Author: Stephen King

Title: Cell

Year of publication: 2006

Page count: 496

Rating: ★★★

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I started a chronological King (re-)read almost a whole decade ago, but it’s taken me half that time to get through the “post-accident” books alone. I finally went into Cell after a year long break since reading From a Buick 8, which had, in turn, interrupted another year-long King-slump. I was fully expecting to hate it, but wanted to finally get it out of the way so I could move on to Lisey’s Story… instead, I ended up devouring it in less than a week. I think that this marks me finally being over my protracted King slump, and also over taking the fandom’s word for what constitutes a good King book. I guess realizing that two of my top three favorite books are underdogs widely regarded as “forgettable” should’ve tipped me off to the fact that I’m a Constant Reader full of unpopular opinions years ago.

Cell is King’s take on a zombie apocalypse (the book is dedicated to two masters of the genre, Richard Matheson and George A. Romero), written at a time when Blackberries were the epitome of widely available cellphone technology, keyboard-less, multi-touch touchscreen phones were still just the seed of an idea in Steve Jobs’ head, and the thought of what Germans have since aptly dubbed “smombies” would’ve seemed ludicrous… but good ol’ Steve-“I-don’t-own-a-cellphone”-King was certainly ahead of his time and definitely on to something with this technophobic story (he’s been on twitter since the end of 2013, so I assume the cellphone info is outdated, although one of the things this book has taught me is that to assume anything makes an ass out of u and me. But I digress).

With Cell, King returned to form in many ways, casting aside elaborate character studies for a gritty, fast-paced novel that follows the usual zombie apocalypse trope, but still manages to keep you on your toes, all without sacrificing your attachment to the protagonists. I’d say that it’s also the goriest of his novels since the final Castle Rock show-down in Needful Things, published fifteen years prior. In it, Steve explores terrorism via technological warfare gone terribly wrong, and taps into a fear that has, if anything, only grown along with the number of smartphones per capita, the booming of social media, digital data collection, privacy breaches, and all that: On a perfectly unremarkable day, millions of people receive a signal (the Pulse) through their cellphones, which wipes their brains of all that makes them human, leaving only the most basic aggressive behavior behind.

I can’t help but contrast it to Stephen’s other apocalyptic novel, The Stand, which is widely regarded as his masterpiece, while the consensus on Cell seems to be that it is, well, a bit of a turd. Both share the most basic premise of an apocalyptic event (the super-flu called Captain Trips in The Stand, and the Pulse in Cell) threatening to bring on the end of humanity as we know it, and survivors banding together to fight the calamity that’s befallen them in order to avert further disasters. But the undoubtedly great The Stand was, at its core, a fundamentally optimistic book written by a young and idealistic, perhaps even somewhat naive King, while Cell is decidedly pessimistic, and collects the grim sociological observations of a world-weary adult looking at the end of civilization.

“At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens as all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle.”

The interesting thing about how the Pulse was delivered is of course the fact that when something catastrophic happens, everyone’s first impulse (pun intended) is to reach for their phone and call their loved ones, to see if they’re okay. And thus, it spreads, far and quick, until people figure out what’s going on, anyway. And then King went one step further than he did in The Stand: At one point, when the so-called “phonies” start developing a more rational, civilized behavior, the main character wonders whether their way of life mightn’t’ actually be better, and they are only seen as the enemy because they threaten the way of living that we’re used to. Pretty deep stuff for a novel that pays tribute to a sub-genre often dismissed as “campy”, and you definitely need to be open for that sort of bleak and uncomfortable undertone.

Any time this book has come up in conversation, people impressed on me how bad of an ending it has. Well, to further prove how full of unpopular opinions I am, I’ll say that I thought it was as close to perfect as you could possibly get after that story. Then again, I’m a sucker for open and/or gut-wrenching endings (the movie ending of The Mist is incredible, and I’ll fight anyone who says that the Dark Tower should’ve ended differently), and didn’t mind that the source of the Pulse was never explained, either. If I didn’t think the start of the novel (I didn’t get into it until after Clay, Tom and Alice left Boston) and the writing itself were somewhat weak in parts, I’d give it four stars, but even taking those flaws into consideration, this was a solid 3.5 star effort, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time spent reading it despite my preconceived notions. Out of context, this quote lends itself to how I feel about this novel quite well:

“The mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.”

Indeed it does.