Sunday Book Review: Stephen King’s CELL

While waiting for my antibiotics last week at the pharmacy, I picked up this book and started reading, because any book blurbed by the Washington Post as “the Great American Zombie Novel” can’t be all bad. And I really enjoyed Stephen King’s old stuff — up through the late eighties, when I stopped reading his books after Tommyknockers disappointed me for reasons I can’t recall.

So this was the first Stephen King book I’ve read in more than a decade. It’s still got the same old familiar King touches — his prose flows so naturally that, like any master craftsman, he makes it look deceptively easy to do what he does.

Unfortunately, it’s also got some teeth-grating anti-gun attitudes on display. All of his firearm depictions (surprisingly few for a TEOTWAWKI zombie novel) are accurate except for one moment where he has a character “swing the barrel out” on a revolver to find that “only one of the six chambers was empty.” Grrr. That would be the cylinder he swung out. But that’s a relatively minor error.

Far more annoying is that King appears to have this thing against hollow-point rounds:

“Then he’d explained the highly illegal nature of the ammunition Arnie Nickerson had obtained for his wife’s .45 fraggers. What had once been called dumdum bullets.” (Cell, Page 231.)

And this:

“KA-POW! in jagged yellow capitals across the foreground of the splash, and this one really is a splash, because Arnie Nickerson has thoughtfully provided his wife with the kind of softnosed rounds they sell on the Internet at the American Paranoia sites, and the top of Ray’s head is a red geyser.” (Cell, page 404.)

AAARGH!!!!

Okay, just where, exactly, are hollow-point self-defense rounds illegal? Outside of New York City and a few other select leftist wacko burgs around the country, that is. (And in King’s story, they are self-defense rounds — America’s Defender brand, in a bright red box.) And pardon me, but I believe you can pick up defensive ammunition at almost any Wal-Mart, Big 5, or other sporting-goods store. No paranoid Internet sites necessary, thank you very much. Maybe King hasn’t been out of his Maine hidey-hole that often in the last few years? At least he recognizes that only Frederick Forsyth still calls hollow-points “dumdum” bullets. Sheesh.

And for what it’s worth, it’s clear all the way through the book that the only way to defend yourself when the SHTF is with a gun. Of course, once the zombies start practicing telekinesis, mere firearms stop being useful. It’s less jarring than it sounds — I suppose that’s just King’s style to push the envelope past your standard zombie fare.

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On balance, it’s a pretty decent “zombie” story, although it’s not zombies per se but rather crazed homicidal humans made nuts by a “pulse” that infects them through their cell phones — thus the title of the novel. It goes off in King’s usual way-out-there vein pretty early on, though. So don’t read it if you’re expecting a tale focusing on survival in the face of the chaotic conditions resulting from SHTF — King moves past that pretty quickly to weightier matters.

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In sum, the book’s definitely worth a look. I sure hated finding out that the ten bucks (!!) for the paperback went to support anti-gunner propaganda, though. For God’s sake, don’t pay seventeen bucks for the hardcover. Wait for it to hit the used bookstores or Goodwill — you’ll get it cheaper and King won’t get your money.