Stephen King’s CELL

Reviewed by Kyle Johnson

I was a bit worried about Stephen King.  Since the unfortunate accident in July 1999, where King was struck by a van, his work seems to have suffered a bit.  Some of his stories didn’t appeal to me personally, and I had feared the worst when he announced his retirement in 2002.  However, King has risen from the ashes like the mythical phoenix, and has been on a roll ever since.  He purchased the van that hit him and personally saw to its demise; strangely enough, the man driving the van died in his sleep on King’s birthday.  King has resumed his writing, picking up a column with Entertainment Weekly and launching the successful Dark Tower saga and the pulp crime piece The Colorado Kid.  King’s Boston Red Sox even won the World Series in 2004 after an eighty-six year drought.  King’s luck has continued with Cell, which is as much a return to form as one could have possibly asked for.
 

The novel is dedicated to Richard Matheson and George A. Romero, two horror icons and close friends of King’s who are renowned for their tales of post-apocalyptic survival in a landscape ruled by vampires and zombies, respectively.  King again embodies himself in Clayton Riddell, a comic artist who has struck a deal to get his work published (King had recently signed on with Marvel to have The Dark Tower produced in comic book format).  King lures the reader in with character development and the serenity and familiarity of the Boston Common when suddenly everything goes awry.  Clayton and the audience plummet into a world of unfathomable chaos as pedestrians begin savagely murdering each other.  A rag-tag group of “normals” push forward through the ruins of cities, discovering that the “phoners” are developing group mentalities and abilities that make them even more dangerous than even previously.  Clay’s desperate search for his son leads him to discover that the cause for the veritable hell on Earth is something that comes to be known as “The Pulse,” a signal sent through cell phones to contaminate the users. 
 

Cell is King at his best, playing on the common fears of man and displaying what can go terribly wrong.  The fear of progress through the mass popularization of cellular telephones is combined with the ever-present fear of looming terrorism in the United States, and the stigma as displayed by September 11th that something catastrophic can happen any time and any place.  The story is engrossing, the characters become very relatable and when King takes one of them away, it haunts you.  The fear that King elicits in his classic works is present again, the reader is constantly on edge and anticipating the turn of every page.  Good things come to those who wait, and those waiting receive King’s best and scariest work in almost ten years.  This comes highly recommended to horror literature fans and makes for a great summer read.  By book’s end, the reader may even fear the real possibility of such an attack occurring.  Stephen King is already one step ahead of us all, as the note about the author on the inside of the dust jacket suggests.  “He does not own a cell phone.”