler:starting the Food City riot]] by [[spoiler:driving Barbie and Julia through toxic air to the box generating the Dome. He lets them have the tires to breathe from, and dies shortly after of a punctured lung.]]
** [[spoiler:Andrea Grinnell]] who has been aiding Big Jim for years in exchange for drugs. [[spoiler:She gets clean the hard way, choosing to suffer through horrible withdrawal pains to speed up the process, then publicly confronts Rennie. She gets gunned down for her trouble.]]
* RefusalOfTheCall: Dale Barbara is in the midst of this as the story opens but the woman who's about to give him a ride out of town changes her mind and drives on at the last second. From then on, whenever he's in trouble he thinks of the woman and wonders what would have happened had she stopped for him.
* RememberedTooLate: Getting body armor for raiding a meth lab.
* ScreamingWarrior: [[spoiler: Chef. ''[[CrowningMomentOfFunny "SELAH, MOTHERFUCKERS!"]]]]''
* SelfDeprecation: Carolyn Sturges thinks about what her career future would have been and she dismissed novelist as too risky. Why? "What if you wrote a thousand-pager, and it sucked?" Guess how many pages Under the Dome is.
* ShootTheShaggyDog: The entire winding saga of [[spoiler:the VADER file.]]
* ShoutOut: Cox mentions a couple of times that one of the female police officers comes highly recommended by JackReacher.
** One of the conspiracy theories mentioned about the cause of the dome is that it is a government experiment GoneHorriblyWrong, exactly like in the movie TheMist.
* StoutStrength: Big Jim Rennie may look like a FatBastard, but that's probably what he wants you to think.
* StrawmanPolitical: Big Jim Rennie is powerfully conservative in many ways, and also the main villain.
* TakeThat: Georgia Roux snarks on Sammy for being an avid reader of NoraRoberts and StephenieMeyer (authors that King ''[[{{Hatedom}} really hates]]'') and says that ''HarryPotter'' rules (King loves the series). However, this is halfway to TakeThatMe, because Georgia Roux is clearly not a nice person.
* TeenGenius: Joe
* TeensAreMonsters: Most of the teenage (or close-to-teenage) characters in the book are sociopaths. [[spoiler: The worst ones are Frankie [=DeLesseps=], Melvin Searles, Carter Thibodeau, Junior Rennie, and Georgia Roux. Junior kills Angie [=McCain=] and Dodee Sanders, and makes the corpses his [[{{Squick}} "girlfriends"]]. Frankie, Melvin, and Carter take turns having their way with Sammy Bushey, and Georgia is essentially their rape cheerleader. Carter also molests Linda Everett late in the book, and threatens to rape her in front of her daughters.]]
** Averted with the younger teen trio of Joe, Benny and Norrie.
* TooDumbToLive: [[spoiler: Carter Thibodeau, at the very end of the book, when he decides to kill Big Jim Rennie so the air in the fallout shelter will last longer, gives Big Jim a chance to pray before he dies. Jim asks Carter to turn the lights off while he prays; Carter actually does it and realizes immediately afterwards that letting Big Jim out of his sight was a big mistake.]]
** Also the ''multitude'' of people who underestimate Big Jim, over and over.
* TotallyRadical: Subverted. A early scene shows a teenager using some bizarre slang, at one point even ''saying'' "totally rad". The adult in the scene tries to reciprocate. The scene's end shows that the teen was mocking the adult's attempts to imitate him, and the teens speak normally for the book's remainder.
* UnusualEuphemism: Big Jim Rennie.
* WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong: One of the cops think so about their [[spoiler: attack on the radio station]]. Naturally it went horribly wrong.
* WhoNamesTheirKidDude: Little Walter Bushey, named after a blues musician. Yes, "Little" is officially the part of his name. Ginny Tomlinson (a nurse in the town's hospital) attributes this to his parents being potheads.
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* TeenGenius: Joe

* AnyoneCanDie: on the cusp of baring Big Jim's machinations to the town, [[spoiler:the dearly-departed police chief's wife]] is summarily choked to death by Big Jim himself. [[spoiler:Andrea Grinnell]] is gunned down in a town meeting. Most jarring, perhaps, is the gradual erosion of the Dinsmore family due to various and sundry Dome-related maladies: by accidental suicide, quite purposeful suicide, and another quite purposeful suicide; the remaining son survives. Barely..

-->'''Soldier:''' Why don't y'all quit on the rocks and do somethin about those cows? Herd em into the barn and milk em or rub soothin shit on their udders; somethin like that.

* BreakTheCutie - Julia after [[spoiler: her newspaper and apartment are destroyed]]. Later, there's a traumatic incident from her childhood which she's forced to re-live.
** During the events of the book Ollie loses his brother, then his mother and finally his father. He decids to stay at their farm. Soon after, it's destroyed and Ollie spends the rest of the book being very close to death.

** Possibly with Lester Coggins who hears the vopice of God. However since what the voice prophesies actually happens [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane possibly it's the real thing]].

* MayDecemberRomance: Carolyn and Thurston. Several peope mistake them for father and daughter.

* PetTheDog - Junior has exactly one decent moment, when he rescues two children separated from their mother. It's especially jarring as it happens mere moments after he and one of his cronies physically and verbally assault two people they practically dragged naked out of bed.

* PoliceAreUseless - Most of the nice cops are, anyway. Per WordOfGod, ineptitude is a theme.
* PrecisionFStrike: While other characters swear throughout the book, Jim Rennie utters a legitimate curseword exactly once.

* ShoutOut - Cox mentions a couple of times that one of the female police officers comes highly recommended by JackReacher.

* StrawmanPolitical - Big Jim Rennie is powerfully conservative in many ways, and also the main villain.
* TakeThat - Georgia Roux snarks on Sammy for being an avid reader of NoraRoberts and StephenieMeyer (authors that King ''[[{{Hatedom}} really hates]]'') and says that ''HarryPotter'' rules (King loves the series). However, this is halfway to TakeThatMe, because Georgia Roux is clearly not a nice person.
* TeensAreMonsters - Most of the teenage (or close-to-teenage) characters in the book are sociopaths. [[spoiler: The worst ones are Frankie [=DeLesseps=], Melvin Searles, Carter Thibodeau, Junior Rennie, and Georgia Roux. Junior kills Angie [=McCain=] and Dodee Sanders, and makes the corpses his [[{{Squick}} "girlfriends"]]. Frankie, Melvin, and Carter take turns having their way with Sammy Bushey, and Georgia is essentially their rape cheerleader. Carter also molests Linda Everett late in the book, and threatens to rape her in front of her daughters.]]

* TooDumbToLive - [[spoiler: Carter Thibodeau, at the very end of the book, when he decides to kill Big Jim Rennie so the air in the fallout shelter will last longer, gives Big Jim a chance to pray before he dies. Jim asks Carter to turn the lights off while he prays; Carter actually does it and realizes immediately afterwards that letting Big Jim out of his sight was a big mistake.]]

* WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong - one of the cops think so about their [[spoiler: attack on the radio station]]. Naturally it went horribly wrong.