Horror, sci-fi, whatever you want to call it, but the main point to know about The Uninvited is that it's all supposedly true. In the 1970s, Broadhaven in Wales became a place for several UFO sightings. In addition to schoolchildren seeing an alien dressed in a silver suit, the Coombs family encountered several unexplained phenomena (teleporting cows, constantly breaking cars and televisions, strange lights etc.). Well, unexplained until years after the publication of The Uninvited several people came forward and claimed some of it was just a hoax. You don't say?

This is one of those cases (rare ones, thankfully) where I was blinded by all the good reviews and the deceptively interesting blurb. What made me even have a strong gut feeling about this is baffling, because UFOs aren't really my thing. I may have a mild interest for the 1940s UFO incident, but that's mainly because I love history, strange things, and I want to visit Roswell sometime (you know, all the fun alien lamp posts and signs etc.). Even in The X-Files, almost all my favorite episodes are monster-of-the-week.

Harold is a completely adequate writer and the book as a whole isn't bad per se, but it's very dull. The sightings follow one after another. There's no real story in this monotony, because we just follow the family and their daily lives with some extra-terrestrials in the mix. Usually my gut feeling is right, but I should probably re-calibrate it when buying vintage horror paperbacks.

Annie Wilkes is some scary lady. It's been years since I've seen the movie, but it's still pretty clear in my mind. Didn't matter, though. This might be one of the very best of King's writing, and he might also have sold his soul to the Devil in order to have the skill to maintain suspense. Waiting for Annie to lose it was both fun and scary.

As a fan of vintage King, I honestly didn't expect much going in. I knew I'd be entertained and sucked in, but the chance of experiencing that particular atmosphere spiced with crazy supernatural phenomena didn't cross my mind. There was still "that something" missing, but this was a hell of a ride in any case.

We've seen so much of apocalyptic metropolises, but Peyton Place (1956) showed that a small town where people know each other can be a gateway to hell, dome or not. Small-mindedness and gossiping create snakes out of even the most unwilling of residents, but when a town is shut into its own universe, its when people actually start eating each other alive. This is a dynamic that gives a lot of room for exploring several themes and personality types, and King has definitely succeeded. On the surface, Chester's Mill is an unassuming conservative town, but beneath that deceptively moralistic and Christian surface there's poison brewing.

When disaster strikes, often the villains have the most guts to take charge, whereas most are happy to just follow someone and pretend everything's ok and will be in the future. Big Jim is the most vile character I've come across in a long time. When a man of that level of demented starts calling the shots, we all know it can't end well, especially when very few realize he's not actually interested in anyone but his own ass. He's like the shepherd of a flock of blind sheep, the nurse of terminally ill patients, with a severe case of a Christ complex.

In this, though, lies also the weakness of the novel. King resorts to painting his characters with very broad strokes, making villains behave like they're possessed by the devil and heroes are just all-round cool guys destined for greatness. It detracts from the otherwise realistic situation, where the dome ties into more general political issues. Actually, there isn't a lot of cracking under pressure either, meaning that the small town mentality isn't fully utilized, because only existing traits are heightened and secrets not tied to personalities but outward things are slowly revealed.

At the same time, what really pushed this into another level was the black humour, which I appreciate enormously (even when it's distasteful and disgusting á la The Devils [1971]). Murder is compared to potato chips (as an avid fan of almost all kinds of chips, I completely understand the comparison), a priest with mommy issues is flogging himself in orange bike shorts (which themselves are a horror to behold), a "green burrito" carpet, and a self-professed prophet becomes like a Judas of sorts (only high on meth). Oh, and there's a reference to Breaking Bad (and Jack Reacher, but I don't know him as a character so I'm not able to appreciate it). Even Anderson Cooper and Bill O'Reilly make an appearance (albeit through a television screen).

Besides, anyone who seems to have been completely confident about a giant character gallery like this deserves to be applauded. Usually a large amount of characters disturbs me to no end, but in this case there are only a few important key players, while the rest mostly end up as dog food.

So yeah, I had fun peeping through a magnifying class these ants engaging in various activities in a catastrophic situation (and gasping when that disturbing event at the end struck). Easily my favorite of 21st century King.

I can't easily come up with a more pallid place than Florida. At least I've always thought of it (like King expresses in this book) as a place of newlyweds and half dead. And maybe Hemingway lookalikes (I know, it may be a stereotype, but all states have their own I guess). Somehow King makes this calming sunny paradise into a less calming one with his own convincing style. Through Edgar Freemantle he explores the consequences of a serious accident: how difficult the recovery process is, but how it's still possible with determination and the support of loved ones.

I liked the oppressive feeling. That state which doesn't stem from the temperature, but from the feeling that someone's watching and manipulating you. In that state the breeze of wind coming from the ocean doesn't feel refreshingly, cool but brings with it the smell of the dead. The characters are nice and down-to-earth, and I liked the theme of art and creativity because of its former familiarity in my life. I once again started to think whether I should dig up my pencils and papers and start scribbling. And starve myself, because I forget to eat in the midst of the burst of creativity.

Although overall this is good King quality, the story involuntarily seems a bit prolonged. I can't tell whether the balance would be restored by cutting some of the stuff out, but around the middle part I started to experience a slight stagnation both in the story itself and in character development. Nevertheless, it was a real delight to get a King book in my hands once again and disappear into that world for a while. It's amazing how someone has such storytelling skills, that I had to read the last 200 pages or so obsessively and feverishly on one sitting, because I couldn't wait till the next day to see how it will all turn out. Actual horror elements didn't get their place in the spotlight properly until the latter half, but King really let himself go in that part, so it was worth the wait. How the hell twins can be so scary? Don't get it.

The first King novel I actually considered pretty boring. The climax when Dolores does what she does is fairly interesting but still the whole story seems to lack in elements which I think made him my favourite author. For example there's no strong character study much because of the one dialogue the book consists of. And I'm drawn into the more supernatural stories, they're the most entertaining ones.