I finished it last night. My impression? It wasn’t as good as some of his earlier works, but it certainly was better than some of the glurge he’s published in the last few years. (Dreamcatcher, and Bag of Bones.)
All in all, it felt too short. There could have been more character development, more stories of what happened to other survivors, and of course:
What actually caused the Pulse. All we got was vague speculation that it may have been “terrorists”. In The Stand we knew what had happened, even if the characters didn’t.
Secondly, I was unhappy with the ending.
[spoiler] Okay, I guess I just hate cliff-hangers. They feel cheap. What was wrong with his son? Was the boy just suffering from normal shock at what had happened? If so, dad really screwed the pooch with his impatient solution of having the kid listen to the Pulse in hopes it would make him a little better.
Too many mysteries were left haging. The demise of the guy in the Harvard shirt just felt like a rip-off, since we didn’t discover why he became the leader of the crazies, nor, really what his plan was.[/spoiler]
I also objected to some re-used plot devices:
Shared dreams again? I kept expecting a magical retarded person a la Tom M-O-O-N to show up.
I think you’re just ahead of the curve, Lissa. I only learned it existed two days ago, but plan to read it ASAP. Then I’ll participate in this thread and do you proud!
I’m picking it up today and was planning to save it for my honeymoon trip in a couple of weeks…ah, who am I kidding? I’ll be back in a day or two. And bless you for boxing the spoilers!
I read the spoilers. I’m okay with them. I’m more interested in checking out King’s style, to see if Cell was written by “the old King”, like some have said. As long as he doesn’t whine about writer’s block, I’ll probably like it.
I started it last night and I’m not loving it but I’ve only read about 60 pages. It seems choppy – more than once I paged back to see if I missed some text. The characters have not exactly popped off the page, either. It’s early yet. I’ll give it 50 more pages.
Yes, I think it will be best for me to read Cell before the trip. There’s no need for my husband to find out so quickly that I actually belong to my books far more than I could ever belong to him…
(If you’re reading this, dear, that was just a little joke, didn’t really mean it, we always joke like that around here, etc.)
I get the impression that Cell is just a novel that King had in the can, and that his “real” new novel is Lisey’s Story, coming out later this year. From what I’ve heard of Lisey’s, it’s a more typical King novel rather than the bite-bite action-fest that Cell is.
My favorite character in the book was The Head. You’ll meet him a bit later on.
When we first met him in the book, I was worried there’d be a creepy molestation vibe, but I was wrong. (I like it when I’m wrong about a character!) His intended sacrifice was probably the most touching moment in the book. Poor Jordan, though, was nothing more than a cardboard cutout of a character, which is a shame, because he could have been so much more.
I also found myself a bit fond of the hotel clerk.
At first, I thought he was going to be a charicature, not a character-- you know, the people in books whose job it is to be an asshole-foil. But he turned out to be an okay guy, something you don’t often see in characters who appear as briefly as he does. I was sort of hoping he’d tag along with Clay, Tom and Alice. (I had visions of him objecting when they would loot a store, or something-- a guy who wants to act civilized when civilization is gone.) I was actually a bit bummed when Mr. Ricardi hanged himself.
I was also hoping we’d see more of “Holy Hannah.”
That would have been a neat subplot-- what do the religious nuts who have been eagerly anticipating the Apocolypse do when it comes, and oh shit, they find that they’ve been Left Behind?
One of the saddest scenes was:
When Clay discovers what happened to Mrs. Nickerson, who shot herself after killing her insane daughter. For some reason, this scene really struck a chord in me.
I’m intrigued. I’ll keep going, but Lisey’s Story sounds like the book I want to read. Scribners (I think) is calling it his bestest book ever: literary, multi-layered, ambitious and blah, blah, blah.
You can read the first two chapters on-line at Entertainment Weekly
I’ll probably go get it tomorrow.
I have a question for King fans. It seems I’ve missed a few offerings. I’m not sure how, but I have.
A non-fiction from 1993: Head Down
A collection from 1997: Six Stories
A serialized novel from 2000: The Plant
A novel from 2005: The Colorado Kid
I googled them and the only one that had anything current was the last one. Does any one have some insight about them?
Head Down was a ste-by-step recounting of a kids’ baseball game, which I personally found very uninteresting.
The story was never finished, and what parts were published are no longer available for download, though you may be able to find print-outs for sale on Ebay. It was an experiment of King’s. He put each part online, asking people to pay on the honor system. His faith in humanity amazes me.
Apparently, it didn’t work out. Initially, the response was good, but I guess payments tapered off, so he abandoned the project.
I finished it yesterday. I thought it was good, not great and way better than the last few books, like Lissa. It had an vintage King feel to it, which was nice. I definitely enjoyed it though-I stayed up to 3 AM to finish it.
Although it was a very touching scene, I didn’t understand why
Alice had to die. What was the point? Her death ended up meaning very little and was just used as a plot device to enable “Harvard Man” to sic his zombies on the little punks who had killed her.
About Clay’s son:
I’m pretty sure he got Pulsed. Remember, Clay had the dream of the Normies being lined up and given cell phones and his son was in the line with them. He also acted like a Phonie, albeit one in which the program was breaking down. I liked the idea of the Phonies possibly being “rebooted”, although I don’t understand why Clay didn’t try the cell phone experiment out on some random Phonie before he tried it on his son. I think that’s what I would have done.
Something I absolutely did not understand:
I have no idea why the Phonies were calling Clay’s group to them. Was it to use them as an example and execute them in front of all the Phonies? But what would be the point? The Phonies were beyond caring by then. Why didn’t “Harvard” just have them killed on the spot after they torched the flock on the football field?
Stuff I liked:
[spoiler]The detailed descriptions of the Phonies-when they were marching up and down the roads and also later on, when some of them started to “wake up” and act a little more human. I thought the idea of being half-Pulsed, like the girl Dark Pixie, is completely horrifying. “Who am I? Who are you?”
I also loved Tom. His goodbye to his cat was almost the saddest scene in the book for me.[/spoiler]
Six Stories was a limited edition, rare and expensive, but the stories were reprinted later in the Everything’s Eventual collection, which is easy to find.
Just finished the book. Not bad, fast paced and fun all the way through. Maybe it was too fast paced. As usual, I loved the characters, but I think King could have gone into more detail with them. And I also want to know
what caused the Pulse. I was half-expecting (read: wanted) the main characters to run into some guys from the Shop and find out they were behind it. The Shop was great in Firestarter. I want to see more of them.
There was one nifty reference I liked:
Notice the ride called “Charlie the Choo-Choo” in the old amusement park? That was great.
Oh, yeah, and the best scene in the book was when
Clay leaves his little band of travelers and is wandering around alone when suddenly he sees finds them waiting for him, standing beside that old school bus.
I admit, I did a little cheer when that happened. King’s really amazing when it comes to making you care about his characters.
[spoiler]Same here. I could handle all the blood and gore, and didn’t even get too upset when Alice died, but thinking about how Tom had to leave poor Rafe behind really got me. I couldn’t help but imagine how wrenching it would be to leave my five cats to fend for themselves in the wild, so I completely understood how Tom felt.
I also liked the fact that King took awhile to get around to coming out and saying that Tom was gay, and how the fact that he was didn’t end up being important in the story. He just was.[/spoiler]
I read the first chapter in the print version of EW and I am hooked. I love it when a normal day goes completely haywire with no immediate explanation. It just does. A King-thing I have always liked!
I haven’t been fired up about one of his books in a long, long time, and I have been a fan since HS (a really long time ago).
Head Down was actually a blow-by-blow of King’s son’s Little League team and their march towards the Maine state championships. I loved it. He is a great writer of the everyday, as well as the extraordinary. But you might have to be a big baseball fan to enjoy it.
I want to read Faithful, his account of the Red Sox championship season, as well. I was just reminded of it when I saw Stewart O’Nan on TV last week.
I stayed up half the night, but I finished it! I think it has a very unfinished feel to it; definitely not one of his better efforts, but I enjoyed it just the same. Tom was the best part of the book for me.
I don’t see the point of Alice’s death either. There were some new characters introduced after that, but they were just names to me.
I also couldn’t help thinking of The Stand the whole time; how much more meaningful and believable it was. Hell, why not just expand The Mist?
The most disturbing part for me was Clay not knowing what had happened to his son for almost the whole book. It made me want to go wake up my son and hold him.
If I were editing this book, I think I’d have told Mr. King to have the Pulse kill people outright and ditch the zombie subplot. “Let’s just have these characters traveling from one place to another in the aftermath. Yeah, that’ll be a good book.”
The photo of King on the back is simultaneously one of his worst and best. He looks so small and old. On the other hand, he’s got a good haircut and the photo catches his admittedly odd face at a good angle. For the first time, I’m finding him kind of hot!
