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I’ve been thinking about my recent experiment: “Reading” Stephen King’s Cell via audiobook, my first audio novel and first King book in decades.

Cell is King’s apocalyptic story about a strange “pulse” that hits one October morning through every cell phone in use at that moment. Cell users become crazed semi-zombie-like killers before slowly calming down and organizing themselves — “flocking” like birds, as the non-cell phone users notice — and the reason for the behavior of the “flocks” is slowly revealed. A band of the still normal survivors heads north from Boston, providing the main narrative drive. The de facto leader of the group is a young father seeking his son.

This is the main theme of the book: the father/son dynamic, the fear of loss, etc. But King has been grinding away at this for decades now. I’d not read a Stephen King book in over 20 years so it was something of a shock to read a book that, quite literally, he could have written word for word 25 years ago (if not for the lack of ubiquitous cell phones back then). What’s disheartening is that, years later, King’s got nothing to add to what he’s already done in this vein.

And despite the rather obvious fact that he’s never been a great stylist (though a sometimes powerful storyteller), his “style” such as it is has not changed one wit. It gets a little tiresome to have story, character, and motive so often delineated by references to movies, TV shows, ad slogans, etc. I understand that the detritus of pop culture is full of common points of reference, but as the primary tool for novel writing is feels lazy, or bespeaks a limited talent. (I understand he also writes more “literary” efforts these days, like the recent Lisey’s Story, but I’m in no hurry to find out if that’s accurate.)

Cell also borrows liberally from earlier King efforts. The Stand comes to mind, with its post-apocalyptic setting, migrating survivors, strange dreams, and broadcast calls to the bad/evil forces who seem to outnumber the good. The parent-child relationship with the parents’ fear of fucking up, perhaps even so far as to cause the death of their child, is most convincingly represented in King’s best novel, The Shining, but it also reverberates endlessly through his other novels, sometimes as background yet often in the foreground, as with Cell.

Not that the audiobook was a chore to finish; it moved along quickly enough as read by actor Campbell Scott, who did a pretty good job differentiating the various characters.

Yet the audiobook itself is an odd animal. I’m in no hurry to experience that again, either. Surely personal taste will vary but it was for me far, far less involving than directly reading a book. Not only was I being read to, the book was in a real sense being “acted out.” I did not feel as though I was reading Stephen King’s latest book — at least not in the moment. Of course, I understood that I was but on the fly it was a different and less satisfying experience than reading. I was not lost in the story as I normally become.

Perhaps Cell was the perfect vehicle for this experiment. King wrote an obvious cautionary tale about the loss of human connectivity — connection without mediation — in a world in which we are said to be, at least in all those TV ads for phone plans and internet connections, more connected than ever. King’s revenge on cell users in the story may seem like poetic justice to one who hates the devices (though King has never been what I’d call poetic).

Still, the extra level of mediation experienced in an audiobook was almost perfect for this one novel. It added unnecessary distance to an ordinary book.