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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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