Hold my calls

I remember standing in front of the new releases shelf in the bookstore picking the book up from the shelf and then putting it down again; picking it up and putting it down. My head was telling me to buy it (it is Stephen King after all) but my heart was telling me to put it down, walk away and not look back. Well I should have listened to my heart because it knew that King’s latest book, Cell, was a lemon. It took my head a little longer—until page 9 actually—to figure this out.

Cell opens three minutes before the ‘pulse’ begins. Three minutes later, after we’ve met Clayton Riddell, cartoonist and, luckily for him, not a cell phone owner, the pulse inflicts its evilness on cell phone users turning them into homicidal and/or suicidal maniacs. Within a matter of hours dead bodies are piling up in the street, planes have fallen out of the sky and society has completely broken down. Clayton hooks up with fellow survivors, Tom and Alice and they set off to find Clayton’s son and safety from the ‘phone crazies’.

Only because I’d resolved to write this review did I persevere with Cell and believe me it was hard going. The narrative is unsophisticated, the dialogue bland and obvious and the characters completely lacking in … uh … character. After 400 pages I still felt nothing for any of the main characters. I don’t know how he did it but King actually managed to make a 15-year-old orphaned girl unsympathetic.

Cell appears to have been written for an American audience because every aspect of the plot is explained; nothing is left to the reader’s imagination:

“What happened just before the shit hit the fan was that Power Suit woman had called her friend Maddy … and one of Pixie Light’s friends had called her. Pixie Dark had listened in to this latter call. After that all three of them had gone crazy.
You’re not thinking—.”

What I’m certainly not thinking is that this book is going to be challenging my brain cells in any way, shape or form.

More than once I looked at the front cover to check that I was in fact reading the work of Stephen King and not ‘Steven King’ or ‘Stephanie King’. This does not resemble the work of the man who penned The Shining, one of the great horror novels. And having just come from reading the final volume of King’s Dark Tower series I just couldn’t believe that Cell was written by the same person. It feels like a first draft whipped up over a weekend, emailed to the publisher on the Monday morning and sent to the printers so fast the copy editor didn’t even get a look in. Surely King isn’t in need of more cash but that’s the only explanation I can think of as to why he would produce a work of such poor quality.

You may think I’m being incredibly harsh but I honestly cannot find a single positive thing to say about this book—to call it a novel is to overestimate its merit—oops, there I go again. As I approached the final pages I thought King might manage to redeem himself slightly with a decent ending but even that was disappointing, lacking resolution. For his own sake I hope he’s not a planning a sequel.

If you’re a hard-core King fan and simply have to read Cell, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Karin van Heerwaarden

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Cell

Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Hodder
Price: $35