Cell: A Novel by Stephen King Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Cell: A Novel
Book Review: "The Stand" rehashed. (oh yawn!)
Summary: 2 Stars
If you want to read a holocaust-type survivor book, go with King's classic, "The Stand". Its a much deeper, more fascinating book than "Cell". I found myself looped in quickly but then soon became bored by the familiar pattern. Save your money and read 'The Stand' instead -- a far superior story!Book Review: "War of the Worlds" meets "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"
Summary: 3 Stars
This story is the same as "War of the Worlds" with one major difference: the aliens have been replaced by cell phones. This is also the same as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" except the bodies are altered by cell phone poisoning, and aren't replaced by pod people.
King takes his anti-cell phone bias (one I agree with) and proceeds to write a cautionary tale of how cell phones are a cancer to society. Citizens who use cells are brainwashed and turned into zombie-like beings who share a single wavelength of thought and duty. The story focuses on the efforts of one person to reunite with his son, and through him we learn the story of the cell-phone brainwashing that's taken place.
King has a good premise here, and the first 150 pages of the book are excellent; easily the best of King's recent work. Unfortunately, the latter half of the book has many passages where nothing happens of import to the plot or to the characters. Overall, this was much better than "The Colorado Kid" or "From a Buick 8." That's not saying much, but it is a step in the right direction for Mr. King.
Book Review: "it" it's not!
Summary: 2 Stars
i bought the book the week it appeared - don't know why i still do this, i have not read more than 150 pages of insomnia, but i keep buying every book except for the dark tower set, and have been disappointed with each of them. i am currently listening to cell on audiobook, which makes it easier to interact with the book while tending to the garden or walking max.
king's first books were superb. he was able to make the reader identify with the book characters and by the time the plot thickened we cared about what happened to ous protagonists, and their reactions were always in sync with what we knew about them. after 3hours 20 min (out of 12 1/2) i do not yet care about clay, tom or alice.
as an inveterate hater of cell phones (i commute to nyc and back home by bus, and have been battling with loud, rude, obnoxious users for more than a decade now), i do love the premise of the book. i hope that i start caring about someone in it soon.
Book Review: 'Cell' Is Return of Potboiler King
Summary: 2 Stars
Stephen King's new thriller, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743292332/sr=8-1/qid=1143872496/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-9298580-9233653?%5Fencoding=UTF8">Cell</a>, reminds me of how compelling King can be, in a way that leaves me feeling manipulated and used. He shows a deep-rooted "damned mass" view of human nature, even while he displays authorial hate for characters within the story who share a view that's perhaps not as extreme as his. And in an effort to raise his book from a beach read to something Socially Significant, he ends up spouting tin-hat political slogans that will be out of date as a Nehru jacket after the 2008 elections (by which time, of course, he'll have earned more royalties on this book than I will in my entire life, just in case anyone thinks I don't know the "If you're so smart, how come you're not published" response).
My view of King's writings has swung between disdain at the goriness of it and at his gimmick of taking the friendly and familiar -- a car, a dog, a cat, a rambling lodge in the mountains -- and making something horrifying out of it -- and respect for real talents of storytelling and observation of human nature. His coming of age novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0582418178/sr=8-1/qid=1143872793/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-9298580-9233653?%5Fencoding=UTF8">The Body</a>, surprised and delighted me with its look at the relationships among a group of schoolboys, and the 12-year-old storyteller character gave me a grounding in the adult author's boyish reveling in the "Oh gross!" After running across The Body, I counted myself a fan.
Cell brings me back to my weariness with the Kinginess of King. He goes back to his attacks on the familiar with the cell phone trick -- cell phones are ubiquitous, and a lot of people love them, and a vocal minority hate them, and King with his $80 kajillion in the bank proudly notes on the cover copy that he doesn't own one, thus showing how morally superior he is. (I know. There are people who are unmannerly about their cell phones. They are also frequently unmannerly about radios, loud conversation and chewing gum. Will King go after these menace also? Just wondering.)
Even though I couldn't put the book down, at the end, I felt that I had -- in a literary sense -- wasted my time and attention. All the same, for a writer, there's much here to learn.
A certain element of the "page-turner" quality is important in a book. If a reader isn't curious about what happens next, he may very well put a bookmark in the page and look at the book six months later, thinking, "Maybe I'll get back to it sometime." At the other extreme, if the book is just a page turner, when I'm done, I feel as if I've just gone through a chocolate frenzy -- disoriented, guilty over the loss of time and nauseated.
But how does King pull off the page-turner quality that he does so well? Sharp detail and a lot of foreshadowing. He keeps revealing what will happen later, in terms that leave the outcome open to speculation but that, when fulfilled, leave the reader thinking, "Of course." King also imagines the situation so vividly that the reader never gets around to thinking, "Now just a gol-darned minute . . . ." For instance, what happens to the cell-phone users is that there's some kind of signal sent by satellite that fries their brains. So the hero uses a landline to call long distance. Well, aren't all long-distance calls sent by satellite? And all these people use their cell phones and get their brains wiped, so there's no alternative source of information? And nobody in the book has heard of the Internet? But he papers over these plotholes with breakneck pacing and one dire circumstance after another.
Dire circumstances bring me back to what I used to hate about King, before I became a fan. It's a weird thing about movies and literature that an author can commit all kinds of mayhem against people and readers nod and turn the page. When the villain kills a dog or a cat, readers write angry letters to the publisher. I don't understand it, but I feel it myself, and King shows a man in a business suit, under the influence of the pulse, bite the ear off a dog. King's POV character says he doesn't know anything about dogs, with an intimation that he doesn't care very much, and I wonder if that's the attitude of the author. Reading it, it comes across as "he doesn't stop at anything." Looking back, it seems more like a cheap trick.
The novel I finished before Cell was <a href="http://librivox.org/notes-from-the-underground-by-fyodor-dostoyevsky/">Notes from Underground</a>. Dostoyevsky is an author who really doesn't turn back from anything. The speaker tells about a conversation with a prostitute, and the outcome of that conversation is as wrenching in its way -- in the destruction of the innocent -- as cruelty to an animal. The difference is that Dostoyevsky is saying something deep and heart-breaking about the state of a man's soul. With Cell, King is exposing readers to the torture of a dog just for effect.
Or maybe for King, it's slightly more than an effect. His characters later arrive at the conclusion that the cell wiped out people's minds, leaving the murder that lies at the base of the human mind (soul?). Well, I've heard that King was an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451169530/qid=1143872843/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-9298580-9233653?s=books&v=glance&n=283155">Evangelical Christian</a> (still don't know whether to believe it), but this would suggest that he's at least a one-point (total depravity) Calvinist. He expresses characters' hatred and author's hatred (by his one-sided, all ugly, bad, and unfashionable description) for a pushy end-times fundy creep -- whose kind apparently demonstrated at abortion clinics in one character's past -- but he never deals with the similarity between said creep, who assumes that the two men have taken the girl for immoral purposes, and the author's apparent view that if you strip away our self-knowledge and socialization, there's nothing left but the savagery of a rabid animal.
I tell myself it's a beach read, and I'm asking too much to expect him to deal with any bedrock issues. But if that's the case, why the political frippery? What does it add to the story to make a snarky comment about Bush's "inadequate plan" in Iraq (whether any given reader favors the war or not)? If I were reading a beach book from 1944, would it add to the effect or take away from it that the writer thinks Roosevelt's plan for the Pacific Theatre was crazy? Or from 1965 and Johnson's plan for Vietnam? Again, it's a pose of relevance that has nothing to do with the story and everything to do with an illusion that something Important is happening here.
If you're a writer, it's worth a read for King's techniques of detail and foreshadowing. If you're a reader, a Batman comic would be a more profound investment of time.
Book Review: *Spoilers* Gripping, but disappointing
Summary: 4 Stars
I should first say that I very much enjoyed this book. I believe the concept is excellent (and perhaps even plausible). Via some sort of "Pulse" transmitted through computers and satellites (the true cause of which is never fully explained - disappointment # 1), cell phone users, en masse, are stripped completely of any cognizant thought or function. As King puts it, "Their hard drives have been erased." They - the Phone-Crazies - begin to exhibit animalistic, violent, survivalist behavior: the core of which, evidently, is murder and mayhem. As time goes on, however, the Phoners begin to change and evolve into a "hive mentality" - a collective mindset that allows them to communicate telepathically, to levitate, and to commit further powerful, unspeakable acts to the Normies.
So you see, the concept is interesting, and the generalizations and assumptions King makes about the human psyche and our ability to survive as a race are extremely fascinating. The reader is very shortly hooked, devouring each page, desperately hoping to finally have all of his/her questions answered.
After putting this much time into developing such an elaborate plot and answering so many of the questions the reader is asking, one would think that Stephen King would tie this book up with a nice, neat ending, providing closure and leaving the reader fulfilled and satisfied. However, this is not the case. The "big" questions remain unanswered at the end of the book: What really did cause the Pulse? What happens to Tom, Jordan, and Denise? What becomes of Johnny, Clay's son? What of the rest of the world? Do the remaining Phoners become normal again?
Granted, I realize that if such a situation as portrayed in Cell were to arise, in actuality, no one may ever know the answers to these questions. King does a great job of leading the reader to his or her own conclusions by providing clues as to what the answers to these questions might be, but he never makes the effort to come out and SAY it. Perhaps this is intentional; King wants to leave the story open-ended so each reader is free to arrive at their own perceived ending. However, in the end, it simply comes across as laziness. Perhaps King himself became bored with the story, or didn't know how to finish it.
Either way, despite its gripping plot and (mostly) likeable characters, this book could have been a much greater one with a bit more closure provided by the author.