Stephen King's New Thriller Scares Readers with Environmental Doom

If you thought that you were going to escape being greenwashed by simply changing the channel for NBC's "Green Week," think again. Now you can't even wile away your time reading a good ol' fashioned thriller. Stephen King's new book, "Under the Dome," depicts a small city on the brink of an environmental disaster (that is, if it can survive the murders, arson, and corruption, of course).

Set in fictional Chester's Mill, Maine, the 1,000+ page tome (King's longest since "It") details the demise of a small town that mysteriously becomes stuck under an invisible, impenetrable dome.

The town faces such King clichés as deception, rape, and drug addiction, but it also discovers that it's on the fast track to environmental doom. The book review by Kevin Kelly of Mercury News describes the town's desperate situation.

"You can't see the dome - until it becomes smudged on the outside by the accumulation of smog and things running into it and leaving stains," he said. "With no steady influx of new air, Chester's Mill begins to smell like a locker room and plants start dying, and as the dome becomes more and more smeared with grime from the outside world, the temperature inside climbs."

In an interview for popeater.com, Stephen King admitted that he wanted to target global warming in his new book.

"From the very beginning, I saw it as a chance to write about the serious ecological problems that we face in the world today," he said. "The fact is we all live under the dome. We have this little blue world that we've all seen from outer space, and it appears like that's about all there is."

Stephen King originally started working on the book back in 1976 - a time, when, as he said on Nov. 13 during an interview on "The View," "there was a lot going on then about ecology and acid rain and the whole environmental thing." Strangely, it was also a time when climate change alarmists were worried about global cooling.

The manuscript lay unfinished for over 30 years. One of the reasons that he decided to finish it was that he "wanted to say something about that [these environmental problems]."