Under the Dome

Under the Dome is a 2009 science fiction novel by the American author Stephen King. It is his fifty-eighth published book and forty-eighth novel. The novel focuses on a small Maine town and tells an intricate, multi-character story with alternating perspectives about how the inhabitants cope with being cut off from outside world by an impassable barrier.

The event is dated to the minute, and the book covers only eight days, from 21 October to 28 October. The dome is described as invisible, semipermeable and of unknown origin, which means the town has air but nothing else from outside, and the plot is organised around the consequences of that enclosure rather than around an explanation of it. The town is in Maine, and the book's scale comes from the number of perspectives it carries: the story is told through a large cast rather than through a single investigator.

It was a New York Times bestseller, and the novel was originally issued in some markets in two parts. Some markets received it in two parts, and the novel's length of more than a thousand pages is one reason for that division.