Can You Fear Me Now?
05/02/2006
King, Stephen. Cell: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2006. 355 p.
According to the introductory material in Stephen King's bestselling new novel, Cell, there are approximately 193,000,000 cell phones in America. After reading Cell, you may wish to toss yours down the nearest manhole. It is likely that you won’t regard your cellie as being the helpful, or at least benign technology that you did prior to encountering this book.
On October 1, at 3:03 pm EST, a mysterious phenomenon occurs that wipes the minds of all cell phoners. Clayton Riddell, the main character, does not have a cell phone and is, therefore, spared. He has just profitably sold his graphic novel to a Boston publisher and is elated. Practically bouncing down Boylston Street, Clay reflects on being able now to afford nice things such as the small present, a decorative paperweight, that he has bought for his estranged wife Sharon. He decides to buy an ice cream before heading back to his modest hotel. It is while waiting in line for an ice cream that he observes the event which would later become known as The Pulse.
At this point, we are treated to grand guignole1 descriptions of a man devouring his pet dog’s ear, of a blonde teenaged girl, Pixie Light, on a peppermint-colored cell phone, ripping into the neck−vampire style−of a middle-aged bystander, and of her brunette friend, Pixie Dark, braining herself by senselessly bashing her head into a phone pole. Vehicular crashes and explosions add to the mayhem. Civilization has short circuited.
Worried that his young son, Johnny, may have endangered himself by taking his red cell phone to school and becoming a Pulse zombie, Clay is determined to set out on the 100-mile journey back to their Maine small town (where else but Maine, the land of King, could such mayhem take place?). His goal is to rescue his boy.
His dystopian odyssey from Boston to Maine is the heart of the book. Along the way, Dorothy-like, he meets various characters who help him. Tom is a quiet, book-loving, urbane bachelor who must abandon his pet cat, Rafe. Alice is a Pulse survivor who has valuable intuitions about the Phoners. Jordan is the classic computer geek whose ideas about reprogramming the Phoners based on the save to system features of computers may ultimately restore Johnny’s mind and sanity.
I enjoyed King's comments on the behavior of cell phone users, their rudeness and self-absorption. This book is a not-so-subtle screed against the pervasiveness of this ubiquitous communication tool. Perhaps when we consider controversial recent research that indicates certain rare tumors might be caused by cell phone radiation, it is not surprising that a writer such as King has imagined this dysphoric cautionary tale.
On the negative side, I'd have liked more explanation of The Pulse, but none is given (which some may argue makes for a more unnerving experience). It was unclear whether one had to be on his/her cell phone or just had to have one hanging around. Could The Pulse work on cell phones that were turned off? Could terrorists or aliens have propagated such a catastrophic charge of electro-magnetic radiation and managed to use it to reprogram people? What other etiology might have generated The Pulse?
But the reader will quickly dismiss such concerns since King succeeds in depicting well-drawn and believable characters. They could be our neighbors, people that we see on the subway or with whom we work. We grieve with Clay and Tom when Alice is senselessly killed in a kind of drive-by. We root for Jordan when he pilots the explosive-laden bus across the abandoned fair grounds and over the sleeping pulse zombies in an act of revenge on the group mind. This group mind is personified by the Harvard man in the red hoodie who made Jordan’s mentor, the headmaster at the New Hampshire boarding school, commit suicide with an ink pen.
Cell could be King’s most violent novel yet. He combines the blood and gore of the prom scene in Carrie, the neurotic food disposal scene in Firestarter, the canine attacks in Cujo, the destruction in Needful Things, and the sociopathic evil of It. And he splatters them across this tale’s several hundred pages. Cell, in fact, is so dense that it is a novel that needs a sequel by its very nature. Unfortunately for King fans, comments made by King himself on his web site explain why one is not likely.
1. See http://www.grandguignol.com/history.htm or http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_072.html for an explanation.