Thursday, August 15, 2013

Did Stephen King Get the Idea for His book Under The Dome from His Tommyknockers Novel?


It’s pretty much likely I’ve stumbled on the origin of Stephen King’s Under The Dome (UTD)… and it’s absolutely not The Simpsons Movie. The book with a goodish length, which only recently got adapted to a miniseries on CBS has been quite the source of controversial stint since its release into the fiction market in 2009. Stephen king has defended the originality of his idea for the book on his website by posting a 61-page facsimile excerpt from his original novel The Cannibals, an unpublished unfinished 450-page handwritten novel written in 1982, while King was filming Creepshow.

All comparisons from The Tommyknockers novel were retrieved from only the last three chapters of the book.


The Year 1982
With what I have, I’m probably a little more apt to hit the bull’s eye than earlier speculations. Did you see the figures in red above? What’s so special about them? Draft for The Cannibals, which eventually, became Under The Dome (UTD) was written that year. The same holds for The Tommyknockers (TK) draft if the date at the bottom of the page (August 19th, 1982) after the Epilogue is anything to go by. It’s a possibility that one complex story idea spilled over into another story, eh? Most Stephen King fans (and we run into millions) would agree it’s one of his quirks.

Date of Publication Puzzle
Another puzzling detail is the publication dates for the two novels. Apparently, they coincide. Although, published in different years, I’d say about twenty two years apart, both books were published on the same date, November 10. The Tommyknockers came out in 1987 while Under The Dome was released into the market in 2009. Am I saying King did that on purpose? Maybe. Do you have a better explanation?

The Dome vs. The Force Field
In both stories, there is a shield of some sort checking movement beyond the borderlines of both towns. The Havenites (in TK) set up a kind of extraterrestrial force field around their town. Composed of odorless toxic gas, the field stops intrusion from the outside world. The dome in UTD performs a similar function and people who got too close to its source risked exposure to radiation.

The Pacemaker Explosions
We find pacemakers detonating when individuals who had one of these gadgets on them made contact with the Dome/Force field. In both cases, the result is instant death. Is it a wonder that both victims are law enforcement officers? In TK, when Henry Amberson a forest ranger from Newport, one of the men sent in to inspect a possible forest came within spitting distance of the field around Haven his pacemaker exploded in Amberson’s chest. And Police Chief Howard "Duke" Perkins is soon killed when his pacemaker explodes after getting too close to the Dome in UTD.

There are two recorded plane crashes influenced by the barrier around the town of Haven in The Tommyknockers novel. In UTD, the coming of the dome was duly publicized when a Seneca V plane crashed into it killing the wife of the town’s first selectman. Later on, a 767-jetliner conveying passengers over the town of Chester’s Mill disintegrates on impact with the invisible barricade. Two plane crashes in two stories both upshots of barriers of alien origin. Coincidence? I think not.

The Alien Gadgets in the Towns’ Back Fields
Bobbi Anderson discovered the flying saucer buried under the ground in her back field in The Tommyknockers and in Under The Dome, a group of curious teens discover the alien generator, the source of the dome, in the town's back fields.

Okay, I’m out of ideas but if what I got here don’t qualify for weird coincidence, I don’t know if anything else does.


Akpan



Enhanced by Zemanta

1 comment:

  1. How about the fact that Marg Helgenberger who plays Bobbi in the Tommyknockers finds the ship in the woods also plays also plays Christine Price who finds one of the eggs?

    ReplyDelete

Feedbacks welcome and appreciated.

Free counters!