Under the Dome is a novel currently being written by Stephen King. It is a rewrite of a novel King attempted writing twice in the 1980s, under the titles The Cannibals and Under the Dome. As King stated on his official site, these two unfinished works "were two very different attempts to utilize the same idea, which concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they've always belonged to. Also, my memory of The Cannibals is that it, like Needful Things, was a kind of social comedy. The new Under the Dome is played dead straight." King read from his new first draft at "The Three Kings" reading event that was held on April 4, 2008 at the Library of Congress, which was broadcast by C-SPAN as part of their Book TV series on May 4, 2008. King described the novel as "very, very long," saying "I tried [writing] this once before when I was a lot younger, and the project was just too big for me." The novel has been compared to King's previous epic novels The Stand and It in length, with King himself believing the book to ultimately be "at least 1,800" manuscript pages long.