Enjoy Cell Presented By Stephen King Listed As Softcover

βιβλίο με συνεχή δράση, όχι όμως από τα καλύτερά του.
Το σίγουρο είναι πως με προβλημάτισε. Κλείνοντας το, αναρωτήθηκα.
Αν όντως υπήρχε μια κοινωνία στην οποία κάθε κλήση από κινητό μετέτρεπε τον αποδέκτη σε ζόμπι, τότε τραγούδια όπως Αναπάντητες κλήσεις παντού της Παπαρίζου και Όταν το τηλέφωνο χτυπήσει κανείς δε θα σου απαντήσει της Κωνσταντοπούλου, θα κυκλοφορούσαν με τον τίτλο Τα Απαγορευμνα The most disheartening thing about this book is perhaps the author blurb, It states, "Stephen King does not own a cell phone", A far cry away from his days today of his many politically banal Twitter posts and social media activity, As somebody who does not own a cell phone myself, and hopes to never have one, I once thought that King was a kindred spirit in that regard.
Cell was, of course, written in, before the mainstream release of the iPhone and before cell phones changed in our cultural framework from a want to a "need".
You are by default expected to have a smartphone or at least a flip phone, and if you don't, you are considered to either be pretentious, stupid or both for choosing not to own one, no matter what your reasoning may be.
People will roll their eyes at you as if your personal choices somehow pose a threat or an affront to their very sense of being, which is bizarre in itself, but King presents a scenario that, for its time, is surprisingly innovative: terrorism through universallyadopted technology.
It isn't like this has never been explored before David Cronenberg did it with Videodrome, and we know all too well the power that radio propaganda has had in driving the most racist and hateful genocides but in the case of cell phones, King taps into a device, that, unlike the radio and the CRT television, people who don't own one are looked down upon with scorn.
The peer pressure to own a cell phone blazes brighter today than the proselytizing of any religion or political party, and to not have one is to not be a member of society.


Cell is in many ways not a good book, The characters are often somewhere between painfully annoying or just silly, and the dystopic plot is full of holes, Like most King books, the protagonist is the cynical intellectual writer and/or artist and/or American

who is one of the few nonsheep in a glaringly sheepy society.
I also think that, had King waited just fifteen more years to write Cell, he could have had fertile horror territory beyond belief in the realm of everything from TikTok "stars" to makeupcaked "influencers" and the like, rather than a social commentary on whitecollar citydwellers who mostly own flip phones for work in the earlys.
Somehow the latter simply isn't as insidious, . . readers will find that many of King's minor characters are described wearing corporate garb such as power suits, or listening to elevator music, Two years before theRecession that would leave most of these people unemployed and in some tragic cases even homeless, the reallife fragility of corporate America was far more frightening and disturbing than cell phone ownership, and now that this has shifted to a point at which phones actually are one of the scariest things in our world today, King himself obviously uses one and is unlikely to write any future book that criticizes smartphone ownership to any strong degree beyond perhaps a brief quip here and there.


I would argue that Cell is less about cell phones and more about the hustle of whitecollar America post/, in that period just squeezed in betweenand, roughly speaking.
This was a period where the idealism of the's was longgone and replaced with a malaise and social regression that the cell phone was tailormade for.
In the wake of terrorism, mass death seems not so farfetched, and what better way to convey it than through a digital device that most middleclass Americans use every day That King's brand of zombie has a drive to kill itself or attack and kill others is as strong a metaphor for post/corporate America as there ever was, as fear and doubt and mania and anger replaced prosperity and idealism and imagination.
Those few "normies" who did not buy a cell phone prior to "The Pulse" would today be a rare breed, or may not even exist, seeing as how even if you yourself don't have a phone, somebody directly on your right and on your left in any public place is bound to be tapping away at the damned thing or scrolling through an endless social media feed.
You cannot get away even by virtue of conscientious objection, There are more smartphones in existence today than there are toothbrushes, Unlike computers and regular landline telephones, cell phones have a short lifespan and must consistently be upgraded and replaced, It is highly likely that at some point, there will be more smartphones in existence than the entire global population, I once heard similar statistics about rats, En general me ha parecido un libro bastante entretenido, con un comienzo brutal e impactante, pero con un final que me ha resultado decepcionante, Odličan početak priče, radnja sasvim zadovoljavajuća iako se javlja osećaj već viđenog i onda bezvezan završetak,

Jednog sasvim običnog dana dobar deo ljudi je, na prvi pogled ničim izazvano, potpuno podivljao, Momentalno počinje borba za preživljavanje određen broj ljudi koji deluje kao da je izgubio razum bez problema napada svoje prijatelje, članove porodice pa i kućne ljubimce i hladnokrvno ih ubijaju na najbrutalnije načine.
U svom ovom haosu Klejton Ridel, Tom Mekort i Alis Maksvel se prepoznaju kao "normalni" i uspevaju da se sklone na sigurno, Razmenjujući utiske i zapažanja zaključuju da je novonastalo ludilo povezano sa mobilnim telefonima sve ljude koje su videli da su pogubili razum su u tom trenutku razgovarali preko telefona.


Alis je izgubila sve članove svoje porodice dok Klej strahuje šta se dešava sa njegovim sinom i suprugom, Kao grupa odlučuju da moraju da preduzmu nešto, pa makar to značilo ubijanje onih koji su zaraženi telefonskim ludilom, Od ovog trenutka situacija se samo pogoršava, jer pored neznanja šta se desilo sa njihovim najmilijima, preživeli moraju da se nose sa daljom mutacijom telefonskih zombija.


Od prve rečenice pa do poslednjih pedesetak stranica čitamo nešto stvarno sjajno priča je dinamična od starta, uvlači nas momentalno i za divno čudo, imajući u vidu sklonost Kinga ka skribomaniji, priča zapravo jako brzo teče.
Nema predugačkih digresija i nema vraćanja kroz vreme i slično, Uvođenje novih likova u priču u određenim delovima je odlično tempirano, zaista je jedan ceo niz događaja opisan na visokom nivou i prilično verodostojno što je meni možda i najbitnije.
Ono što se dešava u poslednjih pedesetak stranica je za mene razočaravajuće, Opet je po sredi jedan od zbrzanih krajeva i mislim da sam izgubila strpljenje i razumevanje što se toga tiče, Tačnije, razumevanje samo donekle jer mogu da razumem razloge koji su rezultirali ovakvim raspletom, ali ne mogu više, Takođe počinje da mi smeta nedorečenost određenih detalja koji su ključni za razumevanje priče, a koje King evidentno namerno izostavlja.


Sa druge strane, ono što jeste doprinelo lošoj oceni jeste upravo moja prezasićenost Kingom, Verujem da bi mnogi bez problema dali i najvišu ocenu jer bih je verovatno dala i ja da su okolnosti drugačije, Stephen King does zombies! Well, . . kind of. We'll get to that in a bit,

But first, here's how I think this book came about:

Way back in aught, or just before because Cell was published in ', but who knows with King, am I right But anyway, we've come a long way since that time.
Everyone was getting cell phones and they were just about getting to every last person around, I imagine him having this conversation with, let's say, his son, Joe Hill,

Stephen: "Wow, cell phones have really gotten popular lately, Everyone seems to have one, "

Joe: "Yeah Dad, come on, get with the times already, man, "

Stephen: "Well, at least we'll never get rid of these landlines right Both are VERY necessary, useless joke probably not in King's character, just wanted to make fun of how we used to still had landlines when everyone was switching to cell phones

"But seriously, I am SO sick of people being on their cell phones all the time.
You can't even have an honesttogoodness conversation with a person without someone bombarding you with a call,

"Can't we just have real conversations with human beings anymore Instead, we talk to electronics and let them control everything we do, sacrificing our humanity.


"If only there was a way to put an end to this nonsense, . . I've got it!"

Cell starts out as your basic zombie book, People are going about their normal business when suddenly lots of people start going crazy and attacking other people while a few people escape unscathed for a while until they get attacked.


Well, Stephen King made a couple of changes to the normal zombie mythos I think we can call it mythos now, Here, the zombies are created by a pulse that occurs through cell phones, All the people using their cell phones at the time of the "pulse" as its known throughout the book are immediately changed into what is essentially a zombie.
Those without cell phones or not on them at the time are saved,

It's not exactly clear whether they are or have to be dead or not, some are, but not all, but they all have the same traits, which are pretty zombielike.
They go crazy, they attack people including their own kind, and make survival the number one priority for those who weren't turned,

They are known throughout the book not at zombies, but as "phone crazies, " Boy did I hate that term after a while, It's just so dumb. It's also descriptively appropriate, but meh, Call them walkers, call them phoners even, but "phone crazies" just bugged me to no end,

In addition, the zombies only come out during the day and therefore leave the night to the survivors,

Cell follows Clayton Riddell, a survivor of the pulse who happened to be in Boston at the time of the "pulse, " He lives in you guessed it Maine but he's not a writer, he's a comic artist, completely different, which is where his family is located at the time of the pulse and provides the impetus for Clay and his group of survivors to head north.


I did enjoy this book, but to talk about why I didn't enjoy it enough to even reach thestar threshold, I'm gonna have to get into some spoilers.
These aren't huge, ruinthebook spoilers, just possibly ruin a part of the firstpages/quarter of the book, You've been warned.

/Begin mild spoilers

I could go more into Clay's group because they do play a large role in the novel, but I just don't have the time nor the energy at the moment.
Know they're there and they are some great characters,

The reason I wasn't a huge fan of this particular zombie book is that King almost immediately kills the whole reason I read zombie books.
I read them for the constant suspense and scare that the people we've grown close to are going to get eaten, turned, die, whatever,

King introduces telepathy into the zombie mythos,

While it's an interesting and unique take, I realized toward the end that it pretty much killed this particular zombie novel for me,

Because the zombie apocalypse occurred through the pulse, the phone crazies bleh are connected somehow, they can even communicate in a way telepathically, It begins through large gatherings where they sleep during the night while getting essentially reprogrammed telepathically,

While they are communicating telepathically, they begin to flock just like some types of animals birds in a "v" for instance, While they flock, they don't attack humans, It just stops.

There's more that happens and they do begin to do some much more devious things, but the survivors, and especially our little crew we follow, are essentially immune from the daytoday zombie attack.


Bigger Spoiler, for the novel I Am Legend as well: While I'm still within the spoiler section of my review, I also wanted to add that I totally thought he was going to go I Am Legend with the zombies, making the zombies the new society and the survivors the outcasts.
It seemed to be going there, but didn't in the end,

/end spoilers

I enjoyed this book, it had great characters as expected and a good enough story to keep me enjoying it.
It also had an interesting take on zombies that, while I applaud King for his creativity and boldness, kind of killed the zombie part of this zombie novel.


out ofStars Recommended with reservations,