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I had always wanted to read Stephen King’s Cell.  Despite the intriguing central concept of cell phones turning people into zombies, I somehow never took the plunge and bought it.  This is probably due to the fact that the book was slightly larger than most paperbacks, which, I am convinced, was done solely to artificially inflate the price of the book. So I was quite excited when my editor, the living breathing anachronism, plopped an audio version of it onto my desk. ¹

“Kid,” he said, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. “Have I got an article for you? It’s a real scoop.” There was barely a pause between the words. The cigarette alternated being stuck to his upper and lower lip, dancing frantically up and down as he spoke; I stared, transfixed.

“You’re going to review this book, see. You like books? Of course you do, books are all the rage these days. Hell, I myself am guilty of reading the latest Horace McCoy or William Lindsey Gresham. Anyways, this one is by a guy named Stephen King. Seems like an uppity name, don’t it, kid?  I mean, calling yourself King. Anyways, this King fella is all about the horror. You like horror, don’t ya? Of course you do, all the kids love the horror these days. Well, this novel of his is sensational! I mean, a real whopper. It’s about a guy who’s trying to get home to his wife and son after half the world has been taken over by these things called ‘zombies’. Now I’m not sure what zombies are, but I’m sure you do. Doesn’t that sound like a helluva story, kid? You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, there’s probably some sex in there somewhere that you can use to punch up your review. It sounds like the next great American novel, Steinbeck eat your heart out! You know what I’m saying kid? Anyways I gotta go, kid.” He got up, adjusting his fedora, a Press Card permanently attached to the brim. “See ya in the funny pages.” He said over his shoulder, cigarette still dancing. I don’t think he ever took one puff the whole time he was at my desk.

Cell starts with a bang. King doesn’t fuck around with set up or exposition; we’re barely introduced to the main character before the shit hits the fan. A pulse travels through the cell phone signals and makes anyone who uses a cell phone insane. This results in a domino effect. As people who are on cell phones start going crazy and killing others, people who weren’t originally on their phones start dialing 911. Very quickly, the amount of crazy people outnumbers the amount of normal people. This ratio becomes even more lopsided as the crazy people start killing everyone or everything they can get their hands on. The focus of the story shifts to a small group of survivors: Generic Hero Guy, Token Middle-Aged Gay Guy, and Teen Gal. The trio set out to find Generic Hero Guy’s son and estranged wife, who are half a state away and may be alive or dead or crazy.

After the initial excitement of the first chapter’s chaos, the book slows to a crawl.

Normally, if a book starts boring me, I’ll just chuck the thing across the room and start something more interesting. ² Since this was for my editor, I couldn’t really do that. I decided instead to incorporate one of my favorite pastimes in to my increasingly dull reading sessions in order to spice things up a bit: drinking. ³ It turns out that Cell was begging for a drinking game to be made out of it. I was lucky that my editor gave me the audio version of the book, since my reading comprehension reaches abysmal levels once alcohol is thrown into the mix. From here on out there are spoilers for the book, so if you’d like to read the book on your own (and in this humble writers opinion you really shouldn’t) you may as well stop now. Soldiering forth…

Take a drink each time King spits in the face of the Romero zombie mythos

Take two if this change exists solely so that the main characters don’t die instantly

While the main enemies of the book are certainly zombie-like in the usual Dawn/Day/Shaun type, they aren’t technically zombies. They were never dead, and once bitten by them a person won’t turn into a zombie. I can accept that because it’s in service to the novel. However, there are a number of other differences between King’s zombies⁴ and your normal run-of-the-mill variety that caused my brain to hurt far more than the eventual hangovers ever could. For starters, the zombies roam around during the day but disappear to parts unknown during the night. Good thing, too, because otherwise the main characters would be totally and completely hosed.⁵ Usually, zombies don’t have much to do, which means that survivors have to spend most of their free time either running like hell, or hiding out in the nearest mall or pub. The other issue is that the zombies don’t like to go into buildings. So during the day, all a person has to do is go indoors and they’re perfectly safe. Again, good thing for the main characters, but it makes for a pretty boring⁶ zombie book.

The largest disregard to the mythos is that it turns out that the zombies are also psychic. They can read minds, project thoughts and persuade the characters to do certain things. When the three main characters are halfway through their journey, they meet up with two more walking talking clichés, The Professor⁷ and Smarty McDork. The duo are holed up in a prep school and are trying to persuade other “normies” to join up with them. Generic Hero Guy and company need a place to stop for the day so they decide to hear what the Professor has to say. It turns out that all the zombies get together during the night and “sleep” in large bunches. The football field of the school is filled with a couple of thousand zombies, and while it is dark out they are all in a trance-like state, oblivious to anything going on around them. They also have a large number of boom boxes surrounding the field which are all playing elevator muzack. Smarty McDork has a theory that the cell phone pulse wiped out everyone’s memory, like reformatting a hard drive, and at night while sleeping their brains are being reprogrammed. This is what causes them to become psychic. Sound pretty stupid? It gets worse, by the end of the novel they can levitate.

The group ends up killing the zombie herd. Since the zombies are psychic by this point, and are basically a hive mind, all of the other zombies instantly learn of this atrocity and the heroes act of genocide warrants them a death sentence. The zombies also send a psychic signal to the other normies warning to steer clear of our heroes who are now ‘marked’.

Take a drink each time the book mentions a movie, director, book, or author with which you could better spend your time

Even though the book starts out strictly as a zombie book, it quickly shifts intocyber-punk territory as soon as The Professor and Smarty McDork show up. While trying to be both horror and cyber-punk, the book manages to end up being neither since the characters realize that what’s happening to them is like what would happen in either a horror or cyber-punk book. As such, there is a discussion about zombie movies and Romero, and another discussion about popular cyber-punk authors William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Smarty McDork even refers to Mr. Stephenson as a God at one point. Each time one of these discussions popped up, I found myself wishing that I were watching Dawn of the Dead or reading Cryptonomicon instead of Cell. I doubt that this is really the intention that King had in mind when he chose to pay homage to these people. This doesn’t even take into account the numerous literary references sprinkled throughout the novel that King used to spruce up his analogies.

Slam your drink each time King paints himself into a corner

By the time Cell ended, I had a raging headache. This could’ve been the fault of the case of Pig’s Eye beer that I polished off while wading through the book, but it could just as easily be the fault of King’s unending love for deus ex machina. ⁸ At the end of the book, the main characters are captured by the group of zombies and are locked up for the night, scheduled to be executed the next day. Generic Hero Guy figures out a way to kill off all the zombies and escape. It turns out that one of the other characters, Semi-Important Character Not Introduced Until the Third Act Guy, rigged the bus the heroes were driving with a bunch of explosives. The explosives were set to go off by cell phone, so Third Act Guy gave Generic Hero Guy a cell phone and told him to use it when the time was right and gave him a phone number to dial. Then, so the psychic zombies couldn’t figure out the super secret plan, Third Act Guy blew his own head off. Now, since no one could know the super secret plan, or the fact that there were explosives on the bus, because the psychic zombies would find out, how did Generic Hero Guy figure out the super secret plan? A dream. A FUCKING DREAM!

As if this weren’t bad enough, after most of the zombies are killed by the explosive laden bus, GHG goes off again in search of his son. Somehow, his son wasn’t one of the zombies who was killed by the explosion, even though all the characters were set to be executed by one of their zombified loved ones, which would’ve meant that GHG’s son would be his executor and should’ve been with all the other zombies. Somehow he managed to wander off at the last minute.⁹ As if this wasn’t enough of a stretch, GHG manages to find him a few days later by simply wandering around random towns, making for a treble deus ex machina. I don’t think God’s worked that hard since the sixth day. ¹⁰

Take a drink each time a phrase or concept is repeated

Take two if the phrase contains nonsense words

King has the annoying habit of repeating himself and I felt like I was in second grade while listening. King apparently assumes that the majority of his audience is too stupid to catch on to the more outlandish aspects of his novel so he feels the need to explain them numerous times. The worst example of this is towards the end of the novel. The zombies are herding people to a small town called Kashwak. They do this by leaving signs that read “Kashwak No Pho” meaning that there is no cell phone coverage there, and it should be a relatively safe haven. While Generic Hero Guy is figuring everything out near the end, the phrase is repeated about fifty times. Not only is it repeated, but it’s often explained afterwards. “Kashwak No Pho because there’s no cell phone coverage¹¹ in Kashwak”.

Take a drink each time a horrific event is described only after it occurs

King has another annoying habit. The last few pages of a chapter will lead up to some horrific event or sight, with the chapter ending just as the event occurs. Skip to start of the next chapter and King jumps forward in time to show what the after effects are on the main characters. There’s a lot of talk about how horrible the event was before they get around to describing the actual event. By that time, the excitement and tension is usually gone. It’s the pulling out of storytelling and is just as unsatisfying.

Those five points should get you through the novel quite nicely. So grab a few friends and your favourite libations, gather around the ol’ Victrola and queue up a copy of Cell. You’ll be so blasted by the end you won’t care about the boring characters hackneyed writing or inane plot. Seriously, the only good thing about this assignment was that I was able to write off the liquor bill as a work expense on my taxes.

Edited by Alex M.