"Cell" by Stephen King (a book review)

I’ve been reading Stephen King since I was, quite frankly, too young to be reading Stephen King. It all started with me watching the movie "It", at my cousins house as a very young child. I still can't stand the sight of clowns, and I am in fact convinced they are evil. The movie had such an impression on me, I just had to torture myself more. I started reading and watching everything "Stephen King" I could get my hands on! You would think my teachers would be concerned that a ten-year-old girl was reading "The Shining"  or "Nightmares and Dreamscapes". I often "borrowed" books and movies from my aunt. My mom would have been horrified if she had known! Luckily for me, no teacher was concerned with the possible effect this sort of adult material could have on such an impressionable young mind, except one.

So I killed her. I didn’t have a choice.

I kid, of course. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t have to. For some odd reason, she never told my mom. Maybe she was just happy I was reading at all, who knows?

In "Cell", cell phones emit a pulse that turns cell phone users into gibberish-spewing, bloodthirsty “Phone Crazies”; living zombies that think with a hive mind, move in well-coordinated flocks, and hibernate en masse when the sun goes down. Meanwhile, “normies” like Clay Riddell, a comic book artist who was making his first professional sale on the same afternoon the shit hit the fan, are forced to live by night, foraging for food and supplies while the Phone Crazies sleep, desperate to get to a place well outside of the coverage area of your nationwide calling plan. For Clay, however, the real journey is home to his son, Johnny, and his estranged wife, and Tom and Alice, Clay’s loyal traveling companions, are just as determined to get him there. But as the Crazies start acting…well…less crazy, and the powerful collective consciousness of these beings hints at abilities well beyond our heroes comprehension, they find themselves resorting to acts they’d never thought themselves capable of; acts that not only infuriate the Phone Crazies, but alienate them from their fellow survivors, and leave them all alone in this brave new world.

Cell is essentially a short story stretched out to novel length. This isn’t to say that the book is a slow read-quite the contrary; this is such lightweight stuff that even the most sluggish of readers should be able to put it away in under a week’s time, and King’s always enchanting prose makes for compulsory reading. However, there’s just not a lot of plot here, and, what little there is seems to have been cobbled together from bits of George Romero, bits of Japanese horror, and a heaping portion of King’s own work; most notably, The Stand. As a matter of fact, Cell feels like a hastily cobbled together retread of that epic tome, overhauled and fine-tuned for the information age, but with nary a hint of the urgency and thematic weight that made The Stand such a heady and vital read.

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I had some fun with Cell, but I’d be a hopeless fangirl if I didn’t also admit that it’s a seriously flawed work. It’s a shame because the book really opens strong, and the first fifty or so pages are such raw, unbridled, truly classic King. However, when the momentum shifts, the book putters along toward an abrupt anti-climax that left me wanting for more (but for all of the wrong reasons). I think that this would have made for a great two hundred page novella, as that word limit would have forced King to trim a lot of the excess fat that keeps the book from being the rapid fire dynamo that the author intended. Still, for Stephen King fans desperate for a fix from the master of gross-out horror, Cell certainly delivers its share of wonderfully descriptive carnage, and, while not nearly amongst his best work, will still offer a few nights worth of light horror entertainment.