King on Under the Dome
Posted: June 18, 2008, 15:36
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Question:
In his book The Art of Darkness, Douglas Winter quotes King as saying "I worked on a book called The Cannibals–I had started it five years before, but it was called Under the Dome then. It didn't get finished either time." So according to this quote The Cannibals and Under the Dome are the same book, or more precisely two attempts to write the same story. However SK's comments in the introduction to Blaze suggest that these are two different books. Could you please clarify this, Ms. Mod?
Here's Steve's response:
Those stories were two very different attempts to utilize the same idea, which concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they've always belonged to. Also, my memory of THE CANNIBALS is that it, like NEEDFUL THINGS, was a kind of social comedy. The new UNDER THE DOME is played dead straight.