readers…… greetings!

here’s something i wrote for the papers where i work, dunno if it will be printed in whole, but hey…. you’re the priveledged ones to read it in whole….

happy reading, and tell me what you think about it….

cheers….

plain ol reviewer joe

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review : Cell, by Stephen King

Another new novel, another round of terror and nightmares from the master himself.

Stephen King returns to the genre he so masterfully controlled with his new thriller, Cell. Escaping from his norm of elaborate character development, local histories and his penchant for slow build up, Cell will yank you straight into the action from the first few pages of the book, and it is by far one of his goriest writings yet. Readers who are well accustomed to his previous works will notice the similarities between his new work and his other masterpiece, The Stand, with a few references to Stand By Me and even glimpses of Salem’s Lot. To the new reader, Cell is an introduction of sorts to what King does best, all his popular elements sans the literary regulars are introduced in his most horrifying and absolute level yet to be seen in any of his previous tomes.

From someone who doesn’t own a cell phone (as written on the sleeve), King manages to capture his audience in a poignant tale about how the cell phone, one of man’s most widely accepted and used piece of technology into a weapon of mass destruction. On a fateful day, all cell phone users around the world are transformed into zombie like entities caused by a pulse signal from an unknown source. Witnessing the destruction of Boston from the streets, the protagonist is soon joined by a rag-tag group of people who weren’t using the cell phone at the time of it’s destructive power, thus called the Normies. These people then trek their way towards a safe haven, where they start to learn about their common enemy, the zombies. They soon realise that the unfortunate series of event have a common source, an unknown entity of supernatural origins first thought to be terrorist factions, but then singled out to be the human personification of everything evil.

The book has all the elements that make it a fabulous scare-fest read; from blood and gore, hive-minded zombies with a penchant for raw flesh, the unknown quantity tat surrounds the leader of the zombies, the physical and emotional turmoil that the protagonist and his team goes through plus a few elements found in the above mentioned King’s classics such as the Raggedy Man (Randall Flagg in The Stand), the cell phone virus (again, the mutated influenza genome from The Stand), the rabid, violent behaviour of the infected people (Cujo), the somewhat organised manner of the mindless zombies (Salem’s Lot) to the camaraderie of the group during their quest (Stand by Me, The Stand, Langoliers). The zombie theme is somewhat the only thing new to this book, almost as if it’s a direct homage to the creator of the genre George A Romero, with the latter’s direct action and gore involving the zombie’s actions so well depicted in the book.

Readers new to King will gulp down this tome for its sheer pace itself, and readers familiar with his works will find themselves somewhat exhausted with it. The pace of this book is very frantic in the beginning, with the city’s decimation told in the most dramatic fashion. The book then staggers a little during the initiation of the quest, leaving some breathing space for character development before entering the climax with a bang. Even the build up before their final confrontation seems somewhat rushed, but that’s the whole point of the book, a fast, frantic adventure into a world where technology and supernatural forces somewhat merges to form a tool of absolute power and evil, leaving the world to travel somewhat backwards to the ages where survival of the fittest meant killing the weak to protect their existence. On a more sombre note, King attempts to get the reader to think about his or her own dependence on technology for their everyday tasks, and how it can be manipulated to perform heinous acts of terror.

Putting down the book was something I dreaded doing, and when the cell phone rang, I wondered if I would turn into one of those zombies and tear my office down, uttering gibberish and rampaging through the streets baring all. Thank heavens it didn’t happen, but true to the after effects of reading King’s works; it sure does seem a remote possibility. A good, thought provoking read, Well paced to suit the younger readers and people who are just getting into the King bandwagon, but somewhat predictable among the King scribes the world over. But as they say, once a King, always a King. And make no mistake; this King seems to tighten his grip on the horror tomes for a long time to come.