the novel. Limited editions A Collector's Edition (limited to 25,000 copies) and a Signed Edition (limited to 1,500 copies) were published by Scribner concurrently with the regular trade edition. These editions feature a dust jacket without any lettering, a removable band with author name and title, printed endpapers with the map of the town in color (regular edition contains a black and white map in the book's front matter), 27 illustrations by The New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee, a ribbon marker, and also contain a deck of cards with the Diffee illustrations. These editions are printed on specialty paper with different binding. A signed and numbered UK edition, published by Hodder & Stoughton, sold exclusively by both Hatchard's Bookshop and Waterstones, was limited to 500 copies. It included the 4-color endpapers, the 27 trading cards illustrated by cartoonist, Matthew Diffee, and was packaged in a slipcase. Reception The author Dan Simmons, to whom Stephen King sent the manuscript for Under the Dome as a gift, commented on it on May 5, 2009, calling the novel "huge, generous, sprawling, infinitely energetic [...], absolutely enjoyable and impressive." Publishers Weekly reviewed the novel on September 11, 2009, calling it "formidably complex and irresistibly compelling." The review said the book contains "themes and images from King's earlier fiction, and while this novel doesn't have the moral weight of, say, The Stand, nevertheless, it's a nonstop thrill ride as well as a disturbing, moving meditation on our capacity for good and evil". In a review for The Plain Dealer, Daniel Dyer calls Under the Dome "a massive cautionary novel", saying it is "busy, ambitious, overlong but addictively munchable, [and] fundamentally a novel about human cruelty, animated by our desires for power, pleasure and sex." USA Today called the novel "propulsively intriguing", "staggeringly addictive", and stated that "Readers can wallow in this glorious novel's metaphoric and oh-so au courant messages about U.S. domination, freedom of the press, torture and environmental abuse, but they also can come to this novel just for the story." The Los Angeles Times called Under the Dome "impressive", containing "lucid prose and chilling precision." Janet Maslin's review for The New York Times said that Under the Dome "has the scope and flavor of literary Americana." Maslin says, "Hard as this thing is to hoist, it's even harder to put down." Ted Anthony of the Associated Press states that "Under the Dome is