Stephen King does zombies! Well...kind of. We'll get to that in a bit.But first, here's how I think this book came about:Way back in aught-6 (2006), or just before because Cell was published in '06, but who knows with King, am I right? But anyway, we've come a long way since that time. Everyone was getting cell phones and they were just about getting to every last person around. I imagine him having this conversation with, let's say, his son, Joe Hill.Stephen: "Wow, cell phones have really gotten popular lately. Everyone seems to have one."Joe: "Yeah Dad, come on, get with the times already, man." Stephen: "Well, at least we'll never get rid of these landlines right? Both are VERY necessary. [useless joke probably not in King's character, just wanted to make fun of how we used to still had landlines when everyone was switching to cell phones]"But seriously, I am SO sick of people being on their cell phones all the time. You can't even have an honest-to-goodness conversation with a person without someone bombarding you with a call."Can't we just have real conversations with human beings anymore? Instead, we talk to electronics and let them control everything we do, sacrificing our humanity."If only there was a way to put an end to this nonsense...I've got it!"Cell starts out as your basic zombie book. People are going about their normal business when suddenly lots of people start going crazy and attacking other people while a few people escape unscathed for a while until they get attacked.Well, Stephen King made a couple of changes to the normal zombie mythos (I think we can call it mythos now). Here, the zombies are created by a pulse that occurs through cell phones. All the people using their cell phones at the time of the "pulse" (as its known throughout the book) are immediately changed into what is essentially a zombie. Those without cell phones or not on them at the time are saved.It's not exactly clear whether they are (or have to be) dead or not, some are, but not all, but they all have the same traits, which are pretty zombie-like. They go crazy, they attack people including their own kind, and make survival the number one priority for those who weren't turned.They are known throughout the book not at zombies, but as "phone crazies." Boy did I hate that term after a while. It's just so dumb. It's also descriptively appropriate, but meh. Call them walkers, call them phoners even, but "phone crazies" just bugged me to no end.In addition, the zombies only come out during the day and therefore leave the night to the survivors.Cell follows Clayton Riddell, a survivor of the pulse who happened to be in Boston at the time of the "pulse." He lives in (you guessed it) Maine (but he's not a writer, he's a comic artist, completely different), which is where his family is located at the time of the pulse and provides the impetus for Clay and his group of survivors to head north.I did enjoy this book, but to talk about why I didn't enjoy it enough to even reach the 4 star threshold, I'm gonna have to get into some spoilers. These aren't huge, ruin-the-book spoilers, just possibly ruin a part of the first 200 pages/quarter of the book. You've been warned./Begin mild spoilersI could go more into Clay's group because they do play a large role in the novel, but I just don't have the time nor the energy at the moment. Know they're there and they are some great characters.The reason I wasn't a huge fan of this particular zombie book is that King almost immediately kills the whole reason I read zombie books. I read them for the constant suspense and scare that the people we've grown close to are going to get eaten, turned, die, whatever.King introduces telepathy into the zombie mythos. While it's an interesting and unique take, I realized toward the end that it pretty much killed this particular zombie novel for me.Because the zombie apocalypse occurred through the pulse, the phone crazies (bleh) are connected somehow, they can even communicate in a way telepathically. It begins through large gatherings where they sleep during the night while getting essentially reprogrammed telepathically.While they are communicating telepathically, they begin to flock just like some types of animals (birds in a "v" for instance). While they flock, they don't attack humans. It just stops.There's more that happens and they do begin to do some much more devious things, but the survivors, and especially our little crew we follow, are essentially immune from the day-to-day zombie attack.Bigger Spoiler, for the novel I Am Legend as well: While I'm still within the spoiler section of my review, I also wanted to add that I totally thought he was going to go I Am Legend with the zombies, making the zombies the new society and the survivors the outcasts. It seemed to be going there, but didn't in the end./end spoilersI enjoyed this book, it had great characters (as expected) and a good enough story to keep me enjoying it. It also had an interesting take on zombies that, while I applaud King for his creativity and boldness, kind of killed the zombie part of this zombie novel.3 out of 5 Stars (Recommended with reservations)
Five stars for the first half. One star for the last 200 pages, wherein King drags his ass like a dog infested with roundworms. Cell is a five-star read all the way up to the halfway mark. You got crazies running around, nom nom nomming on tender bits, and a likable crew of misfits trying to stay alive. Underneath it all, King is stoking the fires of 9/11, trying to keep the fear alive a full five years after the towers fell in a half-ass attempt to scare you with real-world issues. The Phonies (I do not type that word with a straight face) speak in a garbled, almost-arabic language. Slap turbans on King's version of zombies and you have a strong argument for racist propaganda. Did King do this on purpose? Mayhap he did. Mayhap he didn't. Either way, 'MURICA!There's this climax that takes place around midway through the book. King shits the bed after that. What action you do find on the downhill side of this novel is tired, rehashed bullshit from the first half of the book. It's honestly like reading two different books. King even repeats the big scene in the middle further down the road, but by then, the cool factor has disappeared. You can't have barbecue every night, friends and neighbors. It's fucking great on Friday, especially when beer's involved, but more of a pain in the ass on Saturday because you're still hungover from the night before and that goddamn grill is making you sweat pure ethanol.This is either my second or third read through of Cell. Can't remember, but it's certainly not my first. Because of this, I let Campbell Scott read it to me. He does a fine job at the narration, but the production quality is iffy at times. Sounds levels are fucked. He'll be really low one minute (not whispering, just low) and then he'll be loud (not yelling, just loud). Sometimes, the tone of his narration changes, as if he's started reading as another character. I still don't think this is his fault. I think it's the quality of the recording, which, in my honest opinion, is utter dogshit.Before we hit the Conspiracy Theory section of our program, I must say that I firmly believe King got in way over his head with this book. There's a reason why The Stand is 1200-pages long and Cell is only 450. Maybe Cell started as a short story or a novella and it just kept on going, or maybe he always meant for it to end the way it did. Either way, the final product makes it seem as if King just got tired of writing this particular book and stopped. I can dig open endings, but to follow Clay on his hunt only to receive the ending we get here... I don't know, man, that's kind of a dick move. Oh well, it's Uncle Stevie. Whatcha gon' do, right?Here there be spoilers for all of King's books. Only click on "view spoiler" if you've read through King's entire catalog. I take no responsibility for your sadness and despair at having something spoiled because you can't take instruction, ya muppet.(view spoiler)[Obvious Tie Ins: Charlie the Choo Choo (the Dark Tower series)The Dark Wanderer comic (obvious nods to the Dark Tower universe, especially since they are graphic novels and this came out around the time MARVEL started working on their DT comics)Conspiracy theory: I believe this version of the King-verse is another beam altogether from the beam of the Bear and Turtle. The Stand happens on one beam, as witnessed in Wizard and Glass, and Cell on another. This is how you can have two end-of-the-world scenarios in one universe. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about Cell (2006)?
It’s the best book I’ve read after A Song Of Ice And Fire! The characterization and the narration is incredibly amazing. It catches the reader’s interest from the first line to the very last word. Yes!The story starts minutes before The Pulse occurred and takes us through the entire scenario in perfect detail. You’ll get a feeling that you are right next to the lead, Clayton Riddell and are experiencing each and everything. The craziers or the phone-crazies are easy to picture and seem scary. Cl
—Heena P.
Literary critics can moan all they want about Stephen King's "penny dreadful" oeuvre, but his mastery at the craft of storytelling is indisputable. King writes his novels like a seduction, the story unfolding delicately and deliberately. As any Stephen King fan knows, his coy expository chapters often take up the first hundred pages or more. In Cell, however, the reader is brutally dragged into the main action--unspeakable, senseless violence--within the first seven pages. Cell is by far King's most brutal, transgressive work to date.Many have compared Cell to his earlier epic, The Stand. On the surface, the novels are quite similar: an apocolyptic event threatens the very existence of the human race as a band of survivors struggle to come to terms with the carnage and avert further catastrophe. Cell, however, is the far more mature novel of the pair. The Stand was, in many ways, a novel by an idealistic youth, whereas Cell is filled with the trenchant and world-weary observations of an adult. The subtext is laden with so much chillingly apt futurist rhetoric that it is as though the author had Marshall McLuhan whispering plot devices and metaphors into his ear as he labored over his typewriter. King manages to explore several of the major sociocultural conflicts of our time, most persuasively the end of the era of individualism and the rise of collectivism, here symptomatic of heavy reliance on technology. Whereas many dystopian novels are almost comically blunt when expounding upon the dangers of collectivism, King's horrific plot and action give his metaphors a sort of subtlety that renders his subtext much more graceful and easier to stomach than the work of Ayn Rand.As the epigraphs indicate, it is also a meditation on the intrinsic violence of the human race. King clearly feels as though the world is out of control and wants to find out why. His preferred genre, horror, is an excellent one with which to consider the depravaties of modern life. The Stand was a novel that, if not upbeat, was at least optimistic--a reflection of the times in which it was written. There was also violence, but it had its own biblical logic, if violence can ever be called logical. In Cell, the violence is senseless, oppressive, and omnipresent. There seems to be little promise for a better world... at least not one inhabited by human beings.Many reviewers took issue with the unresolved ending. Considering the subtext of the novel, however, the reader will find that the ending's abruptness actually informs the sense that Cell, besides being an excellent horror yarn, is a meticulously painted portrait of the horrors of global culture. The many crises of our time are still developing and mutating. The end is not yet, it seems, in sight.
—Leah Heard
Cell is vastly different, stylistically, from the other King novels I've read, and as a result, it took me awhile to really get into this book. Overall, however, I think the change in technique really worked for this story. Cell is extremely fast-paced and action-driven, with a more simplistic and linear plot than I've come across in a Stephen King book; a rather spare story, in other words, which might have broken down under the strain of his typical web of intricacies and complex subplots, colorful histories, and verbose prose.Despite being sparser than his typical offerings, Cell is still wonderfully (or terribly, if you prefer) vivid and full of that quintessential King imagery. My only complaints are these:You never learn who or what caused the Pulse. Was it really terrorists? A ghost in the machine? Just some freak glitch in the technology? Personally, I'm not too big a fan of this sort of "come to your own conclusion" bullshit.Similarly, after three-hundred-plus pages of following and becoming invested in Clay's harrowing journey to find his son, you never find out whether the patch, or whatever, actually works. I mean, really. A little closure, please, Mr. King? See above.Three stars for the story, which was good, though it could have been great if King had done more with it. Two stars for the subtle social commentary lurking beneath the obvious social commentary. Minus one star for the aforementioned "draw your own conclusions" bullshit.
—Daniella
