Stephen King is back and ready to make your hair stand on end with 'Under the Dome,' a complex novel about society and humanity with that signature King touch. PopEater is proud to exclusively premiere an interview in which King discusses 'Dome.' "There's a saying that people have in Alcoholics Anonymous, which is 'You're only as sick as your secrets.' Some of the people in this book are pretty sick indeed, and let's put it this way, I think readers are going to be engaged, but I don't think they're going to be totally surprised by some of the things people are holding back because we have them in our own lives," King says in the interview. Watch It After the Jump!"I saw it as a chance to write about the serious ecological problems that we face in the world today. I don't want to get real heavy about this ... but the fact is we all live under the dome. We have this little blue world we've all seen from outer space, and it appears that's all there is," King says in the interview.
Explaining how the book came to fruition, King says he tried to write 'Dome' in 1976, but that it got put on the back burner until three years later -- but even then, King wasn't ready. "It's kind of like a baseball player saying 'I missed a really fat pitch and I'd really like to have another chance.'"
During a plane trip to Australia three years ago, King got that fat pitch, and the inspiration to revisit the 'Dome' concept returned.
"The image that caught my mind was the idea of these people giving a press conference to the outside world ... and from what you see there's nothing between them and the cameras until somebody reaches out and knocks on, you know, thin air," King explains.
The acclaimed author of more than 50 books says it "was great to be working on a big canvas again," explaining that he ultimately writes "two kinds of books. I do books that are like murals, they're big and they're populated with all kinds of characters, and then [I] do the close-up books like 'Misery.' ... If you're going to write a book that people are going to love ... you just can't phone it in."
The world and the environment was a key factor for King's inspiration, the author says. "I saw it as a chance to write about the serious ecological problems that we face in the world today. I don't want to get real heavy about this ... but the fact is we all live under the dome. We have this little blue world we've all seen from outer space, and it appears that's all there is," he says.
Get info on Stephen King's upcoming comic book project, 'American Vampire' @ ComicsAlliance.
