4/23/07: Stephen King: Cell (2006)Stephen King remains an important horror writer, as seen by “1408” in 2002’s
Everything’s Eventual. Sadly, that collection's titular tale also illustrates King’s useless politics. The story features a Leftist newspaper columnist who’s executed by a right-wing cabal because he dares to tell the truth about how America no longer has to fear terrorists.
Many conservatives goofed on
Cell for being equally (and moronically) political. They were mostly correct.
Cell isn’t as bad as recent crap like
From A Buick 8, but King bungles what could’ve been his zombie epic. The story begins with a small group trying to stay alive after a weird pulse has turned cell-phone users into homicidal maniacs. It’s the usual King story where every character of every age talks exactly like Stephen King—including a compulsive urge to spout their liberal credentials.
Cell is an okay read, though, even when the zombie mayhem ends and we get an inferior recycling of
The Stand.
Cell also has a strong post-9/11 mentality. Yes, there’s the usual Hollywood formula where Republicans are never allowed to survive by having a gun in the house. It’s always left to Leftists to find the weaponry and survive because…well, just because they’re more peaceful. King never explains how these good pacifists figure out how to load other people’s guns without killing themselves.
King also frontloads the book with some seeming moral relativism. A lot of conservatives probably gave up reading
Cell after the ninth time that King attempts a heavy metaphor about suicide bombers. Towards the middle of the book, though, King chooses a side. The band of survivors—and others out there like them—begin to commit mass murders of the zombified citizens. It’s easy, since the phone freaks gather to be lulled into a nightly coma via portable stereos blasting lite pop music.
This is part of the phone freaks turning into a mass telepathic entity. They start instructing the remaining survivors to go to a remote town in Maine where they’ll be allowed to live in peace. Also, good people of action like
Cell’s protagonists—who know better than to believe the entity’s lies—are to be treated as outcasts. It isn’t long before gullible normal folk are volunteering to protect the phone freaks from outside attacks. As their reward, they get to the supposed Promised Land and are forced to become phone freaks themselves.
King gets truly daring by the end of the book. The phone freaks have moved beyond pop to classical music, and our heroes are moving in for a final big massacre. “And ahead,” King writes, “directly ahead, thousands of phoners had gone to their knees like Muslims about to pray while Johann Pachelbel filled the air with what could have been a substitute for memory.”
SPOILER: The phone freaks get blown up real good—via a device that’s set up like “how the insurgents used to set off roadside bombs in Iraq.”
King even has our main protagonist enjoy some liberal guilt. He starts to feel bad about how the phone freaks hadn’t really declared war on anybody—“unless one considered forcible conversion an act of war.” The poor sap even considers how the levitating phone freaks “wouldn’t have been falling all over themselves to buy gas-guzzling SUVs.”
That’s okay. It’s just a few pages later when the guy gets a very ugly reminder that those phone freaks needed to die. It’s a happy ending, if only because it proves that
Cell’s author hasn’t lost his mind.
The main spokesman for the mass entity, incidentally, is a black man in a Harvard hoodie. When they make the film, they should cast Samuel L. Jackson and doll him up to look like
this creep.
Make it your own: It’s a Stephen King novel.
Used paperbacks litter the side of the highway.
