Cell in Challenge: 50 Books

Jan 02, 2008 Chris rated it did not like it · review of another edition

I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to say. I own about 30 Stephen King books, I believe I have read them all. Strange enough, it seems like just as I started getting into the King of Horror, his talent began to dwindle. I think it was when I was in sixth grade that I started digging him and becoming a fan, and at about that same time he began to put out books that pretty much anyone with a brain will concede are not nearly the clean-up hitters that his first works were. Carrie, Pet C I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to say. I own about 30 Stephen King books, I believe I have read them all. Strange enough, it seems like just as I started getting into the King of Horror, his talent began to dwindle. I think it was when I was in sixth grade that I started digging him and becoming a fan, and at about that same time he began to put out books that pretty much anyone with a brain will concede are not nearly the clean-up hitters that his first works were. Carrie, Pet Cemetery, Christine, Cujo, The Stand, The Shining…..esteemed and awesome for the most part, only to be replaced with the likes of Gerald’s Game, The Woman Who Loved Tom Gordon, Insomnia, and the Green F@cking Mile.

There’s something wrong in that, I was always under the belief that the more experience you have in your craft the better you will eventually get, unless you’re an absolute nimrod. Well, Mr. King proves me dead-fricking wrong, especially with the release of Cell, a novel I can’t quite find a word for. Disappointing? No, I was expecting about as much. Poor? Too rich for this trash. Feeble? Getting warmer.

I want to put this to bed rather quickly, after all, Stephen King has written more than a few badass books and I’d rather not dwell on the poor bastard's dwindling talents as he progresses in age and rocks out in his crappy band, “Bookwyrm”. Ok, so his band isn’t called Bookwyrm, but it ought to be; it shows that in one second I came up with a more powerful and awesome name than he ever could. His band doesn’t matter here, what matters is that King had the great idea of making a back-to-the-basics horror novel, and what better subject matter than zombies! Flucking zombies man! Maybe Steve is the only one who hasn’t realized it, but zombies have been beat to death (no pun intended) in recent media via horror films and video games. Not to mention that the Zombie King, the venerable George Romero, has produced some rather slick zombie films in his “Dead” series recently, one example is Land of The Dead, which King liberally rips off with the idea of zombies evolving in this novel, although Romero isn’t gay enough to consider having them evolve super powers including levitation, thought-control, and telepathy. Thank god.

King, however, is down with this wishy-washy, flimsy shit, and it’s not surprising that the novel starts to nosedive about the time the undead begin using their newfound powers. Like all King novels that center around droves of mindless minions of evil, there is one badass leader zombie that seems to be running the show, and he’s the only character that I can really even recall from the book, how f@cking pitiful is that, especially since the only reason I can imagine the dude is because he’s such a archetypical figure that this is his only real intent.

The story plods along after all cell phones receive some sort of ‘pulse’ which leads to the poor f@cker on the phone becoming a zombie. If I recall correctly, that’s the only thing which turns people into zombies, the Pulse. Now, I understand King is trying to make a point on society through the sheer number of zombies, but let’s face it, the number of people this would effect is not that fucking catastrophic. In Cell, it is, almost 75% of the world seems to either have been zombified, or is in immediate danger due to someone else’s transformation into a zombie. This sheer mathematical impossibility annoyed me throughout the course of the story. Adding to my troubles, the main character, Clayton (of all fuggin names), is hell-bent on finding his family, he’ll do anything just to see if they are alive or dead, blah blah blah. I think another character was a homo and of course there was the ever-present Crafty Child. All dicking around while the zombies grew more powerful through their unnatural cerebral enhancements. Boring. ...more

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Nov 14, 2007 Brian rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I call this book the mini-Stand. The Stand was Stephen King's epic about an apocalyptic flu and the people who survived it. "Cell" is much like The Stand, but instead of the flu, people get infected via their cell phones, which turn them into zombies (do you get the feeling this book practically wrote itself?). The "normies" who survive uninfected scramble to try to survive the phoners' attacks. It's much shorter than The Stand though, because instead of following a large group of characters, it ...more

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Feb 09, 2008 Rob rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: king

My first King book, and I'm not ashamed to admit, it spooked me more then a little bit. I wasn't exactly pleased with how he ended it, but as I'm to understand, this is how he does things, and in that, I guess I'm okay with it. ...more

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