Cell

I’ve mentioned that one thing Stephen King does well is build up a slow burn and then have things explode towards the end of a book. In Cell, he does just the inverse. You open up the book and immediately see that King has his arm cocked way back and he’s holding that proverbial pile of you-know-what that he immediately flings into the fan. By the end of page 7 the world is ending in violence and madness as cell phone users are infected with a kind of insanity-provoking thought virus. Unfortunately, the energy doesn’t hold up and book ends abruptly in an unsatisfying sputter.

One of the other things King usually does really well is develop characters that you feel that you know and sometimes care about. Not so here, as all the characters are pretty uninteresting and not very well developed. For example, one Amazon.com reviewer noted that if you replaced half of the “Clay said” with “Tom said” most readers wouldn’t notice the difference. King is also flagrant in his over reliance on a know-it-all 12 year old to narrate key plot points that the boy should have NO way of knowing. The kid sees like one or two things and then immediately infers a host of truths about the world’s conditions just because King apparently can’t think of a better way to communicate them to the reader. It’s quite annoying, made doubly so because of the ineffective techno babble that makes no sense, even in the context of a horror novel.

I won’t say much about the ending for fear of spoiling it for anyone who does read the book, but suffice to say that it’s extremely open ended and doesn’t resolve much. We’re left completely hanging as to the fate of the principle characters or the nature of the Pulse that kicked off the end of the world in the first place. My guess? King just got tired of writing and decided to wrap this sucker up.

On a side note, while reading the book I kept thinking that King was trying to make some points, or at least parallels, about the Iraq war but from a point of view that you might not think of. The heroes are, in effect, insurgents fighting against an occupying force of “phone crazies.” They use guerill tactics and improvised explosive devices like car bombs. The phone crazies, on the other hand, start their occupation of the world with extreme –and overpowering– violence, but then take on the role of liberators who want to free the “normals” from their perceived insanity by organizing an event where they are brought into a collective (pure democracy?). Only toward the end the phone crazies start to unravel and the situation deteriorates. Ah, maybe I’m really reaching here, but these kinds of parallels just kept coming up.