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February 23, 2006

Book Review: Cell

Stephen King is, too often, a clockwork orange, churning out uninspired writing with the regularity of a GM assembly line. I pretty much gave up reading much of him after the bloated The Stand. That book had its moments but was in desperate need of a strong-willed editor with a desk full of blue pencils. However, King's unevenness has kept me hoping and coming back from time to time to see if he's recaptured some of the originality and true creepiness of some of his earlier work. I bought Cell at the same time as Prayers for the Assassin.

And was mildly disappointed. It's not the worst of King (Dreamcatcher and the whole shit weasel business is one I'd readily nominate), but it's certainly nowhere near some of his other writings. Cell should be subtitled: The Stand-lite. It trods familiar territory in a much shorter book over a much shorter time period with a smaller cast of characters.

This time, instead of a super-flu that kills off over 90% of the human race, the triggering event is a "Pulse", delivered through cells phones that "wipes out" the brains of anyone who answers their cell phone one fateful day. It is analogous to formatting a computer's hard drive - an analogy King works over and over again throughout the story, principally through a young whiz kid (is there ever any other kind?) Jordan. With such stripping of all such programming, the "phone-crazies" at first fall on each other and on any hapless "normie" with Night of the Living Dead violence.

We have our own trio of "normies" to follow on their trek north, at night (when the phone-crazies sleep), their encounters with other normies, their observations of evolving phone-crazies behavior, and their ruminations on How This All Happened.

Are we bored yet?

Over the last several years, the best of King's work is in short stories (ie Hearts in Atlantis, Everything's Eventual). It seems that when confronted with writing a book-length story, Inspiration slips out the backdoor to vacation in Florida while King blurts out something "commercial" on paper in order to make the Best Seller section of Barnes & Noble.

Re-read The Shining or It for a scare that will keep you up at night. Or even Delores Claiborne for a great stream-of-consciousness character study.

Hang up on Cell.

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Posted by Darleen at February 23, 2006 12:14 PM

Comments

Heh, heh, heh. . . I must confess, I became bored with Stephen King decades ago.

Like most modern day horror writers, the real horror of a given situation utterly escapes him; what's truly frightening about cell phones is the fact that people yak on them while DRIVING, for pete's sake! That's scary enough as it is!

(And, of course, anyone who can't separate themselves from their precious phone while barreling down the freeway at 80 miles per hour has already had their brain wiped.)

Posted by: TalkinKamel at February 23, 2006 06:18 PM