"UNDER THE DOME," by Stephen King, Scribner, 1,088 pages, $35 (f)

Life goes like this sometimes: One minute you're taking a flying lesson on the most perfect of autumn days, tickled to see people fishing under the bridge, to catch the view of your everyday world from up above. And the next you are just body parts raining down.

And life's more apt to go that way when you're a character in a Stephen King novel. When the King of Creepy has close to 1,100 pages to wreak havoc, as he does in "Under the Dome," things can get pretty hairy.

In interviews, King has said that he tried to write this book a quarter-century ago. He wasn't ready. He apparently used part of that time, as it roamed around in the background of his mind, coming up with awful things that can happen to people and animals.

Once you calm down from seeing the sheer size of the book (a few inches thick and nearly 4 pounds, I'm told) and get past the list of more than 100 characters, designed to help you keep the book's huge cast straight, it really is a surprisingly quick read. It is also decidedly suspenseful — even thrilling in places.

The action takes place in the oh-so-ordinary, neighborly town of Chester Mills, Maine, where on a crisp and beautiful fall day a clear dome slaps down over the town, sealing it off from the outside world. You can sometimes reach someone outside with your cell phone, depending on the reception. You can speak to those who stand on the outside. But you're not going anywhere. And that becomes wildly problematic. Nothing, including supplies, is going in or out.

What is this thing and where did it come from? Who's responsible for it? No one seems to know.

And, of course, because it's a King novel, some pretty horrible things are going to happen, some of them quite grotesque. So you might not want to get too attached to the characters as you meet them.

As for the characters, there's a super-bad guy, corrupt politician and car dealer (yeah, King embraces boldly some cliches) Big Jim Rennie, and some lesser creeps. The good guys include Gulf War veteran Dale "Barbie" Barbara, dog-loving physician's assistant Julia Shumway and some kids who are going to try to set things right. Despite an intriguing group of good guys, it really is a rather jaded view of human nature as the experience wears thin and human behavior begins to deteriorate badly.

King's strength is in the pacing and the plotting, while his weakness is dialogue. It sometimes sounds "off," as if people would never really talk that way. On occasion, both action and dialogue seem cumbersome.

Could you walk away from it, though? I seriously doubt it. I'm not a big fan of the grotesque, but despite a few shortcomings, King is a master of pacing and he knows all about setting his hook and reeling readers in. He had me by page 10. King takes the book's intriguing, if not entirely original (didn't I see a dome slam down on Springfield in a Simpsons episode?), premise and delivers high drama at a staccato pace.

e-mail: lois@desnews.com