Cell [2]

So I finished Cell.

The less said, the better, I think.

I mean, it's not the worst book he's ever written (he says, ignoring his last statement entirely), but it may be his most mediocre. His last couple books, King has started to repeat himself, and Cell is certainly no exception. He lifted themes -- entire scenes, in some cases -- from The Stand, The Tommyknockers, even the final pages felt like the lead-up to the lame ending of It, and tried to string them together into something that felt like a story. Not a bad story, surely -- just a variation on the Zombie plot that Romero snaked from Richard Matheson. But... it felt like he was just making it all up as he went along, with no clear thought put into anything that happened. Which makes sense, really, because he's the guy who has said that he "uncovers" the story, like an archeologist uncovers the bones of an ancient king.

Riiiiight.

I used to subscribe to that theory, or something like it, anyway -- that the story already exists somewhere in the ether, and the writer acts as a medium, channelling the story through himself, his keyboard becoming a Ouija board. But I have to call "bullshit" on that. That kind of thinking, the "archeological dig" thing, takes the author's talent (or lack thereof) right off the board, dunnit? I mean, you can say -- in keeping with the archeology metaphor -- that if you don't dig carefully, you'll ruin the find. Which is to say, if you force your story, if you push it, rather than let it flow, you're going to fuck it up.

(*cough* Dark Tower *cough*)

Cell feels less like a great archeological find than, perhaps, that poor animal that Barnum and Baily tried to pass of as a unicorn some years back; it's a sham. It's familiar which you're being asked to accept as something not only new and exciting, but fascinating as well. In Cell, King sees a unicorn, where I see a goat with a broomstick shoved in its skull.