Cell
Stephen King
350 pages
published in 2006

I'm not a big horror fan, nor a big Stephen King fan either. The only books of his I liked was his Dark Tower series and even that I haven't kept up with. Yet when I idly started to skim through Cell, I couldn't put it down until I had finished it. Sandra, who is a Stephen King fan, says that this is what King does best: grip you by the throat and carry you along until the story's over. He certainly managed to do that here, dragging you bodily to the finish despite the absurdities on the way.

Because, let's be honest, Cell is not so much a good novel, as it is an exciting novel, one for which the inevitable movie treatment has already been written. Googling, it seems this was written as a homage to zombie horror movies, as well as novels like Richard Matheson's I am Legend; Cell is in fact dedicated to George Romero and him. In that context it works about as well as the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead: it's a fastpaced but shallow adrenaline rush.

The plot is simple: just as Clayton Riddell has finally gotten his big graphic novel contract that will make him famous and rich --the hardest to swallow bit in the whole book right there-- The End of the World happens, as everybody who uses a mobile phone (cell phone in yankland) goes stark craving bonkers and starts attacking everybody in sight. It's always something, isn't it? Clayton finds himself trapped in the middle of Boston, desparate to get out of town and look for his estranged wife and son. Together with two other survivors, Tom and Alice, he manages to escape the city and starts the trek back to his hometown, to see if his wife and son have survived. Meanwhile, the phone crazies have begun to mutate out of their rage and madness into something more ...intelligent and inhuman and even show signs of telepathy.

That they are telepathic is dramatically demonstrated when Clayton and his small band of survivors manage to kill a gang of phone crazies and are punished for it. The crazies seem to have a leader and they want all survivors to turn north. Surely that cannot be for any benevolent reason...

Yes, the science behind this all is awful, but than this is hardly the point of the book, now is it? This is intended to be a zombie flick on paper and it succeeds very well on these terms. Cell starts with the quick establishing shot of normalcy, before the switch gets flicked and the world is turned upside down with lots of fireworks and explosions. It then settles down in the relatively long slog for survival after the pyrotechnics have stopped, before ending on some sort of resolution in a world irrevocably changed yet with some hope for the re-ermergence of "normal" life.

As Sandra said to me, this is like a big, cheap bar of chocolate: quite enjoyable while you're devouring it, with a certain quality, but in the end nothing more than empty calories. You wouldn't want to try and life on a diet of them, but having one every now and again doesn't harm you.

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Stephen King, Cell, horror, science fiction, book review