The Science of Stephen King

Although Edgar and Elizabeth could be suffering from a shared delusion, they realize that there truly is a villain that is trying to control them.

Jerome Wireman, the live-in attendant for Elizabeth, is grief stricken over the deaths of his wife and daughter. He is so depressed that at one point he attempts to die by suicide. What is the psychology behind grief? There are five stages of the grieving process according to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying:

1. Denial.

2. Anger.

3. Bargaining.

4. Depression.

5. Acceptance.10

People tend to spend various lengths of time in these stages and each one may affect others differently. For example, some people may grieve a loss more before an actual death. This is referred to as anticipatory grief. The subsequent passing, then, can sometimes be seen as a relief and the acceptance stage is reached more quickly. One psychologist found that 50–60 percent of people recover from grief fairly quickly while only 10 require therapy or other interventions to help them cope.11 However you grieve, it’s seen as a personal and necessary process that is different for everyone.

Edgar uses his power one final time at the end of the novel Duma Key to destroy the island. He returns home and traps the villain in a statuette, dropping it into a freshwater lake in Minnesota. His geographical healing has come to an end and the true healing can begin.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Under the Dome

As the Coronavirus pandemic rocks the world in 2020, it would be difficult not to compare the isolation in Stephen King’s forty-eighth novel, Under the Dome, to this modern crisis. Published in 2009, Under the Dome centers on the town of Chester’s Mills, Maine; a town that is inexplicably covered with a glass dome. This barrier causes damage and death when it falls from the sky, and more, it causes the townspeople of Chester’s Mills to be cut off from the outside world. As the novel progresses, people become more desperate to escape their cage, especially as resources dwindle and the air grows toxic. Eventually, we learn that aliens, known as “leatherheads,” are to blame for the dome. In the tradition of many extraterrestrials in the media, they find entertainment in torturing humans, watching as they panic, pillage, and kill. King explained his thought process behind Under the Dome:

From the very beginning, I saw it as a chance to write about the serious ecological problems that we face in the world today. 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. It’s a natural allegorical situation, without whamming the reader over the head with it. I don’t like books where everything stands for everything else. It works with Animal Farm: You can be a child and read it as a story about animals, but when you’re older, you realize it’s about communism, capitalism, fascism. That’s the genius of Orwell. But I love the idea about isolating these people, addressing the questions that we face. We’re a blue planet in a corner of the galaxy, and for all the satellites and probes and Hubble pictures, we haven’t seen evidence of anyone else. There’s nothing like ours. We have to conclude we’re on our own, and we have to deal with it. We’re under the dome. All of us.1

This humbling realization, that we are likely alone in the universe, is what makes the parables in Under the Dome so powerful. No matter how big or small our personal “bubble,” we eventually have to come to terms with our own human vulnerability.

But what about the vulnerability of the planet? When an explosion kills hundreds of residents in Under the Dome, the toxic air lingers, not able to escape the barrier. If Earth is, indeed, our shared dome, how have humans destroyed it, both unknowingly and brazenly?

Global warming is a scientific term that has been gaining popularity in the last several decades. It refers to the proven increase of Earth’s temperature caused by humans. While global warming has occurred in the prehistoric past, the rise in the twentieth century is the most markedly dramatic. This is due to carbon emissions. Since the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, humans have increased our carbon emissions into the atmosphere by 45 percent. This is because of our use of fossil fuels, as well as extreme man-made changes in the planet, like deforestation. In a study focusing on the US mid-Atlantic region, researchers pinpoint the problems with increased carbon (CO2) emissions:

Atmospheric CO2 has increased since the Industrial Revolution.