Cell, Stephen King

I bought this for my mom's birthday (a co-gift with my father), as she has always been a solid Stephen King supporter and, via that influence, so have I. On a drive from Star Valley to Salt Lake to visit my brother, I cracked it open and found myself immersed, again, by King's straight up narrative.

I should have known from the dedication of Cell that it would be, essentially, Stephen King's take on the zombie genre (the novel is, in part, dedicated to George A. Romero, who spawned the zombie-film genre with Night of the Living Dead and it's subsequent Dead sequels). And does he pull it off?

He's Stephen King. What do you think?

He creates a new, deeper version of the modern zombie; while the name kind of lends itself to Family Guy jokes (“It's about an older couple and a. . . um. . . lamp monster!”), cellular phones are only instruments in creating this newer, more basic zombie. Rather than being the living dead (which, I think, I prefer), the zombies are stripped of their humanity to their deepest core: murderers. And, when the survivors of 'the Pulse' (a coded message buried in cell phone signals that brings about the End of Days) begin to realize that the zombies aren't just humans minus the social awareness, it appears that they're evolving, our merry group of post-apocalyptic warriors (made up of several teens, a gay man, and a graphic novelist) realizes that they must be stopped.

The novel gathers a lot of tone from King's earlier (and more successful) trip to the end of the world, The Stand, and that's where the similarities stop; The Stand is a thousand-plus page novel crammed with characters, details, and struggle. Cell is a sort of bare bones Stand; rather than the super-flu, we've got the pulse. Rather than the struggle we've got the mystery. Rather than the details, we've got. . . what? Gore?

Overall, I'd like to say it was a good book. I'd like to. But I'm not kidding myself; it has the stronger King structure, the propensity of character development, and the right tone of horror. But the characters begin to become interchangable. The climax itself is weak, as is the resolution, but, at the very least, we've got a strong, new Zombie to plague our social anxieties, which is more than I would have expected.