Cell
I just finished reading Stephen King’s Cell…
Very enjoyable read. It’s been a long time since I read anything by Stephen King and it was a lot of fun just to experience his writing style again. He’s got a way of describing things that is absolutely amazing. And I’ve spent enough time in the North-East to enjoy his Maine-isms. But, on the whole, I don’t think it was one of his stronger books.
It started out pretty good… Looked like it was going to be some kind of zombie story, which had me pretty excited. I really enjoy zombie horror, and I enjoy Stephen King – so the combination of the two should have been great. But the phoners don’t stay zombies for long. They start flocking and becoming intelligent and developing psychic powers after only a day or two. And then they just aren’t zombies anymore.
And the whole thing seemed to move awfully quickly. The whole story takes place over a period of only about two weeks. We have the initial outbreak with our protagonist in New York City (at least, that’s where I think he was)… And then he steadily makes his way North… And about 10 days later he’s somewhere in Maine. It just doesn’t seem like things could happen that fast. It doesn’t seem like people could move that quickly.
It also reminded me a whole lot of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing… It was obvious that Stephen King had read that story and was incorporating elements of it, which is fine. It’s kind of neat to think that I’ve read some of the same stuff that Stephen King has. But some of it was so similar that it seemed outright derivative.
The whole thing with the pulse erasing human civilization and exposing the dumb animal beneath sounded an awful lot like the neuro-linguistic programming in Snow Crash. The guys on the raft, towards the end of Snow Crash…with the antennas wired into their brains, babbling away in some ancient language… Those could easily have been the phoners. The whole idea of basically creating a computer virus that could infect humans is right out of Snow Crash.
And, of course, it ended pretty vaguely. We have no idea what really happens to the phoners… We don’t know if they wind up taking over the Earth or if they all die off. We don’t know if there are any normal people left. We don’t know what happens to our protagonist, or his kid, or his companions. It’s all left very open-ended… Which is pretty typical of Stephen King stories, but this is still a little extreme. Usually you’ve at least got a halfway decent idea of whether the good guy wins or not.