Coffee, café conversation and all that “undead” paranoia

“I’ve read that one,” the stranger told me from the next table. “It’s a cool book.”

The book I had with me was Cell, by Stephen King. I’d just reached the end of the book and was setting my mind to finishing my black coffee and working on some book notes while I had a second cup.

“What did you think of the story?” I asked and that was all the invitation Todd and his girlfriend, Annalese, needed to leave their table and join me on mine. I welcomed the unexpected company and interruption because I had time to kill and I love talking books and movies anyway. They were both in their early-thirties, optimistic, happy with themselves and their place in the world and loved the arts, making me warm to them straight away.

I liked the variation on the zombie-infected-crazies theme: a frequency transmitted via cell phones that would affect the brain in such a way that it would reboot it, like a computer program, and send it back to its base-instinct. In this case, being murder! With this story, King revisited some of the apocalyptic themes he covered in The Stand. The chaos of the population tearing each other apart when the “pulse” first zaps those with a cell phone to their ear is well described.

For the most part, this story is believable … sort of. The controversy and fears about cell phone signals frying brains with radiation and the same being sent out by the signal booster masts has been well-documented. But what let it all down for me was the part in the story where the “phoners” levitate along the side of the road, in single-file, and float over the tops of the trees. That gave me a laugh-out-loud moment I’m sure King didn’t intend and killed the momentum of the story for me.

Talking about Cell led us to compare it with other stories of the genre: Romero’s Dead series of zombie movies and a nod to Romero’s The Crazies (1973) … more recent movies like 28 Days Later and the sequel 28 Weeks Later, and others … how the genre now seems to be done to un-death and if there could possibly be anywhere left for it to go from here.

Cell is an enjoyable enough read, but nowhere near the best of what King has produced. Over the course of his writing career, King seems to have been aiming to cover every category in the horror genre: ghosts and an axe-wielding maniac in The Shining ... psychics in Carrie, The Dead Zone and Firestarter ... werewolves in Silver Bullet ... vampires in Salem’s Lot ... invading aliens in The Tommyknockers ... the end of the world by plague in The Stand ... nature turning on man with a vengeance in Cujo ... machines turning on man with a vengeance in Christine and in his short story Trucks, which he later directed himself as the movie Maximum Overdrive. It was later filmed again as Trucks in 1997, by Chris Thomson. King's homage to The Lord of the Rings was his Dark Tower series and Cell is obviously his own take on the zombie-infected-crazies genre.

Overall, I wasn't disappointed with Cell, apart from the levitating bit, and I'm looking forward to the forthcoming movie adaptation. I just hope they don't include the levitating bit.

We talked for over an hour. When the time came for Todd and Annalese to leave, they gathered up their things and we shook hands and wished each other well. Then something happened that made us all laugh: my cell phone rang in my coat pocket.

YIKES!

I held my phone out to Todd, asked him if he would answer it for me and warned Annalese that she may want to step away from him when he took the call.

Todd shook his head firmly and refused to take the phone from me.

It was a funny moment that I think we’ll always remember when our cell phones ring and we tense a little before taking the call.

When they'd reached minimum safe distance, I answered the call … and guess what … it was a damned telemarketer who refused to tell me how he’d got my number.

Annoyed, I refused to answer any of his questions, told him to remove my number from his call list and then hung up on him!

Maybe I’ve read Stephen King's Cell wrong and missed an important plot point … maybe it’s actually the telemarketers and not the “pulse” that sent them all crazy.