Fearless Writer ... Reviews

Author: Stephen King

These days I find myself approaching each new Stephen King release with a sense of hope rather than a sense of expectation. It’s somewhat like watching an athlete who is clearly past his prime but still able to pull off occasional acts of brilliance. I watched through parted fingers as he fumbled with the disaster that was Rose Madder, delighted to his brilliant performance with The Green Mile, and ground my teeth as he ruined the otherwise brilliant Dreamcatcher by trying to suffuse it with a spiritual subplot and give it “meaning”. King’s collections of short fiction have always been personal favourites, so I anticipated excellence from Everything’s Eventual – only to find it an uneven ride, with spikes of literary greatness (‘All That You Love Will Be Carried Away’) and depressing troughs of mediocrity (‘Autopsy Room Four’ – some say contemporisation, I say borderline plagiarism with a vulgar and uninteresting twist). Then there was From a Buick 8, which King described as a “strong novel” but which in my eyes was a lot of talky melodrama threaded onto a flimsy and incidental string of supernatural plot.

So I picked up Cell with a combined sense of hope and dread, desperate for it to be good and terrified that it would not.

The opening two hundred pages – otherwise known as half the book – made me fear the worst. While the first few chapters (where the world is thrown into a violent chaos courtesy of a mysterious ‘Pulse’ sent through mobile phones) were sufficient to draw me in, they were also repetitive. Pages and pages are devoted to describing explosions – which constantly interrupt characters at key points – and out of control vehicles. But these scenes of destruction are unpleasantly familiar. King wrote them in a slightly different form back in the late 1970s, when he was tapping out The Stand. Those affected by the Pulse (later to be known as the ‘phone crazies’ or ‘phoners’) also provoke a sense of déja vu, but we’ll discuss that in due course.

Likenesses to The Stand continue, as a small band of ‘normies’ get together and decide to head off on a pilgrimage north to Maine (in The Stand it was an east-west axis) mainly because our protagonist, Clay, wants to see if his son and estranged wife are still alive. During this period, King’s manipulation of language is flat, even lazy, and somehow editor Chuck Verrill has missed his repeated use of the already trite phrase “in hell”, ie, “it was like a [insert phrase] from hell”. (Ironically, King thanks Verrill for his quality work in an afterword.)

Then, around the two-hundred-page mark, a literary miracle occurs. It’s almost as if King warms to his own tale and his brain snaps into gear. The reader’s intrigue over the Pulse and resulting race of phoners is piqued as the concept behind it is revealed (sort of, the characters can only speculate) and a small guerrilla war begins. The language switches from mundane and hackneyed to inventive and even experimental (one image that really impressed me was when Clay saw Tom’s clenched fist as a metaphor for the brutal post-Pulse world). Because King cares, we start to care too. Shocks come as actual shocks, and – thank your choice of deity or higher power – the ending is satisfying while also permitting the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that Cell is in the league of The Green Mile or anything King wrote pre-Misery. Aside from its scratchy opening half, it also suffers from the author’s tendency to push the reader’s credulity one step too far – in this case, it’s the utterly unnecessary addition of levitation to the phoners’ telepathic abilities (which on their own beg to be compared with those in Carrie and Firestarter). Over-explanation is once again apparent, with facts the reader has already attained from implication being spelled out in extra, superfluous sentences. Moreover, King’s age is beginning to show, both in his dialogue and his outdated depiction of female characters (who are forever screaming or swooning over something). And while the book explores its core concept of the human brain as an organic computer well enough, it also recycles a horror archetype (George Romero’s zombies) and a classic horror theme (from Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend) – unoriginality King then chooses to highlight by dedicating his book to its two sources.

Yet for all the deserved criticisms that can be levelled at Cell, it cannot be labelled a bad book. King’s famously indefatigable writing style transports the novel over its patches of bumpy terrain - and besides, Stephen King at his worst is still better than the lion’s share of bestselling authors that litter the bookstores. I’d stop short of labelling Cell a triumph, but it does have the power to teleport the reader into a gruesome, speculative universe – and it is redolent of a writer rediscovering his groove in the afternoon of his career. King’s next book, Lisey’s Story, will be a fascinating read for that reason alone.