First, a confession: I’ve read almost nothing by King in many years. After binging on his novels in college, I just burned out on his style; and the last few King novels I read before calling it quits were… not so good (Rose Madder, Insomnia…). But when Cell came along recently, and word reached me that King was returning not only to the all-out-horror genre but to a monster type that he’d not yet used (zombies!), I was intrigued. And when I found a copy at the library bookshop for $1, I knew that it was time to revisit King.
Cell is Stephen King’s crack at the Zombie Apocalypse genre. (He’s done the Apocalypse before in The Stand, but that book lacked zombies.) Within the first few pages of Cell, an unexplained pulse sent through the world’s cellphone infrastructure causes a large portion of the cellphone-using world to become mindless, slavering cannibals, and things go downhill from there. The novel follows the adventures of a small band of survivors as they try to navigate zombie-infested New England.
Much of the novel works very well–much better than I expected, in fact. I was braced for the standard zombie-movie plot (the one that goes like this: zombies appear; group of survivors band together; they take refuge in some sort of organized [often military-ish] compound; in the end humanity’s own All Too Human flaws result in the zombies breaking in; everybody dies). But King manages to put in some genuinely new twists on the genre. I won’t spoil things for you, but in a number of ways–and in one big plot twist in particular–King puts a unique stamp on his zombie story. That was a pleasant surprise; I like the Standard Zombie Plot and would have been satisfied with a simple King-style retread of it, but it’s more fun when you can’t predict exactly what’s going to happen and who’s due to die next.
But what sets Cell apart, in both good and bad ways, from King’s other novels is that this isn’t just a zombie novel; it’s a self-consciously post-9/11 zombie novel. “Post-9/11″ is a descriptor that’s been so overused as to be nearly meaningless, but in this case it’s accurate. Zombie stories have long had (mostly unsubtle, but sometimes clever) political subtexts, from George Romero’s Living Dead movies to this year’s 28 Weeks Later, so Cell’s political angle is firmly in-genre.
So does the political angle work, or does it come across as awkward and preachy? Well, a little bit of both. It works best when King taps into the nagging, difficult-to-answer moral questions that have become especially important since 9/11 and the Iraq War. Much of the more interesting political elements center around the question of violence (and Cell is a very violent story). Is violence done for a good cause necessary or praiseworthy, or is it ultimately self-defeating? If well-intentioned, morally-justified actions result in violent reprisals and unexpected consequences, should you refrain from acting? Given a choice between fighting hard (and possibly futilely) for an ideal world and settling for a worse world, which would people choose? These are somewhat vague questions, but King distills them into concrete plot elements, and while he hypothesizes about the correct answers, he does not definitively answer them. That’s King at his best.
Unfortunately, King sometimes slips into more preachy territory. This doesn’t tank the book by any means, but it gets old after a while; it doesn’t help that King’s explicit political lessons feel clumsily tacked onto the story. For example, less than a day after the Zombie Apocalypse has broken out, two survivors have a surreal conversation in which they agree that while the Zombie Apocalypse was certainly bad, think about how much worse it would have been had their state’s gun control laws been less strict and citizens had had easy access to firearms during the zombie takeover. (Er, wouldn’t that have meant that people might’ve been more able to defend themselves against the zombies?) Little asides like that, as well as the appearance of several over-the-top Red State stereotypes, feel awkward and out of place. And the whole semi-Luddite “cellphones are turning us into a nation of zombies” gag gets stale by about page 10; fortunately King does not press this too much.
Beyond the political elements, Cell shares the good and bad qualities of most King novels. On the downside, the characters are fairly forgettable; the somewhat-witty dialogue gets old after a while; in places the writing feels sloppy and in need of a second editing pass; the ending is anti-climactic; and while it’s very violent, it’s not really very scary. (Also, Cell includes that most annoying of characters: the obligatory Teenage Computer Expert whose main job is to sit around and spout painful computer analogies: “You see, the human brain works a lot like a computer’s hard drive…”). On the plus side, whatever flaws you can find in King’s writing style, the fact is that he can write a damn good story. It’s a cliche, but I had a hard time putting Cell down. When King is on a roll, it feels petty to stop and fret about minor annoyances.
All in all, I’m very glad I decided to revisit King with Cell. It’s not in the same league as his earlier works, but it’s satisfying. For the most part, he’s managed to write a novel that’s informed by current trends and fears without letting them overshadow a plain old good story. It’s not King at the absolute top of his game, but he can obviously still tap into some of that old magic.
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