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Cell starts with the end of the world as we know it. As the
main character, Clayton Riddell, is happy to having finally signed
his first contract with a publishing house in Boston for his comic
book, The Dark Wanderer, he witnesses people starting to go
amok just after answering their cell phones. A young woman jumps at
an older woman's jugular, a man bites off his dog's ear, etc, etc.
Later, cars and planes crash, fires sprout everywhere, showing that
the craziness has generalized... The "virus" passed to man by cell
is known as the Pulse. As King writes in a blood-freezing preface:
"On October 1, God was in Heaven, the stock market stood at 10,140,
and most of the planes were on time [...]. Two weeks later the skies
belonged to the birds again and the stock market was a memory. By
Halloween, every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the
empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory".
Clayton, who doesn't own a cell, worries about his son, Johnny,
who owns one. Chances are, Johnny could be OK, since the battery of
his cell is more often flat than not. But even though, no young boy
is safe in a world where people have lost their minds and go at each
other's throats. Soon, Clayton meets two other people who were
fortunate enough, like him, not to carry a cell phone: Tom, a
middle-aged man, and Alice, a teenager. The three of them try to
find safety, then weapons, and head towards Maine where Johnny and
his mother live. Tom is a lonely man and Alice's mother went crazy
in front of her eyes, and the only one who has a goal anymore is
Clay.
Little by little, the fellowship will gain new members and lose
old ones. They will find more about the "phone people" and what the
Pulse exactly did to their brains, and they will also manage to
antagonize them, all this while following Clay in is quest for his
son...
What amazes me with Stephen King is how he manages every time to
use the same ingredients and come up with a different novel. As in
many of his novels, there is quest, a fellowship of very sympathetic
people, there is also the really bad guy (although here he is more a
"collective entity"), a fight of good versus evil (with the usual
touch of ambiguity). If Cell is more like The Stand
(with a little of The Tommyknockers in it)
than any of his other novels, it is also an entirely different
story. For one, Cell is a post 9/11 story, and the
apocalyptic scenes at the beginning are marked strongly by it. No
doubt, Cell is a novel for the new millennium, a
techno-horror which could not have been written ten years ago. King
makes sociologic statements as well as writing a horror story, with
grim observations on what man has become in this day and age of
cells and computers. If I had to make a guess, the idea for Cell
was probably born while King was writing the prologue for
Everything's Eventual...
Cell is not King's best novel (how can he best the Dark
Tower series anyway?, there are some lengths in the part of the
book located approximately after the first quarter and before the
last third (that is to say, after the first apocalyptic scenes, and
before the main characters work their brains toward explaining the
Pulse and its consequences), but all in all, I had a jolly good ride
(I read the second half in one sitting), and I am looking forward to
Lisey's Story, King's next novel, due in October...
Last but not least, as a Constant Reader, I appreciated the few
Dark Tower allusions, but I missed a prologue!
Rating: 
© Discussing Books, 03/06/2006 |
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