Writing shows maturity, but novel loses its way

BY TED ANTHONY
ASSOCIATED PRESS
For most of his career, Stephen King has written two types of scary novels.
One kind ("The Stand," "It" ) is all over the map -- literally and literarily -- and features the perspectives of multiple characters bringing an epic story together for a multifaceted climax.
The other ("Misery," "Rose Madder") is taut, tense and personal, the novelistic equivalent of claustrophobia.
Sometimes King exhibits elements of both ("Christine," "The Shining"), but usually it's one or the other.
That's why "Cell" is such an unusual entry in the King canon.
With "Cell," King demonstrates a more mature kind of writing that, for him, is oddly muted. It still exhibits the best characteristics of his prose -- adept manipulation of the reader's emotions, deft pop-culture references, dead-on replication of the cadence of human conversation -- but manages to avoid his two customary pitfalls of flabbiness and overwriting.
An evolution
In a novel that's about the evolution of the human being -- reverse evolution, really -- King's writing has clearly evolved to the next level.
At first, "Cell" feels topical, like "The Stand" but with consumer electronics instead of a global pandemic. The world as we know it begins to fall apart on the first page as Clay Riddell, a graphic novelist from Maine, sees his fellow pedestrians suddenly go crazy and tear each other apart.
Clay realizes all the people affected were using cell phones -- which includes just about everyone. It seems something unknown -- "the Pulse," they dub it -- has come through the signal and did something to people. It wiped out their humanity and revealed something primitive and primeval. That's what makes it interesting.
To King's credit, he never reveals who's responsible for the Pulse. It doesn't really matter. "Cell" isn't about how it all happened; it's about the small group of people King has chosen and how they cope. The disaster is epic, but the tale is personal.
As they realize the world has changed and zombies walk the Earth -- the hard drives of their brains wiped -- Clay and the small group of "normals" head north on foot to Maine, where Clay is determined to save his son. The lack of communication -- they can't use cell phones -- adds to the claustrophobia.
Paying homage
This is King's latter-day homage not only to apocalypse movies ("The Omega Man," "The Last Man on Earth") but to friend George Romero, director of "Night of the Living Dead" and its sequels. But these zombies emerge during the day and rest at night -- a reversal of the movie convention --that allows for scenes of ruined humans shambling against gentle afternoon light.
The novel's second half, while never shifting perspective from Clay, is as much about geography as about people. Like "The Stand," it turns into A Quest Across Our Land. But while the Superflu refugees in "The Stand" headed west -- toward the frontier, the future -- these guys head deeper into New England, the forest, the primitive. Optimism is in short supply.
Faltering
This is where King ultimately falters. "Cell" loses its way about two-thirds through. We start realizing that not only will there be no coherent resolution, but the solutions devised by the "normals" we're supposed to care about are, at best, pedestrian.
Sure, people coping with mass destruction and uncertain futures aren't pondering the finer points of intellectual discourse, but it would have been nice to have a bit of a sense of destiny infused into the narrative. In the end, while we feel affection for the humans we're following, they become only two-dimensional.
All the mature writing in the world can't make up for that. King's a master of characterization for sure, but it's unclear what happened here. Characters die or exit stage right, and Clay -- who seemed so interesting for so long -- is reduced to little more than a narrator whose obsessive quest to find his son nudges the tale forward.
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