Book Review: Stephen King's Cell

There are six things I loved about this book, and two that missed the mark, but the good stuff was so damn good I decided to share them.

NB: this whole post is pretty much spoilerific, so you may want to skip it if you're looking forward to reading the book unspoiled.

The Pulse

The basic premise of this book is that a pulse – we're lead to believe it's electromagnetic but it's never spelled out at length – is sent via mobile phones, or as the Americans quaintly call them, cellphones – and they erase all conscious thought and turn the recipient into a raving homicidal maniac.

These people – "phoners" – then begin to flock together in a mindless, yet deeply eerie, way.

(How the average redneck/chav actually spotted the difference is open to question – phoner, hoodie or good ole boy, confusion must've reigned in many areas.)

Sharing The Love

The stuff to love comes in this order, and I reckon this is King's best high-concept book since Christine (it's better written and tighter as well):

1. Mobile phones destroy the world - as opposed to just being a crime against good taste, good manners and the environment.

Got to love the way Mr King takes one existing niggle – teenage girls are scary, fandom taken to excess gets weird, and what happens to a car that's caused fatalities? – and turns them into such exquisite entertainment!

2. Mindless people flock together, yet rip apart outsiders - yup, the recent mini-riots at Primark and Ikea, and a good hard look around you will verify that. If I was more intelligent I could probably make a better socio-political point here, but use your eyes and remember school, if you went, it's all there....

3. Empty minds love easy listening - phoners flock at night to stadia to listen to the only kind of music that isn't worsened by being converted into Muzak, nothing challenging, nothing that might rock them out of their weird mind-sharing unconsciousness. "Wind Beneath My Wings," "Fly Me To The Moon" - big band and Dean Martin, music to have no thoughts to.

4. Humans have innate, and immense, psychic potential yet it's repressed - the phoners can levitate, control normals, move objects by the power of mind and communicate telepathically at will. These are similar themes to Carrie, and The Shining, and stand up well here adding the only "supernatural" element without being an imposition or device.

That they're probably very true and fit in nicely with the experience of my SkinnyGriffin posse, is an added bonus!

5. The. President. Of Hah-vud - frontman used by the phoner mass mind, he's as indelibly etched on my brain as King's Carrie's Mom and the Caretaker of The Shining - secondary characters whose enigmatic yet archetypal presence adds depth and who give me, to use a technical term, the willies.

6. Latin as the language of the mass mind - of course, we see what we want in everything, and I admit I see the mass mind using this dead language to hide behind as rather reminiscent of lawyers, but either way it's a well neat touch, and makes the dream scenes (where the lead characters are judged for acting against the phoner herd) very much less cartoonish than they could have been.

There's some more neat bits here, again through my own lens because I have no idea whether the author intended them (or if they were just impressed on his own programming):

"911" becomes the call for help that wipes the brains of the majority of the human species;
the rounding up of normals into reservations - where they are simply and efficiently converted into phoners;
and the way brandnames - our former gods, our mojo and talismans - are represented throughout in special fonts, in a world destroyed forever and in which they have absolutely no meaning left.

The only two things that sucked came, as many of King's sucky bits do, towards the end:
the bus filled with explosives is pure deus ex machina, there's no way it's integrated into the plot right until it's needed and it stands out like a coldsore:
and the way blowing up a fairly small bunch of phoners, in one part of the United States, somehow represents victory.

Both of those, I can easily forgive, because this book continues to echo in my head and has made me more aware of how reliant upon technology we all are now, not only to serve us but also not to turn round and rip us to pieces. I'm sticking to texting from now on....