Title: Under the Dome
Author: Stephen King
First Published: 2003
Publisher: Scribner
Pages: 1092
Genre: Science Fiction
Format/Source: Kindle/Amazon
"[He] looked up and saw [her] brains drying high on one wall. What she used to think with now looked like a clot of oatmeal. He burst into tears."
On the morning of October 21, out of the blue, an invisible barrier appears all around Chester's Mill, Maine. The first two victims of the "Dome Day" are the two passengers of a little plane that crashes into the "Dome", the hand of a gardener who happened to be reaching over the town limits the exact moment is cut off by the force field, it's owner dies of blood loss.
Aside from killing another half-a-dozen or so people and one woodchuck, the Dome also prevents Dale Barbara, nicknamed Barbie, a cook and Ex-Iraq solider from leaving the town after a physical conflict with the son of the town's second selectman.
As the town scrambles to adapt with this situation, this selectman, Big Jim Rennie, is quick to hatch a plan and try to take on control over Chester's Mill, whatever the price is.
But Barbie and Julia Shumway - the publisher of the local paper - see through this plan and suspect there's a little more to Big Jim than the dutiful selectman and used car dealer than it seems.