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Cell phones send out a signal that makes everyone who hears it turn into ravening zombies!
Stephen King often starts out with "ordinary thing X is scary" and then takes that premise in interesting directions. So it didn't put me off that the premise of Cell is "cell phones are scary," because he's done great things with "a car is scary," "a Saint Bernard is scary," "a devoted fan is scary," etc.
The problem with Cell isn't that cell phones aren't scary, or that the book is basically "old man yells at cell phones." It's that though there are individual good scenes and good characters, the premise goes in nonsensical directions, the characters are subpar, and the book as a whole doesn't work.
The opening scene, in which the one guy in a park without a cell phone watches helplessly while everyone who answers or makes a phone call goes berserk, is a grabber. But it also ends up illustrating why King normally doesn't do big action scenes as openers. Everyone's running around attacking each other or trying to escape, and we know nothing about any of them, so it's exciting but in a hollow way. In most King books there'd be more buildup - sometimes a LOT more buildup - so you care about the characters and are biting your nails in anticipation of the phone zombies, rather than the phone zombies attacking on page one.
The no-phone guy is Clay, a comic book artist/writer who's in New York to pitch his comic, while his estranged wife and beloved son are home in Maine. Normally I either love King's protagonists or find them awful but compelling. Very unusually for King, I didn't care about Clay.
There's a lack of specific details on what his wife and son are like as people, so Clay's quest to find them lacks emotion. He also just doesn't have much personality. Clay hooks up with a gay guy, Tom, and a teenage girl, Alice, to avoid phone zombies and find his family. I did like Tom and Alice, but the entire book is from Clay's POV. This book particularly would have benefited from multiple POVs as everything outside of Clay seemed more interesting than Clay.
But mostly I want to rant a bit about how the phone zombie plot is aggressively nonsensical.
Why is there so much discussion about computers without anyone ever trying to figure out if the internet still exists/is safe to use?
The phone zombies start out as mindless zombies who try to murder everyone in sight, including each other. This is theorized to be because everything was wiped except the ONE thing at the base of all humanity which is mindless rage. I don't buy that as humanity's key feature as if we'd evolved mindlessly attacking each other, we'd never have survived as a species.
Then the phone zombies, who previously weren't smart enough to understand the concept of stairs or doors, evolve into a hive mind. They play elevator music on boom boxes and only come out in the day. Why? Who knows!
They speak in nonsense words that don't even make sense to each other, but develop sophisticated telepathy which they can use to communicate with humans in English. But they also sometimes communicate with humans in Latin. Why? Who knows!
They form a highly organized society but never figure out that they will not survive long if they shit their pants and keep wearing them, never bathe or clean themselves, and never tend to their injuries in any way.
They do tend to injured zombies by setting them in comfortable locations, but despite knowing Latin and understanding humans enough to convey complex messages, they never figure out disinfectant or bathing, so they're slowly rotting away.
When Clay and his friends slaughter a bunch of them, they respond by murdering one of Clay's friends plus a huge number of random bystanders, leave a menacing note in Latin, force Clay & friends to leave town, telepathically order all other humans to ostracize them but not harm them, and kill some humans who do harm them. Does this mean they have morals? As a hive mind, do they think that being left alive and alone the ultimate punishment? Who knows!
The phone people begin a campaign to forcibly convert the rest of humanity to being phone people. Why? Who knows! They exclude Clay and his group. Why? Who knows!
They learn to levitate. How? Who knows!
Why is any of this happening? Who sent the phone pulse? Were levitating, Latin-using, filthy yet sophisticated telepaths who love elevator music the intended result? Who knows!
Clay sees that later phone people can speak and act much more like regular humans with brain damage than alien pod people... but rather than being encouraged that the pulse seems to be waning in power or that maybe phone zombies can eventually recover, he's much more horrified than before because two men having a fairly normal if aggro fight over who owns a truck while speaking with difficulty are INSANE!!!! And can clearly NEVER RECOVER!!!
Clay's son gets phone zombied but another character theorizes based on literally nothing that listening to another phone call might reboot him. No one tries this out on a random phone zombie. Clay tries it on his son, and the book ends before showing whether or not it works.
Really bottom-tier King. I rank it with Thinner and The Tommyknockers in my absolute least favorites. (I have not read Dreamcatcher.) If you like King in general, which are your least favorites of his?
Check out the covers. The first is the original, showing a flip-top phone. (Also an overturned cup and a scary shadow, both of which detract from rather than add to the central image. The artist definitely caught the "throw in things randomly" vibe of the book.) The second one shows a modern phone. If you read this book picturing a modern cell phone, you will be very confused as they are only ever used for phone calls, not accessing the internet.
Stephen King often starts out with "ordinary thing X is scary" and then takes that premise in interesting directions. So it didn't put me off that the premise of Cell is "cell phones are scary," because he's done great things with "a car is scary," "a Saint Bernard is scary," "a devoted fan is scary," etc.
The problem with Cell isn't that cell phones aren't scary, or that the book is basically "old man yells at cell phones." It's that though there are individual good scenes and good characters, the premise goes in nonsensical directions, the characters are subpar, and the book as a whole doesn't work.
The opening scene, in which the one guy in a park without a cell phone watches helplessly while everyone who answers or makes a phone call goes berserk, is a grabber. But it also ends up illustrating why King normally doesn't do big action scenes as openers. Everyone's running around attacking each other or trying to escape, and we know nothing about any of them, so it's exciting but in a hollow way. In most King books there'd be more buildup - sometimes a LOT more buildup - so you care about the characters and are biting your nails in anticipation of the phone zombies, rather than the phone zombies attacking on page one.
The no-phone guy is Clay, a comic book artist/writer who's in New York to pitch his comic, while his estranged wife and beloved son are home in Maine. Normally I either love King's protagonists or find them awful but compelling. Very unusually for King, I didn't care about Clay.
There's a lack of specific details on what his wife and son are like as people, so Clay's quest to find them lacks emotion. He also just doesn't have much personality. Clay hooks up with a gay guy, Tom, and a teenage girl, Alice, to avoid phone zombies and find his family. I did like Tom and Alice, but the entire book is from Clay's POV. This book particularly would have benefited from multiple POVs as everything outside of Clay seemed more interesting than Clay.
But mostly I want to rant a bit about how the phone zombie plot is aggressively nonsensical.
Why is there so much discussion about computers without anyone ever trying to figure out if the internet still exists/is safe to use?
The phone zombies start out as mindless zombies who try to murder everyone in sight, including each other. This is theorized to be because everything was wiped except the ONE thing at the base of all humanity which is mindless rage. I don't buy that as humanity's key feature as if we'd evolved mindlessly attacking each other, we'd never have survived as a species.
Then the phone zombies, who previously weren't smart enough to understand the concept of stairs or doors, evolve into a hive mind. They play elevator music on boom boxes and only come out in the day. Why? Who knows!
They speak in nonsense words that don't even make sense to each other, but develop sophisticated telepathy which they can use to communicate with humans in English. But they also sometimes communicate with humans in Latin. Why? Who knows!
They form a highly organized society but never figure out that they will not survive long if they shit their pants and keep wearing them, never bathe or clean themselves, and never tend to their injuries in any way.
They do tend to injured zombies by setting them in comfortable locations, but despite knowing Latin and understanding humans enough to convey complex messages, they never figure out disinfectant or bathing, so they're slowly rotting away.
When Clay and his friends slaughter a bunch of them, they respond by murdering one of Clay's friends plus a huge number of random bystanders, leave a menacing note in Latin, force Clay & friends to leave town, telepathically order all other humans to ostracize them but not harm them, and kill some humans who do harm them. Does this mean they have morals? As a hive mind, do they think that being left alive and alone the ultimate punishment? Who knows!
The phone people begin a campaign to forcibly convert the rest of humanity to being phone people. Why? Who knows! They exclude Clay and his group. Why? Who knows!
They learn to levitate. How? Who knows!
Why is any of this happening? Who sent the phone pulse? Were levitating, Latin-using, filthy yet sophisticated telepaths who love elevator music the intended result? Who knows!
Clay sees that later phone people can speak and act much more like regular humans with brain damage than alien pod people... but rather than being encouraged that the pulse seems to be waning in power or that maybe phone zombies can eventually recover, he's much more horrified than before because two men having a fairly normal if aggro fight over who owns a truck while speaking with difficulty are INSANE!!!! And can clearly NEVER RECOVER!!!
Clay's son gets phone zombied but another character theorizes based on literally nothing that listening to another phone call might reboot him. No one tries this out on a random phone zombie. Clay tries it on his son, and the book ends before showing whether or not it works.
Really bottom-tier King. I rank it with Thinner and The Tommyknockers in my absolute least favorites. (I have not read Dreamcatcher.) If you like King in general, which are your least favorites of his?
Check out the covers. The first is the original, showing a flip-top phone. (Also an overturned cup and a scary shadow, both of which detract from rather than add to the central image. The artist definitely caught the "throw in things randomly" vibe of the book.) The second one shows a modern phone. If you read this book picturing a modern cell phone, you will be very confused as they are only ever used for phone calls, not accessing the internet.
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Okay, the hive mind makes a certain amount of sense as part of the traditional collectivism of pod people, but the levitation does not.
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... it really feels like these are things where there should at least be some sort of hint or gesture towards a possible explanation.
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(Somewhat surprised there wasn't any suggestion of "secret government labs". Still not particularly plausible but governments are going to have access to previously unknown tech before terrorists do.)
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I got really excited here for about two seconds, lol.
I don't know that I've really hated any King novel that I finished, but I did feel that the seams really showed on The Green Mile, as being originally a serial, and I remember not loving the racial dynamics, although it's been long enough that I don't recall the details.
Edit: I just remembered The Breathing Method, from one of the novella collections, and that one really was just unforgiveably stupid.
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The climax of "The Breathing Method" was kind of accidentally hilarious.
Your criticisms of The Green Mile are dead-on, but I really like it anyway. It's got some very beautiful writing and I love the old-timey narration.
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I really don’t like Dream Catcher, The Tommyknockers (does anyone?), Roadwork, and Black House, although it’s hard for me to separate my disappointment with the latter from any objective assessment of its quality.
(and my copy of Holly just arrived!)
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I suspect Holly is a love it or hate it book, but I loved it. It's set during a very specific point in 2021, complete with Covid, which I was very reluctant to read about but it won me over.
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Ones I started but DNF: Roadwork, Desperation, The Regulators, Under the Dome
I never tried Cell, or if I did, it didn't grab me for very long.
I tried most of these 15+ years ago, during a period when I was checking out everything the library had of his. So I couldn't say specifically what the issue was with most of them.
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Dreamcatcher might be my low point--I've gone at it with grim determination and still haven't made it through. And I didn't care for End of Watch or--to a lesser extent--Under the Dome and Revival. (The latter I sort of like more if I fanwank it, but I'm not sure that's what I'm intended to do.)
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Or maybe it's the Rapture, but they're all scared of heights.
If King was channelling old man shouts at new technology back in the flip-phone days, imagine what he's like over the Tik-Tok generation?
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Me: Haha, yeah, that sounds like King. Great setup and then the resolution is just, what.
*reads the rest of the post*
Okay I WILDLY underestimated what you meant by aggessively nonsensical. This is next-level.
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ETA: Was Tom still gay?
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According to Wikipedia--which doesn't mention if Tom is gay--the Cell film actually has a true ending out of all the endings. If you're curious about Wiki's summary of the film's ending, here it is in rot13:
Ng Xnfunjx, Pynl svaqf gubhfnaqf bs cubaref jnyxvat va n pvepyr nebhaq n pbzzhavpngvbaf gbjre. Pynl frrf gur Enttrql Zna ng gur pragre bs gur pvepyr, ehaf uvz bire naq ercrngrqyl fubbgf uvz. Gura Pynl urnef uvf fba pnyyvat gb uvz sebz nzbatfg gur sybpx naq rfpncrf sebz gur pvepyr. Na vasrpgrq Wbuaal [Pynl'f fba] nccrnef orsber uvz, naq gur Enttrql Zna ergheaf gb yvsr. Pynl uhtf uvf fba nf ur pnyyf gur ahzore ba Enl'f cubar, qrgbangvat gur rkcybfvirf va gur gehpx, qrfgeblvat gur gbjre naq gur cubaref. Pynl naq uvf fba svaq gur znexf naq sbyybj gur genvy gbjneq Pynl'f sevraqf. Ubjrire, gur rkcybfvba vf erirnyrq gb or na vyyhfvba: Pynl unf orra vasrpgrq naq abj jnyxf va gur pvepyr nebhaq gur gbjre.
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The rest of this absolutely sounds like incoherent bottom-tier King, but the Latin is what really has me sputtering.
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--This whole review is hilarious, but at that line I burst out laughing.
I can understand King settling initially on zombies for what phones do to you (since people can seem mindless when they're wrapped up in their phones... though was this true in the flip phone era? I'm thinking not so much. Then it was just, "how annoying; people doing their private conversations out loud in public"). But the murderous rage thing is random and then quickly boring--so I can see how he wanted to transition away from that. But then maybe modify your premise from the start?
And the yes!Latin no!hygiene is truly nonsensical. What even?
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(the only other horror author I'm at all well read in is Poe so I'm... not exactly accustomed to the genre. I started one other horror author's novel which was going fairly decently aside from somewhat iffy period portrayal of what was probably supposed to be DID + psychological treatment. (The latter aspect could actually have been relatively true to period but there are a number of regrettable perspectives lurking in that history.) But I didn't finish it before it was due back to the library. Nor have I seen many horror films. (The Shining and the comedy Tucker & Dale vs Evil)
Oh, but very recently I did love A House With Good Bones and mostly liked Camp Damascus.)
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