Poor Steven King gets a lot of flack these days. Seems you can't open a magazine or watch a sitcom without hearing one joke or another concerning his newest and latest offerings to the literary world. After all once you've made it onto Family Guy with a skit about a scary lamp it might be time to re-charge the creative juices. After reading Duma Key, I kind of agreed. That book was rough- to say the least. The disappointment I felt at the end was rivaled only by the disappointment I felt on my wedding night after discovering my new husband spent the day at the strip club prior to the wedding. See, I have a large capacity for horror.
Cell, now cell was an entirely different story. Cell was a fantastic, amazing, utterly terrifying, gory, brilliant, scary, scary, scary return to the horror market. I haven't been this freaked out by a book since I was thirteen and finished Salem's Lot at 2:00 in the morning. I didn't sleep for 36 hours after.
Cell should be bought and placed on a special shelf- that top shelf houses the other scariest books of all time. A partial list would include:
- Swan Song by Robert R McCammon
- The Stand by Stephen King
- Thinner by Stephen King
- The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson
- Salem's Lot by Stephen King
- anything by Clive Barker
- The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
On a bright sunny morning, people are moving through their lives with utter normalcy and then the cell phone rings. Instantly chaos erupts, those who don't die immediately are stripped of their humanity, their consciousness, all that is left is the most basic of functions, the id. With a ferociousness only rivaled by 28 days later, Stephen King paints a bloody, horrific picture of what could happen. Few escape the call into madness -one of which is Clayton Riddell, an illustrator from Maine, who was visiting Boston when the nightmare hits. He struggles to return to his young son, Johnny-Gee, unsure of what he will find. Clayton bands together with other survivors to get to his son.
I have one recommendation for you- dear reader. Take my advice. do not pick up this story on audio thinking it will be a good way to kill a few hours on your ride into San Francisco. It will forever ruin San Francisco for you. Do not listen to this story with your two teenagers in the car. As a matter of fact do not listen to this story at all. Read it- that way you can skip some of the more horrific, gory scenes. It's never good to plugging your ears on the expressway, the other driver's frown on it.
Most of all- read it. Stephen King can still reach deep inside to that place in your soul scared of the monster under the bed and torture it just a little.
1 comments:
There's not many people I know that have read Swan Song, which is a brilliant book. I keep buying it and giving it to others to read! I thought The Cell was an excellent read. I'm looking forward to King's new book Under the Dome.
It seems whenever King writes stories that take place in Florida, they are never as good as the ones that take place in Maine. His short stories in Just After Sunset weren't very good.
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