It has been a good summer for Stephen King. We can now add his massive 2009 novel Under the Dome to the list of King projects in various states of development around Tinseltown.  The thousand-page epic has found a home on Showtime with Steven Spielberg attached as Executive Producer through Dreamworks TV. No word yet on a director or cast but I’m sure that news will start trickling out soon enough.

Under the Dome is about a small Maine town that suddenly finds itself trapped under an invisible dome. As with most King novels the story is less about the catalyst and more about how the people react, in this case the breakdown of the society trapped under the dome. The novel grew from a shorter story he wrote back in 1982 called The Cannibals about a group of people trapped in an apartment buidling. I enjoyed the book tremendously but it does suffer from that pesky “poor ending syndrome” that plagues a few other King books I can think of. In this case, as with those others, the journey far outshined the payoff and I wasn’t complaining.

Seeing Spielberg’s name attached to this gives me all kinds of warm fuzzy feelings, and the added bonus of cable television means that hopefully some of the more disturbing scenes won’t get cut out. If I was a betting man I’d say we’ll see this on screen this time next year.