The Paperbackers

The strange goings-on in a New England town and a half-caste ex-mujahid who comes in from the cold....

A woodchuck is bisected,a crow gets decapitated midair and a flying lesson comes to an abrupt end when a Seneca plane flattens its nose on an unseen barrier,raining an assortment of body parts and twisted metal on the woods below. Meanwhile,a farmer puttering home for lunch on his John Deere tractor,while listening to James Blunt cloyingly bray Youre beautiful on his brand new iPod,is thrown off and killed,with the exploded iPod scattered about him like white confetti.

That these spooky events befall a sleepy little town in Maine can mean just one thing: master of horror Stephen King is back,belting out another bestseller that throws the blandest quarters of small-town America in a frightening,spectral light. Under the Dome Hachette,Rs 350 relates the supernaturally dire troubles of the residents of Chesters Mill,who find themselves trapped in an invisible barrier that has descended on them,shimmering like the air over an incinerator or a burning barrel.

As panic seizes the town,a villain emerges: Big Rennie,a used-car salesman and town official,who assembles a team of violent lunkheads to commandeer the towns resources and do his bidding. They are headed by Rennies son Junior,who suffers from murderous migraines that send arrows of pain into the squalling meat of his poor brain. Against them is ranged a motley crew of good people: an Iraq veteran who works at the local grill,an unstoppable lady reporter,a toiling physician,and a lady officer whose vast tiddies invite more attention than her policing skills. Also in this pacy 900-page thriller: a self-flagellating priest,children with oracular seizures,dogs that listen to dead voices,as well as some quaint,occasionally scatological small-town idiom Holy jumped up God!,Ill be dipped in shit!.

Lots of proverbial excrement hits the fan in Michael Grubers spy novel The Good Son Corvus,Rs 450,when mujahid-turned-undercover agent Theo Lagharis American mother is taken hostage by a band of mujahideen in Pakistans North West Frontier Province en route to a conference on conflict resolution in Kashmir. Sonia Bailey a psychotherapist and Sufi mystic,among other things also has a decades-old fatwa on her head for travelling to Mecca disguised as a young boy. Laghari jets off from his not-really-girlfriend Glorias side in Washington DC to rescue her.

Grubers novel moves away from the rarefied air of his previous two novels,which involved a forged Velázquez and a lost Shakespeare play. This one is filled with stark flashes from the ongoing theatre of war in Iraq. Like Lagharis lucid nightmare recollection of the kind of shit that gives people in a war zone post-traumatic stress disorder: Little girls in embroidered dresses lying by the side of the road like dead dogs,cars full of some family that was in the wrong place,sitting there,roasted meat,teeth grinning out from the char. Gruber also smuggles in some pithy comment on 21st century American interventionism. There was no Afghanistan the way there was a France or a Canada,there were only individuals and families and clans,and the Americans trying to make it different was like assembling a fighter plane out of wet toilet paper.