To begin with, it appears as though there’s a militaristic government running the nation, one that squelches any sign up uprising by eliminating citizens from their houses and disposing of these quietly. It’s set during the present day, and while the America of King’s creativity is readily recognizable, there are several important elements that mark this planet as a terrible, twisted variation of our very own. Human sacrifice is a theme as old as the written word, therefore it makes great sense that Stephen King, having an obsessive documentarian of the darker side of the human psyche, would plumb these depths for content. Stephen King – The Long Walk Audiobook.īack in 1985, King release the book The Long Walk under the pen name Richard Bachman. Obviously, prior to that came Shirley Jackson’s terrifying tale of ritualized mob violence “The Lottery,” and before that we had gladiators squaring off against hungry beasts in ancient Rome. Mod and I welcome your comments.Long prior to Katniss Everdeen picked her up and boldly targeted at the bureaucratic villains of The Hunger Games, there was Ray Garrity, a child sacrificed by the USA of America to the amusement of its blood thirsty citizens. For the doubters, this excerpt should demonstrate that I was thinking dome and isolation long before Homer, Marge, and their amusing brood came on the scene. The reason is simple: no two human imaginations are exactly alike. Unless there’s deliberate copying (sometimes known as “plagiarism”), stories can no more be alike than snowflakes. I can’t speak personally to this, because I have never seen the movie, and the similarity came as a complete surprise to me…although I know, from personal experience, that the similarity will turn out to be casual. Several Internet writers have speculated on a perceived similarity between Under the Dome and The Simpsons Movie, where, according to Wikipedia, Homer’s town of Springfield is isolated inside a large glass dome (probably because of that pesky nuclear power plant). There’s another reason for publishing this on the website. I’m amused by the antique quality of the typescript this may have been the last thing I did on my old IBM Selectric before moving on to a computer system. Mod from a locked cabinet in a back room of my office. So, for your amusement, and as an appetizer to Under the Dome, here are the first sixty pages or so of The Cannibals, reproduced, warts and all, from the original manuscript which was dredged up by Ms. Long story short, it turned up-battered, and with some pages missing, but mostly complete-in the summer of 2009. It was called The Cannibals, and this time I got a lot further-almost five hundred pages-before hitting a wall. I spent two months in a depressing suburban apartment complex that became (with the usual fictional tweaks) the setting for the story. That second try was mostly written in Pittsburgh, during the filming of Creepshow. That seventy-page manuscript (actually titled Under the Dome) was lost, but after reviewing the stuff I said about it in Douglas Winter’s book, The Art of Darkness (1989), I got thinking about my second effort to write that story, which, as you will find out, deals with people trapped in an increasingly lethal environment. My first effort to write it came in 1978, or thereabouts. This novel was the genesis for Steve's later novel, Under the Dome.Īs most of you know, I have a novel coming out in November called Under the Dome. Apartment dwellers find themselves trapped inside their building.
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