To Hell With Cells!
The Crazy Brian Review of Stephen King's Cell
After the public hooplah of his retirement, I felt misgivings when novelist Stephen King began publishing books again. Part of me felt his Dark Tower series stood a fitting coda, and anything else would overstay his welcome. Along comes Cell, a slim and true volume showing you can’t keep a committed writer down. He might repeat himself, perhaps echo past glories, but King can command attention.
If you heard Cell is a rehash or a redux of The Stand, you heard correctly. Consider this your spoiler alert-down to the climax the plot plays like a Reader’s Digest Updated Edition of the author’s earlier epic. Indeed, both the blessing and the curse of Cell stems from being classick Stephen King.
Unusually, he dedicates Cell to Richard Matheson and George Romero. I can’t remember off the top of my head the last time King dedicated a novel to influential horror maestros. Otherwise, I found much of what I expected. Cell begins with the familiar round of famous quotes from real people. In the story proper, King continues his career-long tactic of taking an existing genre and giving it a good personal spin. Horror in the mundane? Check. Fusion of science, psuedoscience, and supernatural themes? Here. Chaos in the streets and an End-of-the-World scenario? Present and accounted for. Lone innocents ripped to pieces in a painful and frightening fashion? Just standard operating procedure, ma’am.
Enter the curse. King did this story, again and again. It most closely resembles The Stand: with its setup of a global catastrophe pitting a small band of good survivors against a small band of evil survivors; in a world in which civilization falls, but guns and tanks lie around waiting to be picked up again. The story goes so far as to reproduce the types of conversations in The Stand. Remember when Stu and Frannie talked about group telepathy, and Harold tried to play The Voice of Reason only to crumble before the testimony of the others? Change Harold’s name to Tom, and Stu and Frannie to Clay and Alice and you have Cell. King not only re-introduces another Randall Flagg-type religious villain in the Raggedy Man character, but has the protagonists journey all the way to the villian’s symbolic Captiol of Sin, whereupon the bad guys all get blown up-just like The Stand.
Readers may recognize strong echoes of “The Mist”, Desperation, Salem’s Lot, Tommyknockers, The Dark Tower Series, you name it. I can even find a comparison with S.M. Stirling’s Dies the Fire, in which a catastrophic technological event likewise brings America down. King calls it “The Pulse”, Stirling calls it “The Change”. It doesn’t matter that one event creates zombies while the other event eliminates electricity: the overall effect is often the same.
But people don’t read Stephen King for originality so much as for his distinct storytelling. Like I said above, the man made a career out of the time-honored tradition of taking an genre and injecting his own life experiences and education into it. Along the way he tends to spin yarns for the modern Workin’ Joe as opposed to the literati, though the latter can enjoy a good zombie splatterfest too.
I know I do. And once the story got going I got into it. But in a lot of places the writing didn’t work for me. King tends to tell more than show, at least by my understanding of writing style, but here he seems to hold the reader’s hand more than usual. The prose litters with exposition and editorials. He makes a lot of clumsy references to 9/11 and zombie movies, both in dialogue and in his metaphors: “‘I can do my share, sir!’ Jordan said. He spoke as stoutly, Clay thought, as any Muslim teenager who ever strapped on a suicide belt stuffed with explosives (149).”
I winced when I read that. Not in a “ooh, what a horrifying image” way, but a “gimme a break” way. It might be realistic for King to have his character draw such a comparison between Jordan and suicide bombers. But what the hell does Clay the graphic artist know about how Muslim teenage terrorists sound anyways? Little efforts like this to liven the prose and expand upon the character end up being tripwires instead, and they bump me out of the story as much by their lack of finesse as by the questions they raise.
For while there I couldn’t finish the book between the redundancy of the story and the loud burps in the prose. But I’m not going to let wobbles in execution keep me away from a story; King’s got some good stuff here. A lot of Constant Readers moan about the lack of character development, but I think King did a good job letting character speak for itself in appearance, behavior, and dialogue. I don’t believe development should hinge on some lengthy character back story which interrupts the flow of a story, and I’m glad King just let his characters be themselves. I also liked the ending. I found it as appropriate and satisfying as the end of his Dark Tower series.
King also has a somewhat better grasp on firearms in this story. He still has some hiccups in dialogue and description-I don’t believe a pair of basically liberal characters will refer to a rifle as “That’s a Kalashnikov”. Especially since many Americans are still stuck on the name “AK-47” without knowing that is merely the first in a long line of venerated rifles, or that many of the rifles in this country are actually Chinese and Romanian knock-offs of newer weapons like the AKM and the AK-74. At the same time, for the purpose of this story that level of reality really doesn’t matter. More jarring was a description of the lead protagonist checking the cylinder of a revolver to verifya shot was fired. He finds one chamber empty. Uh, except revolvers can’t eject a spent cartridge when they fire; it remains seated until somebody manually extracts it. And the person who fired it happened to have died before they could do any such thing.
That was one of those “You almost had me-but you slipped” moments. Yet King played the scene well for the most part. I liked how he described finding a box of “highly-illegal cop-killers,” though again I have my doubts that Clay would recognize them as “fraggers”.
And King paves over such potholes with good scenes like discovering how hard it really is to set a field of zombies on fire. Retired or not, King still knows how to lure people onto the ride and then send them on a screaming, white-faced, stomach-churning ride to hell and back. If nothing else, Cell demonstrates King’s commitment to fiction as opposed to money; I doubt he needed the bucks, but he obviously needed the exorcism. He said it himself in On Writing: if God gave you a gift, why wouldn’t you use it?
That leads to a question of my own: what did a cell phone ever do to you, Mr. King? I mean, damn man! Forget terrorists. There is some phoner-hatin’ going on in this book.
I hated Cell myself at first. I thought unkind things like, “He should have stayed retired.” But I trust and respect his work enough to forget such pomposity. Cell remains an exciting yarn for the airplane or the dentist office, still written better than a lot of other books, and that should be good enough. Don’t miss out on account of the fat: wince along with me and savor the juicy bits.
+* Concise character description and development.
+* Exciting and immersive plot.
+* Commitment
-* Too redundant
-* Significant prose problems.