I've been reading Stephen King's Cell. I know. I generally hate King. Let me rephrase that. I like his stories, but I hate his novels. Yet, over the years, I come across people whose opinion I trust who try and convince me that my completely justified opinion of an author is wrong and I should give him/her another shot. And this is how I end up doing things like reading novels by novelists I know I hate.

And thus I end up reading Stephen King's Cell, which is kind of a shorter version of the Stand only with the disease that wipes out mankind actually being a cellphone transmitted madness, which eventually also a communal consciousness and the ability to levitate in the "phoners" (as opposed to the "normies"). The idea might have worked had it been written by someone a little more hip to the cellphone/IM/text/sidekick culture. As it is, it's kind of like my great grandfather trying to write Tron.

Still despite King's classic, pardon me while I kill the only character you like tactics, his clumsy attempt at using meta (the main character is a comic book artist who at the climax of the story envisions penning a comic book titled Cell-guess what it is about), his heavy handed commentary about consumerist American culture. (All these people turned into a shared communal consciousness by using cellphones? Once they become mindless phoners, they indulge in all manners of junk food. Sounds a lot like vilifying adolescence, doesn't it?) I could have tolerated all his antics until I hit this sentiment: "Survival is like Love. Both are blind."

After reading that sentence, I am beginning to wish I was blind too.

* Joe has nominated me for a thinking blog award. I shall be posting about that later tonight, I swear. But to all of you who came here expecting brilliant literary analysis and found complaining about Stephen King, I apologize. Tomorrow I'll write something about Voltaire, I promise.

Labels: cellphones, horror, stephen king