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 fast paced but shallow adrenaline rush.
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