Under the Dome/YMMV

• Complete Monster: Big Jim Rennie.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: Barbie deliberately antagonizing Junior in order to save Rusty's life, despite the fact that Junior had a gun and Barbie was trapped, almost totally defenseless, in a jail cell.
• Crowning Moment of Funny: Junior's reaction to Randolph using the phrase "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.":

Junior didn't know whether to say "Yes, sir" or "No, sir", because he had no idea what the idiot behind the desk was talking about.

• Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Visitor's Day. Too bad it soon goes to hell.
  • A pure one happens when Ames and Ollie Dinsmore meet after the dome goes up.
• Fetish Retardant: Two men kiss and profess their love for one another before dying in each other's arms. One is a skin-and-bones maniac in urine-stained frog pajama pants, the other is a middle-aged pharmacist. Both are tweaked out of their minds. And their last act is to blow up a barn full of gigantic tanks of propane. Still an oddly touching moment.
• Fridge Logic: Big Jim wants to convince the population Barbie is an insane serial killer and necrophile and the mastermind of a government conspiracy. It's too bad we never get to hear him try to explain exactly why this is supposed to make sense. . .
  • Although given the psychological state of the town at the time, he probably wouldn't have needed to make much sense.
• Ho Yay: Andy Sanders and Chef Bushey share a kiss in their final moments, before they blow up the drug factory and themselves.
• Nightmare Fuel: the whole fire under the Dome sequence. And Henry's bus. Also the last few minutes of Jim Rennie's life: alone in the dark, with a failing heart, running out of air, surrounded by the ghosts of his victims...
• Squick - Junior Rennie's "girlfriends." Two girls he kills. Then he stuffs them in a pantry. And then has sex with their dead, decaying, dead, corpses. Repeatedly. And later on he makes plans to rescue two children for whom he feels love and responsibility to the same pantry. Just to keep them safe, obviously.
• Tear Jerker: Henrietta Clavard and Petra Searles conversation before they died.
  • Sammy's gang rape.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks - A common criticism against the book is that Stephen King merely ripped off The Simpsons movie when Stephen King claims to have never even seen the movie. In actuality, stories about domed cities have been told for decades and Stephen King had originally come up with the idea in 1976. If those people leveling the accusation had bothered to actually read the book, they'd realize that it really isn't anything like The Simpsons movie anyway.
  • The Simpsons even referenced these criticisms in a 2010 episode. Mr. Burns threatens to trap Springfield under a dome, but when he's told it's been done before, he is surprised because he thought the idea came from King's book.
  • The idea of a dome suddenly appearing over a city pops up in 1965, with Clifford Simak's All Flesh is Grass, and in 1988, with Robert Mc Cammon's Stinger, so it's hardly a ripoff, but an idea.
• The Woobie: Poor Ollie Dinsmore. By the end of the book his whole family is dead, from one accidental suicide and two quite purposeful ones. He even witnesses his brother's accidental suicide, and sees the aftermath of his mother's and father's.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Andy Sanders, who at the beginning of the book is regarded as Jim Rennie's stupid, easily manipulated figurehead. His wife is one of the first people killed when she, and a man whom she may or may not have been in an affair with, crash a plane into the side of the Dome. Very soon after this, Andy's daughter, Dodee, is murdered and raped by Junior Rennie simply because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. After her body is discovered, Andy nearly commits suicide, then chooses instead to confront Chef, an insane tweeker, and probably get killed in the process. Instead of this, Chef gets Andy hooked on meth and gives him an AK-47, recruiting him into his "holy army". The pair then proceed to massacre an entire squadron of policemen and blow up the meth lab, all but wiping out the town's population in the process.