King's latest transcends most of his previous works

BY JULIA KELLER
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Stephen King is the Brett Favre of literature. He's scrappy and passionate and reckless, and he loves the game and he'll do anything to keep at it.
With King, as with the Green Bay Packers quarterback, you get the idea that even if they just read gas meters for a living, they'd still grab and snatch at every spare moment to write books in the basement (King) or play ball in the vacant lot (Favre). It's not just something they do -- it's who they are.
That manic creative energy, that headlong nonstop verve, makes "Cell" a marvel. Stamped with all the standard King trademarks -- gunk, gore, dumb puns, belches, flatulence, and a spray of brand names to give it that kick of cultural verisimilitude -- it transcends most of King's previous novels.
It's about zombies. And, it's about how cell phones -- the "devil's intercoms" -- are not only nuisances, but also quite possibly harbingers of the world's end.
Many topics covered
'Yet it's also about lots of other things: parenting, loyalty, the roots of violence, the perils of technology unmediated by courtesy or common sense. It asks questions: What does it mean to be human? When catastrophe strikes, is our chief responsibility to our absent families or to the strangers by whom we happen to be surrounded at the time ?
But first things first: Those zombies.
They are, as you'd expect from King, deliciously loathsome and repugnant. They move in that slow, shuffling, relentless way that zombies are wont to move, with dead eyes and empty souls. They'd rip your heart out as soon as look at you, and, when they get the munchies, tend to chew on necks and make a hasty meal out of spilled intestines. They possess "a kind of haunted avidity," in King's gorgeous phrase, and they exhibit not-so-gorgeous features: "torn ears, bruises, burns, scorched skin and hanging wads of blackened flesh." Yum.
What creates them is a mysterious signal emitted from cell phone towers. Everybody who is talking on a cell at the time of The Pulse -- that's what King calls it -- sheds any vestige of humanity and starts twitching, running around, barking and howling, taking slobbery bites out of passers-by.
Spared from this destructive mayhem is Clay Riddell, a nice-guy graphic novelist who doesn't own a cell phone and who's just made his first big sale to a Boston publisher. He's feeling good about things. His personal life is a bit iffy -- he and his wife are separated, and he misses his young son, Johnny -- but he's pretty sure he can get his life back on track.
Cursed cell phones
Then the world disintegrates, thanks to those infernal cell phones that seem clapped to every ear in sight. Clay and a couple of other unafflicted folks -- gentle Tom and spunky teen Alice -- head north, trying to escape the nightmare .
As the plot unspools from the big weird ball of yarn taking up most of the space in King's head, the trio happens upon good guys and bad, upon scenes of horrific destruction and eerie peace.
Admittedly, things get a bit tedious, even amid explosions, fireballs and zombie breath on the backs of their necks. But then, with his exquisite and unerring knack for just what it takes to keep readers sublimely hooked, King knocks off a character when you least expect it. The moment is profoundly shocking, and then the shock wears away to a kind of disbelief, disbelief to awe, awe to sadness, then you realize you're at the mercy of a master storyteller.
To say more about the plot would be diabolically unsporting, but this much can be revealed: "Cell" includes some of King's most beautiful writing and affecting characterizations.
Descriptions
To be sure, "Cell" features gallons of blood, buckets of gore, gobs of guts strewn savagely about.
King often seems to take a 10-year-old's glee in being gross. But that's part of his frenetic charm. If you told him he had to sit up straight and dress up nice and toe the line -- "No boogers, Stephen, and absolutely no burps!" -- you'd end up with a classier novel but a lesser work. Jane Austen, he's not.
Austen, though, never gave us zombies that open their mouths and out comes cheesy recorded music -- a classic King touch. Zombies that not only maim and maul, but that have exceptionally bad taste.
Cell phones may be ruining the planet, as King's novel implies, but if you want to talk real catastrophe -- well, just imagine a soccer-field full of zombies and the monstrous musical stylings of Debby Boone's "You Light Up My Life.".