A Novel Critique

Stephen King novels affect me in different ways. When I originally came to him, when I was twelve years old, it was after having seen Pet Semetery in the theater. My Dad, knowing I loved the film, picked me up a paperback copy at a local store, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So my first introduction to King was a need – perhaps very much an outgrowth of my teenaged psyche – for visceral, gory horror. I wanted kids coming back from the dead and cats from hell and ancient Indian burial grounds that held terrible secrets. This is what a childhood bred on 80’s horror taught me to expect: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist, all that stuff: it underlined shock value above all else.

What I learned coming out of the novel version of Pet Semetery is that, while the visceral horror can exist and be interesting, it’s what goes on behind it that’s really important. The humanity that lurks in the characters, the poignancy of those characters’ often terrible journeys. The fact that those two things – the sharp, bloody horrors, and the literary satisfaction of a tale well told – could coexist stunned me. And it kept stunning me for quite some time … until I sort of forgot about it.

Somewhere in my neverending defense of King as a worthy literary author, I forgot that yes, he does on occasion write scary stories. It seems absurd to admit now, but starting in 1998 with Bag of Bones, my perception of King has been that of a literary author whose “horror” days were a thing of the past. He won an O. Henry Award, he won a National Book Award, and all of it sort of got me to the point of saying, “Look, everyone. This Stephen King guy really is important. He’s literary! You don’t have to like vampires or werewolves or haunted hotels to like King. What about The Shawshank Redemption? What about Stand By Me? That’s Stephen King!’ But the problem is, by trying to mollify the masses by presenting only a portion of King’s story was sloppy of me; irresponsible, even. Because King doesn’t just write “literary stories” and “scary stories”; he writes both, often at the same time, and it was wrong of me to forget that.

Cell helped me to remember.

At first, the concept of Cell comes across as a kind of ironic social commentary: cell phone users nation- and, maybe, world-wide are suddenly affected by something known as The Pulse, which turns the listeners into mindless, zombie-like creatures: primitive, aggressive, and brutally violent. The idea could have played itself out as farce – cell phone users as mindless zombies, sure. Ha-ha.

But King plays it straight, and it’s to his strength that he pulls it off so casually. The main thrust of the story concerns Clay Riddell, a graphic novel artist and writer who has just gotten his big break before the Pulse hits. He’s in downtown Boston, and the only things on his mind are presents for his son and his estranged wife, and an ice cream cone for himself.

When the Pulse hits, its result is swift and bloody. A proper woman in a business suit in line ahead of him at the ice cream stand goes ballistic, lurching forward to tear the ice cream vendor apart. In the nearby Boston Common, a man suddenly turns on his dog, attempting to bite its ear off. Small and large pockets of violence erupt seemingly out of nowhere, and now the only thing on Clay’s mind is: is his son safe?

Thus, the book – a short one, by King’s standards, only about 380 pages – opens up as sort of a travelogue, and Clay Riddell one of King’s many protagonists on a quest. From the outset, Clay befriends a man named Tom from nearby Malden, and a young girl named Alice, who both agree to journey with him to Maine (where else?) to find out whether his son has been affected by The Pulse. Along the way, they meet some new people, and begin to theorize about the nature of the Pulse itself. Was it a terrorist act, a more subtle yet more insidious attack than those of 9/11? Did The Pulse, as one character hypothesizes, erase humanity from the brains of those affected down to the most basic, most violent human core? Are people really like computers? And if everything can be stripped away, can they also be rebooted?

Cell – another terrific double- or triple-meaning title – starts off with mindless violence, but it doesn’t follow that path for long. As the story evolves into something more thoughtful than the opening might suggest, so too do the people affected by The Pulse: eventually known as “phoners,” they slowly but surely begin to evolve. And that evolution might turn out to be the worst outcome of all.

This book surprised and thrilled me, all the way through. This is King’s first regular release since From a Buick 8 – while I loved the Dark Tower novels, I was ready for a breather – and I had no idea what to expect. King makes good use of recent tragedies – not only the obvious 9/11 parallels, but also the horror of Hurricane Katrina – to subtly underscore the horror being played out here. In addition, he brings back some of his old parlor tricks, utilizing psionics like telekinesis, levitation, and telepathy as some of the “wild talents” Clay and his friends encounter as part of the phoners’ evolution. (There’s also a couple of neat sequences involving prophetic dreams that underline Cell’s connection to The Stand.) And King hasn’t lost his sense of humor: for nearly half a page, King rakes Michael Bolton over the coals, for no reason other than that he can. It’s a hilarious throwaway moment, the kind that King is so very good at.

The last few pages of Cell brought to mind my very first King literary experience, Pet Semetery. Unlike that book’s inevitably pessimistic conclusion, this one ends with a note of hope. Recently, King has been toying with inconclusive endings – From a Buick 8 and The Colorado Kid being two of them. This isn’t like that; it’s an ending like that of The Stand or The Dark Half – an ending that hopes the darkness is past, but has a little trouble believing it.

The final pages of this book are devoted to a preview of King’s upcoming novel, Lisey’s Story. By all accounts, this is going to be King at his most literary, and I for one am duly excited. My only fear is that, when people look back on King’s 2006 output, they’ll make the mistake I almost made and recognize Lisey’s as another of King’s triumphs, while Cell is just the necessary evil of a horror novel.

Cell doesn’t deserve that. It’s a fully-realized, well-written, character-driven narrative that is graceful even in its bloodletting. Cell is King at the top of his craft.