Now I Wish I Had a Land Line

The first book I fin­ished read­ing in 2009 was Stephen King’s Cell. I picked up the hard­cov­er at Barnes & Noble’s clear­ance table. I went through a peri­od of time in my ear­ly twen­ties when I read sev­er­al Stephen King nov­els. They’ve always done the job for me, passed the time while keep­ing my brain rea­son­ably active. So when Cell caught my eye with a «Bar­gain Priced» stick­er on it, I snapped it up with my oth­er pur­chas­es and tore through it in a few days.

This, again, did the job. It was a wel­come relief from my heav­ier read­ing which I put on hold: Mihaly Csikzent­mi­ha­lyi, Mal­colm Glad­well, a cou­ple of O’Reil­ly tech books, and a his­to­ry of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. I’m get­ting a lot out of the oth­er books on my list, but they go slow­ly in com­par­i­son to a light novel.

Cell takes King’s schtick — mak­ing ordi­nary things hor­ri­fy — into the Twen­ty-First Cen­tu­ry. Not because the evil in the sto­ry comes through cel­lu­lar phones, as there were plen­ty of those in the Twen­ti­eth, but because King played on a very post‑9/11 fear of ter­ror­ism. As The Dead Zone played with the fear of nuclear holo­caust that per­vad­ed our cul­ture in the Cold War era. The phe­nom­e­non around which Cell is cen­tered is the­o­rized to be an act of terrorism.

Today’s cul­tur­al bogey­man is ter­ror­ism instead of nuclear war­fare. Cell goes a lit­tle deep­er than that sim­ple trans­la­tion of shared fears, though. I found myself won­der­ing at sev­er­al times if instead of ter­ror­ists «The Pulse» could have been the actions of ghosts or demons or aliens from anoth­er plan­et. The sec­ond thought after this spec­u­la­tion was won­der­ing whether aliens or demons would actu­al­ly be com­fort­ing com­pared to terrorists.

And that is cer­tain­ly one of King’s tal­ents. He’s good at get­ting at what we find disturbing.

That said, Cell pales in com­par­i­son to his more famous nov­els. It was engag­ing and clever, but ulti­mate­ly for­get­table. For what­ev­er faults and virtues they have, It, Car­rie, The Shin­ing, and many oth­er of King’s nov­els are sto­ries that stick with the read­er long after the book has been put down. There’s very lit­tle in Cell that stands out like much of King’s oth­er novels.

My rec­om­men­da­tion? If you see it on the bar­gain table while you’re look­ing for some­thing to pass the time, go for it. Oth­er­wise you’ll prob­a­bly be bet­ter off look­ing deep­er into King’s back catalogue.