To start with, I have only read three Stephen King novels. It’s funny, I’ve seen plenty of movies based on his stuff before, but never actually gotten around to reading the man’s work. No reason, it’s just that I don’t read much horror. I generally find movies to be more effective for me as far as creating a scary atmosphere. I read more in the sci-fi/fantasy area and humor in general (I’m a huge P.G. Wodehouse fan; his lunacy is tops). Well, I finally decided to stop being silly (well, just on this account ) and finally check this King fellow out properly, because some truly awesome movies have come from his stories. So I bought a boatload of his novels cheap from a local booksale and got to work. First book I started with was The Gunslinger, which was kind of abstract, but a pretty good novel. The scene where the gunslinger slaughters a whole town alone is worth the price of admission.

Next I went with his vampire tale Salem’s Lot. Salem’s Lot was excellent; it achieved a good sense of place (though perhaps a little too good, at the cost of the pace sometimes I felt), and was pretty exciting once the defecation hit the oscillating device (read: the poop hit the fan). Ben Mears I thought was a little ‘stock writer’, though, and the main female character was a little throwaway. One telling line came when Ben Mears said ‘I loved her, I guess’. You guess?! You either love a person or you don’t. There’s no ‘guess’ about it. My favorite character was actually Mark Petrie; King has a thing for children characters, it seems, and he really, REALLY gets childhood fears like quite no one else I’ve experienced. I think, though, that King was less concerned with establishing fascinating main characters than he was in showing the bigger picture of the small town, and the dirty and ultimately pointless things that went on behind doors. In that, I believe, he succeeded admirably, and I think what he really wanted to achieve with Salem’s Lot, he pretty much achieved. It was a good answer to the Dracula legacy.

And that brings us to the third book of his I read: Cell. This book … changed my opinion from thinking this King guy was pretty good, to outright fantastic. Unlike the other two King books I read, this one starts right in the action, minutes before the Pulse signal causes people with cell phones to go ape-poop insane. This is extra devastating to our hero, Clay, because he has just made a successful deal regarding his graphic novel. The great thing about this beginning is that shows the true chaos that would happen at the start of a sudden apocalypse; the violence, the discombobulation, the open-mouthed ‘Oh-my-God-is-this-really-happening’ and the rabid clinging, especially on Clay’s part, to his humanity; he wants to help everyone and make everything right. But there is no way to help those gone mad, those down in the street dying; there is no taking back the Pulse. One has to toughen up and move on, or else perish.

He hooks up with a little mustached man named Tom McCourt, and together they survive the chaos around them long enough to hole up in a hotel lobby. There they meet Mr. Ricardi, a slightly crazed hotel employee gallantly (and stubbornly) sticking to his old post. Eventually they are joined by a girl named Alice, whom Mr. Ricardi originally wouldn’t let in along with Clay and Tom because she was covered with blood. I kind of hoped Mr. Ricardi would come along with them, but alas, such was not to be. He remains at his post, while the others flee to find Tom’s old residence.

The main reason (though there are quite a few) that this book is elevated in my opinion above the other King novels I have read thusly is the characters. The banter and affection between Tom, Clay, Alice, and later Jordan, the Head, and others, feels real and amusing. You really get to feeling like you know enough about these characters that you’d love to know them in real life and get to know them even better. I found the tension of the situations and trials and tribulations of these characters heightened tenfold because I genuinely cared about the characters, which is a slight advantage, I think, over Salem’s Lot. I was strenuously rooting for them throughout, and when one dies (though I won’t say who) it was literally like a punch to the gut. Good, believable characters have always been what I looked for in stories first and foremost, and Cell delivers admirably.

Another reason Cell is so good is because of the bigger picture, and the excellent pacing. This isn’t simply a story about people trying to survive zombies; this is about people trying to survive a threat whose very nature and rules mutate and change every day and threaten the characters and the world around them in new and terrible ways more and more as time passes. Striking back and killing a huge group of these ‘zombie’s turns out to be possibly the worst thing they can do, and even as they come to understand their situation, it seems they become more helpless to escape it. The characters are on the move often, and even the stops are fraught with the tension of coming to grips with the overarching problems they face, aside from the more ordinary dangers they encounter.

Aside from the characters, the bigger picture, and the pacing, King does a good job making you think. Everything he writes drives home the feelings of randomness and pointlessness that dog all of us from time to time regarding our own existence. When the apocalypse has come and the pretty covering on humanity has been stripped to expose a sort of base murdering savagery, it subtly reflects on what humanity was before. Was it really better? King asks. Might not, given time, these new ‘phoner’ creatures be able to develop further and become more than humans once were? Clay’s answer is that survival is key, and the ‘normies’ will do everything they can to survive and ultimately reclaim the world that was once theirs. We are what we are; Clay admits to not minding that his wife Sharon is dead if his boy can but live; he is not proud, but there it is, out in the open, the nakedness of human nature. And yet, there is something admirable about Clay’s raw, unrepentant love for his son, and something equally admirable about seeing strangers forming fast friendship bonds when thrown together under duress. Despite the gore and the violence, this isn’t just a tale wrote to satisfy those of us who crave a good blood splatter; it’s a tale meant to cause you to ponder and reflect on many things.

I would examine the book on a more plot-by-plot point basis, but that would take away from anyone who has yet to read the story, even without giving ending spoilers. The whole thing unfolds expertly and is a page-turner. Almost like Michael Crichton’s better books, except Michael Crichton never wrote characters nearly this well, which makes the urgency of the plot that much more engaging. Really, I can’t think of a single thing I didn’t like about this book. I read yesterday that King has said he wrote a screenplay for the possible movie version of the book, and that due to complaints he has changed the ending. Without spoiling it, I will say that I personally loved the ending. It has a feeling of finality yet adventure about it, and it lets you draw your own conclusion as to how certain things work out, yet it strongly hints (at least to me) what the outcome of certain people’s plights are.

Overall, it’s an amazingly gripping book, much deeper and better crafted than one would except for a story in which cell phones drive people to become (at first) mindless violent zombies, and much more satisfying than the average ‘page-turner’. I am sure that I will be returning to this book again in the future to read once more for the characters and themes. It is that good. If you are a silly stupid-person like me and you haven’t read anything by the good Mr. King yet, you owe it to yourself as a liker of good things to at least pick up Cell. Of course, if the only thing you’ve ever read is Winnie the Pooh, you might not be able to handle the gore factor, but in that case, you should read it anyway and firm the heck up.

Addendum: I will use this blog to chronicle my reading of new King books as I go along. I am at the moment choosing them at random based on what I feel like reading at the time, but I don’t think there’s any compelling reason to read them chronologically, besides of which, my collection (big as it is thanks to that booksale) is incomplete. Since I just recently re-watched Cujo due to finding the DVD for cheap at a Blockbuster that was going out of business (something I will also review in some form soon), I am considering reading the book version of that, though I have doubts it will be good as Cell. One thing’s for sure; even though I recall some snickering going on after Mr. King took a snipe at Stephenie Meyers, I’ll say this: I don’t care if every other book the man wrote aside from Cell consisted of six hundred pages of the word ‘poop’ repeated over and over again; King wrote at least one novel of the quality Stephenie Meyers couldn’t get near if she wrote for a hundred years. That’s not some smug snipe on my part, that’s just me saying that if anyone has earned the right to say what he did, it’s Mr. King.