"Stephen King has written of ghosts and vampires, revenants and demons and all manner of supernatural terrors.

"What does he find scarier, the extrahuman monsters or the human ones?

"'The human, always the human,' King says."

You can read the rest of my interview with Stephen King here. In a phone interview, we talked about why his terrific new novel Under the Dome took more than three decades to write, how the Bush administration inspired some of its characters, and why the current book price wars trouble him.

The book is one of King's best, as I say in my review:

"What's more terrifying than the invisible, impermeable, immovable dome that suddenly cages a chunk of Maine countryside in Stephen King's Under the Dome? 

"The town beneath it.

"Under the Dome has elements of extrahuman mystery, but the most frightening creatures in this frightening book are the human beings who find themselves trapped like ants under a heedless child's magnifying glass and, in many cases, respond with cruelties of their own."

Read the rest here.

Also on this week's books pages, you'll find reviews of Googled, Ken Auletta's lively history of the search engine that changed the world; Pilgrims: A Wobegon Romance, the lastest novel by A Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor, who will appear in Tampa on Tuesday; and Nightlight, the Harvard Lampoon's spoof of a certain series of teen vampire lust novels you might have heard about.

Dan Mann of Lighthouse of Pinellas Inc. tells us what's on his Nightstand, and Notable gathers three new kids' books about real-life famous animals.

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