"Cell" by Stephen King - anti gun or just stupid?

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cheap shots...

I'm reading ZOMBIE fiction so I can obviously accept non-realism; that wasn't my original point. Why do the stereotypes we're painted with always seem to be negative?

Do we all own "OPEC-friendly SUV's" and not care about the environment?
Do we all drag our knuckles on the ground and sound like Sly Stallone because we like guns?
Are we inclined to seek out and acquire magical "cop killer bullets"?
Is every Kalashnikov we own a "machine gun"?

Hell no, and I resent the closed-minded assumption! I regret that some people will read this (or watch the evening news for that matter) and think all this crap is true!

I wasn't so much bothered by the technical inaccuracies (swing out barrel, safety on a revolver, assuming that if you have a gun with Russian markings on it then any box of ammo with Russian markings on it will be the right kind to use in that gun...) as the passive-aggressive cheap shots he worked in that seemed entirely unnecessary to further the story. Our society has come about on a lot of issues and outwardly rejected some stereotypes like sexism, homophobia, and racism. Others stereotypes ("fat people", "gun nuts", "red necks", etc.) still seem to be fair game in the media.

You'd think we'd get fair treatment seeing as how we've got all the guns and aren't afraid to use them! ;)
 
Stephen King does some really great work. His grandest story, The Dark Tower series, almost completely revolves around guns and the ability of the story's heros to use them.
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I loved the first four of those books, but the rest are not worth reading.

The best scene ever was when Roland walks into the New York gun store in our universe, and is amazed by the vast ammunition riches before him. 50 rounds per box! Brass cases shining new! Never reloaded! That scene makes me want to get into reloading :D
 
I'm sure that "4.5" Colt" was just a misprint, and he meant "4.25 Colt".
Probably a Combat Commander.
I used to find Stephen King unreadable back when he wasn't Big Stuff.
Now that everybody knows the truth, I don't have to bother throwing the books out because I don't get them in the first place anymore.
 
I envy anyone who can overlook that kind of frothing nonsense in a major novel.
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Meh, most works of fiction have fairly far-fetched plots to begin with. Sure, errors do detract from the work, but at the same time, I only use mass market paperbacks as cheap escapism and a way to let my imagination spin its gears for a bit. Accurate rendition is better, but like I said above, some books that are very accurate with firearms tend to include too much detail and thus bog things down a bit (Unintended Consequences can do this from time to time).

If you can accept space aliens, zombies, monsters, or whatever else, you've already suspended belief to the point where inaccurate details of certain things can be easily overlooked. It just depends on what the point of the book is; if it revolves around guns, then it should be more accurate, but if they are nothing more than props (as they are used in most King books), I can live with errors.
 
Cell was not my favorite, by any means, but from what I understand, it was written with some homage towards George A. Romero's zombie movies. Those who have seen the movies will recall that they never really explained the cause of the zombies there either, and they really didn't have much in the way of endings.

Still, I can't excuse King's lack of knowledge regarding firearms. He urges aspiring writers to always read in order to write better. I really liked the Dark Tower series, which dealt a great deal with the guns and showed them in a fairly positive light. However, he made quite a few factual errors, notably that the characters now and then "fanned the trigger" and the single action cowboy style revolvers had swing-out cylinders, and the main character used .45 Winchester ammunition, but when faced with someone using a .357 noticed that the revolver looked huge and the hole at the end cavernous. Uh, compared to his .45s?

Yeah, I like King's older stuff, but his writing about firearms makes me cringe.
 
You can read the book if you want and make up your own mind. My gripe is that King on one hand is giving the impression of how bad guns are and how much damage they do to people,
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There are two reasons King did this. Not that either are right but it explains why he painted guns like this.

1. It is always more entertaining to exaggerate or mock people or issues in a fiction novel.

2. King wrote two short stories in the 70's, "Rage" and "Cain Rose Up" both of which depict students going on shooting sprees. King felt guilty about this and thus, "Cell" was written in that context.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_Rose_Up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(novel)

One is about a college student who goes on a sniper rampage from his dorm window out of frustration. And the other is about a high school student "who snaps" due to bullying.

Later, some real school shootings were linked to these books (the shooters had read the stories, etc). King felt immensely guilty about it. This is the reason he isn't writing a pro-gun fantasy story, plain and simple.
 
it was written with some homage towards George A. Romero's zombie movies.
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All the more reason to get the gun facts straight. Romero's zombie flicks are characterized by pretty realistic firearms and solid gunplay. Remember the Savage 99 from the original "Dawn"? Even the homage to "Dawn of the Dead" from 2005 did a good job on that score. The horror is made more effective because the enviroment and props are realistic.
 
Yeah, Rage hasn't been published in years and years because he felt badly about it. You can still find copies on ebay though. It's an interesting story really.

Personally, I am a HUGE King fan in general. I love his stories, I have an entire bookcase dedicated to his books. He's not very accurate with his guns, yes we all know. Honestly I don't think it's a big deal. I am a huge car enthusiast too, and I cringe a little when authors (or directors, etc) make car model/engine/whatever mistakes but I don't let it bother me. Whenever you are an enthusiast in a certain area, any minor mistake is going to jump out at you. No author or director is going to be a bona fide expert in all possible fields and so you have to expect errors like this.

Personally, I find the authors who try to "brag" about their knowledge even more annoying. This has already been covered in a post before this and I agree completely.

Sit back, enjoy the ride, and suppress your inner nitpicker and you'll live a lot longer :p

Dope
 
I've never understood why King is so popular.

It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to learn something about firearms, I think that persistently writing ignorant things is to establish his bona fides as a non-gun person.

No writer today could get away with blatant bigotry against women, or blacks, but when gun owners are portrayed as retarded knuckle draggers, it is supposed to be "cute".

It's still supposed to be cute when the REAL protaganists (who are too "civilized to own firearms, themselves) make use of the "knuckledragger's" weapons against the monsters, or zombies.

--Travis--
 
If you want accuracy go to a technical journal, King is a writer of escape literature no more and no less. "The Stand" did not follow Revalations either, but it's a fiction story. Expecting true facts from a fiction hack is much akin to expecting a woman that connot control her husband to be able to run a country - contridiction in terms.

Selena
 
I know doctors who cant stand medical stuff in books.
I know nerds who can't stand computer stuff in books.

You people need to realize that not EVERYONE shares your hobby or knowledge. To fault King as a writer for being inaccurate with firearms is ridiculous, especially considering how minor your complaints are.

I have read every one of King's books except for Firestarter and Christine and I can tell you more often than not firearms are used as a force of positiveness in his work. The Dark Tower, his magnum opus, is entirely CENTERED around guns, and the people who use them for good.

And King putting in one "gun-nut" household does NOT make him a perpetrator of that stereotype. He's written nearly forty novels with hundreds of characters, and only ONE has a stereotypical "gun-nut" in it.

I for one am enormously grateful that SK does not waste his time researching guns just so he can satisfy the experts in the field; if he did that he wouldn't have time for a little thing called STORY, which is the whole reason people even open the book.

And to those of you have said SK will be forgotten- I can only laugh.

Yeah...he is only the bestselling novelist of all time...who wrote the second greatest book on writing of all time...who is more recognizable than a lot of well-paid actors...and who wrote the story behind the film currently ranked at IMDB as number 2 among the best films EVER, second only to The Godfather.

But then again he put a safety on a revolver, so I guess he'll be forgotten within a decade of his death, never to be remembered...in favor of such geniuses as Tom Clancy.
 
Those passages, in addition to being incorrect, were clumsy and poorly constructed, I thought. Just bad writing.

No offense, Stephen.
 
I enjoy most of Kings books. I like his non-fiction stuff a lot, he seems like an interesting guy. I read Cell and like I said before, I didn't find the passages to be all that negative. He makes it clear that the family is not evil or bad just for owning guns. Their fate is more tragic. And being accurate on gun stuff is not his mission.

I liked Cell, but I found the continued operation of the cell phones after the collapse of civilisation to be harder to swallow than any gun inaccuracies. Although he fanwanks it at the end. :)
 
I stopped reading King long ago when he just got silly and ridiculous. It was ok when I was a teenage boy with no hard core beliefs. Now, I realize his writing is pretty juvenile. I know I've seen him speak positively for gun control in an interview because I remember thinking how happy I was that I quit reading his junk. I've looked pretty hard but can't find the quote or video. I'll keep looking.
 
I love Stephen King. Always have. Is he 100% accurate in his writings? I doubt it, even on more than gun related stuff. I don't care though... I don't read it for factual stuff.

I'm a computer guy, and I can tell you, 90% of "hacking" movies and books are not even close to the truth... nothing I've seen or read anyway. But if people made a movie, with real coding going on, instead of all the fancy graphical special effects, no one would watch it. It's not exciting to a bystander! :)

Read it for fun.. but don't nitpick it to death where you don't get enjoyment out of it...
 
Stephen King is very anti-guns.

I've seen him interviewed on teeeveeee and he's stated his extreme left wing prejudice against firearms and firearms owners.

(Interestingly enough, it was a drunk driver who ran over him, severely injuring him, injuries from which he has not fully recovered ... but he doesn't condemn booze, nor does he call for it to be "confiscated." Just another left wing hypocrite.)

L.W.

L.W.
 
I haven't read the book so i don't know all the dirty details.

It can't be as bad as a James Patterson book called Jack And Jill. The cops would go on alert and grab their Glock revolvers.

Or a Dean Koontz book where the cop had fired his 45 revolver 5 times because the empties were ejected on the floor. A later edition of the book had the gun changed to an automatic.

The best one was another Dean Koontz book were the good guy (a woman) had a full auto rifle with a custom mag that held FOUR HUNDRED ROUNDS. I think it was an AK. Can you imagine how stout the spring would be to feed the weight of that many rounds. Good grief, don't these people have any friends that own guns that they can quiz.
 
Yeah, DT series is a favorite of mine, so I overlooked the SA .45 colts with swing-out cylinders (which is why he can load them faster than us mere mortals with the rolling cylinders), but I only recall that mistake once or twice. Eventually, he moves to "rolls the cylinder" instead of "rolls out the cylinder" Of course, his argument for those would then be "they aren't from the real world, but from Roland's world, which were but copies from the ones brought back by Arthur Eld, which were supposedly colt peacemakers. So perhaps they modified them to swing the cylinders out? The other one that made me raise an eyebrow was Jake's father's gun- the .44 automatic.

James Patterson bothers me more, actually. I've read/listened to a few of his Women's murder club books, and the lead detective carries one side arm and sometimes a backup. The main weapon is simultaneous (throughout the book and Glock, a revolver, and a glock with a safety, and a revolver with a safety. Oy!
 
It sounds like The Cell is written in the "Third Person Limited Omniscient," which is how I do most of my writing. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia:

While an omniscient point of view can change viewpoint characters instantly, the limited omniscient point of view narrative limits narration to what can be known, seen, thought, or judged from a single character's perspective. Thus, the narration is limited in the same way a first-person narrative might be, but the text is written from the third-person perspective.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_limited_omniscient

The narrator may simply be relaying the underlying biases of the character who is interacting with these firearms. Activating the safety on the revolver may be an extension of the character's ignorance, or perhaps an inside joke that fell flat.

I've only read King's Dreamcatcher, so I can't comment on the rest of his work directly. I did enjoy that novel, FWIW.
 
It's fiction. If there can be cellphone induced zombies, then there can be colt .45 revolvers with safeties on them.
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I've seen this excuse used before, and I don't buy it. It is the author's job to create the world. He can create what he wants, but it is also his job to inform the readers of the rules of his world. If he wants it to be the real world +/- a few key details, well then he needs to get his real world facts right.

Otherwise you run into too many scenarios where any author can just invent magic to get his hero out of any scene. You want zombies cause by cellphones? sure. However, you have the hero outrun the motorcycle the biker thugs are casing him with because he was a highschool track star? Well, at least you better introduce that superpower beforehand, or allow the hero to be astounded by his own feat, or something. Even within his own created world, the author must be consistant. The audience/reader will never be able to be in suspension if the author is constantly deviating from the real world because the audience will never know when the character is really screwed or when some fictional power or device will allow him to easily escape.

Science fiction frequently has this problem, it is one of the reasons sci-fi never really gets as gritty or as horror filled. Look at all the times in Star Trek when there is some problem beaming people from place to place. Then some guy mumbles some stuff and wiggles some things around and poof, back to normal.

Even in a world with zombies, I expect a person burried alive to run out of air and die. Sure, in a world with cell phone created zombies, the author is in his rights to do anyhting he wants, but it is my real world understanding of the limited time a person can survive in a tiny closed space that gives the scene it's drama. If the person is able to live indefinately without oxygen, that sucks any dramatic potential out of the scene. If you don't know when the author is going to throw in a silly new rule, ALL dramatic scenes lose their potency
 
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