Now Reading: Stephen King's "Cell"

(certified spoiler-free post)

Let me begin by saying that I love the Dark Tower books. In fact, the series has been my lunch hour reading material at the bookstore for some weeks now, and I'm about 300 pages from finishing my second trip through the entire series from beginning to end (the first one was when book 7 originally came out). I'm happy with the way it all ended, sad about what happened to some people along the way, and ecstatic about the forthcoming Marvel comic books. Roland of Gilead's tale is one of my favorite fantasy masterpieces ever, right up there with the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings and Tad Williams' Otherland.

That being said, sometimes I miss the old Stephen King, back when he used to actually write horror (many people still think of him as a horror novelist, but he's been a lot more eclectic than that for quite a while now) and when every book didn't tie into the Dark Tower in one way or another. So I've really been looking forward to Cell, which amazon has been billing for months as "Stephen King's triumphant, blood-spattered return to the genre that made him famous." I finally started it this morning - and Stevie, it's good to have ya back. He dives into his take on the zombie story with unrestrained glee, tossing aside his usual elaborate characterizations (although they're still there in part, you just pick them up on the fly instead of spending the first quarter of the book immersing yourself in them) for an in-your-face attack on the senses that starts not five pages in. I'm currently about a third of the way through it, and while it's no masterpiece of the horror genre, neither is every movie "Citizen Kane" - nor would you want them to be. Sometimes it's more fun to sit down with a big box of popcorn and watch "Armageddon." Or "Night of the Living Dead." ^_^