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Stephen King is pretty much critic-proof. He's written so many bestselling books that life is too short to keep count; and so many of these have been turned into blockbuster films that, again, life really is too fleeting to toy with figures. He's gigantically rich; he's a legend; he's the grand master of scary. What would airport bookshops do without him?
King has, in the past, described himself as "the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries"; he's also said, "I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami". Yet critics have begun to talk about his work in more exalted terms. So who's right? Is he a junk writer or an underrated prose-meister?
In Cell, there's no doubting King has managed to put one word after another to create 397-and-a-bit pages of apocalyptic fantasy about a world in which an electronic pulse,
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Critics may lend him an air of gravitas, but can Stephen King write, asks tim auld
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sent through the mobile phone network, has created a horde of brainwashed zombies. You can't fault him for application. But you can fault him for skill.
Cell contains some of the most naive, leaden, cliched (someone actually says, "I'm beginning to get a bad feeling about this"), and bizarrely unedited prose you might ever have the misfortune to read. Consider this: "If it had been a fart, it would have been the kind that comes out sounding like a party-horn blown by a kid with asthma." But seeing as it wasn't a fart, what was it like? Who actually knows, or cares?
It's not all awful. King can construct a story and doesn't tick all the predictable Hollywood boxes, but Jack Nicholson's not going to win any plaudits if he's cast in this one. In all honesty, the most frightening thing about Cell is the homicidal photo of King on the dust cover. 
FIRST
POSTED FEBRUARY 27, 2006
More fiction: The Eagle’s Throne
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