Stephen King’s CELL: The One Call You Want To Miss

Reviewed by T.J. Tranchell

   Late last year, Stephen King gave us a short “crime” novel, “The Colorado Kid,” with no answers. This year, King does it again. His new novel, “Cell,” concerns a group of survivors after “The Pulse” a signal that goes out to every cell phone in the world and drives the receiver of the signal crazy. Clay Riddell, a comic book artist, doesn’t have a cell phone and he becomes the books protagonist. He teams up with Tom McCourt and Alice Maxwell and they set off from Boston to find Clay’s son (and to a lesser degree, his estranged wife) in Maine.
   After the survivors establish a pattern for the “phone-crazies” behavior this becomes a classic post-apocalyptic road trip, like The Stand but without as many subplots. At the same time, it is very much a post-9/11 journey, filled with distrust and paranoia. In “The Stand,” King gave us two distinct groups: The Boulder Free Zone and Randall Flagg’s Las Vegas. With “Cell,” we have none of that. Many small bands of refugees, occasionally on the same path, sometimes swapping (mis) information. And the phone-crazies, somewhere between zombies and vampires. (The novel is dedicated to George Romero and Richard Matheson, with good reason.) There is little sense of survivor bonding, unless it is in the groupings of the infected humans. At one point, other survivors shun Clay and his band of travelers.
   We do get plenty of old-fashioned King mysticism. Dream-visions, telepathy, and that “I-know-just-because-I-know” feeling. We also suffer through the quick and tragic deaths of characters we come to love. It is a shorter novel so maybe there isn’t as much attachment to the characters, but it still hurts.
   What we don’t get is answers. Did terrorists cause the “pulse” or not? Why do the phone-crazies sleep at night and wander during the day? Will Clay find his son (and his wife)? Sorry, no answers from me.
   One note of interest. Clay Riddell’s graphic novel is called “The Dark Wanderer” and concerns “post-apocalyptic cowboys” struggling against an evil consuming their world. Recently, King announced that Marvel comics would be releasing original stories from the Dark Tower universe. One thing to remember with King: there are no coincidences.