My Review of Stephen King’s Cell
Well, this will be the first Stephen King book I’ve reviewed on this book reviews blog, but it certainly isn’t the first one I’ve read. Ever since I first read Carrie when I was ten (and wondered what the hell, really, was going on in that opening segment!) I was pretty much hooked on Stephen King. I’ve heard him described as a sensual writer, and whatever he writes about, something in his style, his choice of words, the way he shapes language, makes me feel as if I’m right there in the story. King’s works do this more than any other, and it’s quite amazing, which is no doubt why I’ve probably spent a good few thousand hours over the last 25 years immersed in the Stephen King universe. For it is a universe, much more than simply a collection of characters or a single world (Go then, there are other worlds than this, as we hear Jake say in the Dark Tower series!).
One gets the sense that just around the corner, in any Stephen King novel, you could run into characters or events from any of his books (and sometimes you actually do!), and during the course of reading Cell, I was convinced we were going to run into Randall Flagg at some point, the walking dude, the midnight cowboy! Maybe the Raggedy Man was him, who knows? Anyway, although Flagg doesn’t raise his ugly world-murdering head, I’ve no doubt he has something to do with the horrible event that sets in motion the horrible aftermath which unfolds in this apocalyptic novel. And yes, King comprehensively examined the end of world theme in The Stand, but Shakespeare wrote about regicide more than once, Dickens wrote about poor orphaned children more than once, and I for one was happy to look over King’s shoulder as he visited another version of the end of the World in his mind’s eye 
Like many King novels, the action is sudden, preposterous and bizarre, yet all too believable. And King’s quirky observations often carry an eerie sense of verisimilitude. The story opens normally enough with comic book artist Clayton Riddell on his way to a hotel, after closing a deal for his artwork. Like the world around him, Clayton is preoccupied with enjoying the present and anticipating the future, with a sense of potential walking along with him, when the world is suddenly, inexplicably, terrifyingly ended within the space of a few pages. It’s not a bomb, it’s not bullets, and it’s not airplanes flying into skyscrapers. It’s the humble cell phone, and the damage is done as some strange and mysterious signal unencodes the user’s mind and returns it to its most primal, insane vestiges. And that, as you might expect, is when people start to kill each other, and when those who have been untouched (those who either don’t own or have lost their cell phones) must band together to survive.
Clayton, meanwhile, is desperate to get home to see how his wife and child have fared amidst this chaos. Of course, he can’t use a cell phone, and the landlines are down. Much of the story revolves around this journey home, but as with many King novels, it is as much the characters, the humour, the interactions, the observations, as much as the plot that keep it going.
I read Stephen King’s Cell in 2 sittings, the first time I have just sat down and got through a book so quickly in a long time. I am definitely planning to spend some of this summer re-reading a few of the favourites in my collection