Signal

Not King's best work. The characters are rather cardboard in spite of verbose descriptions. The whole tale moves slowly and the climax leaves the outcome unresolved. I actually found that I had to force myself to finish this book.
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What happens when the world can no longer use cell phones because everyone who was using a cell phone got turned into a feral, homicidal killing machine? Well, things go to hell in a handbasket, basically. This is easily one of King's best books in recent memory--not overblown, not too long, not too heavily cliched, and creepy as hell at points.

What was really fascinating to me was his picture of American society crumbling into chaos--it's so heavily influenced by 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. It's so of the moment, I could see it being looked at twenty years from now as an illustration of the American Psyche, circa 2007. ( )

Stephen King was my favourite author as a teenager and he's been the biggest influence on my own writing because of that. I've not read anything new of his in a long, long time, though. I stopped around the time where he stopped writing brilliant horror and started writing not-so-horror. And then I kind of never got started again. I'm trying to write horror at the moment, and feeling nostalgic about It and other King novels due to the content of what I'm trying to write, so when I saw this in the library I picked it up.

You know, I hadn't realised how much I'd missed King until I started reading him again.

This is good solid post-apocalyptic fare. I do love apocalyptic horror, so I was never really going to hate this. The beginning actually reminded me of Laymon a lot, so I spent a while expecting the teenage girl to get raped, because she probably would've if Laymon had written this. As it went on, it became more reminiscent of The Stand, which is one of my favourite King books.

The best thing about this, though, is that it has an excellent gay character in it. I shouldn't have to be so excited to find that in this genre, but let's face it. We all know what the genre's like. The greatest thing about it, is that Tom's sexuality is just there. And that's how it should be. There are a couple of hints, it's mentioned outright at one point, and that's it. And guess what? He doesn't even die! I know, right? ( )

this was pretty meh for me. in the end it's more or less a zombie story, which really doesn't appeal to me at all. and as far as the post-apocalyptic groups coming together, walking north, and surviving thing goes, i just recently read parable of the sower and that is better in every conceivable way. (even being situated on the west coast instead of the east, hahaha.)

this story isn't actually all bad, it's just not that interesting, and he forgets what makes his books so good - there is very little true character development here. so i don't care about these people the way i should. or the way i know he could make me. it's unlike him to write this way, and as such, it isn't one of his better efforts. although i do appreciate that at the very end, we don't know if clay will be able to "reboot" his son and bring him back, and then if he'll be able to regroup with his friends. we don't even really know if his band was even able to truly kill the "phone people" or not. it's strangely left pretty open, and while i like that in the case of clay's son, i don't like it with the phone people, since that's kind of the whole point of the book.

i do like what he might be saying about technology, gun control, and humans' base instincts. (i don't always agree with it, but it's an interesting conversation to have, anyway. ...and depending on my mood and the world around me, i might agree with it some days.) but in the end, the book doesn't really focus on those questions, but instead on the less interesting stuff. (stuff that could have been more interesting if he'd developed the characters better.)

although this was a remarkably fast read for my not feeling too interested in it. still, i think a lot of it could have been left out and replaced with character depth, and it would be much improved, and more like stephen king.

"At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle." ( )

Literary critics can moan all they want about Stephen King's "penny dreadful" oeuvre, but his mastery at the craft of storytelling is indisputable. King writes his novels like a seduction, the story unfolding delicately and deliberately. As any Stephen King fan knows, his coy expository chapters often take up the first hundred pages or more. In Cell, however, the reader is brutally dragged into the main action--unspeakable, senseless violence--within the first seven pages. Cell is by far King's most brutal, transgressive work to date.

Many have compared Cell to his earlier epic, The Stand. On the surface, the novels are quite similar: an apocolyptic event threatens the very existence of the human race as a band of survivors struggle to come to terms with the carnage and avert further catastrophe. Cell, however, is the far more mature novel of the pair. The Stand was, in many ways, a novel by an idealistic youth, whereas Cell is filled with the trenchant and world-weary observations of an adult. The subtext is laden with so much chillingly apt futurist rhetoric that it is as though the author had Marshall McLuhan whispering plot devices and metaphors into his ear as he labored over his typewriter. King manages to explore several of the major sociocultural conflicts of our time, most persuasively the end of the era of individualism and the rise of collectivism, here symptomatic of heavy reliance on technology. Whereas many dystopian novels are almost comically blunt when expounding upon the dangers of collectivism, King's horrific plot and action give his metaphors a sort of subtlety that renders his subtext much more graceful and easier to stomach than the work of Ayn Rand.

As the epigraphs indicate, it is also a meditation on the intrinsic violence of the human race. King clearly feels as though the world is out of control and wants to find out why. His preferred genre, horror, is an excellent one with which to consider the depravaties of modern life. The Stand was a novel that, if not upbeat, was at least optimistic--a reflection of the times in which it was written. There was also violence, but it had its own biblical logic, if violence can ever be called logical. In Cell, the violence is senseless, oppressive, and omnipresent. There seems to be little promise for a better world... at least not one inhabited by human beings.

Many reviewers took issue with the unresolved ending. Considering the subtext of the novel, however, the reader will find that the ending's abruptness actually informs the sense that Cell, besides being an excellent horror yarn, is a meticulously painted portrait of the horrors of global culture. The many crises of our time are still developing and mutating. The end is not yet, it seems, in sight.
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