Satisfactory Resolution

I used to buy every record that Cheap Trick released. I did it at first because I really loved their comic-book version of rock and roll. Then I was buying them out of politeness - a sense of dedication - then obligation. I started to buy them all over again on CD. Then I stopped abruptly. I'm forty-three. I don't have to have their entire catalog to be happy - just the songs I like.
This brings me to my knee-jerk consumer moment of the day. While wandering around Amazon.com this morning I got the news that Stephen King is putting out another book. Let's dispense first with the jokes about just how inevitable a moment the release of a Stephen King novel is: somewhere between rain in Seattle and objects in motion tending to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Stephen King has had a lot of adjectives attached to him, but "sporadic" has never been one of them.
This being said, why would this come as any kind of shock to me? Maybe because he's supposed to be retired. After he got run over by a van a few years back, he told the world that he was winding down his writing career, and was going to take it easy. The world continues to wait for this to happen. I had been buying Stephen King books with the same dogged obedience that I bought Cheap Trick albums. I received the approximate cultural nutrients from them both. I continued to buy new Stephen King books long after I stopped buying Cheap Trick music. I was buying the first edition hardcovers. I've got a shelf full of them that leaves little room for books that don't have zombies, werewolves, evil clowns, aliens and all manner of pshychokinetic children and adults.
I thought I was done a couple of times. Most significantly in 1987, after feeling particularly burned by "The Tommyknockers" and its vague story of alien abduction that never quite found an ending, I swore off King for good. Or so I thought. I tuned into the ABC miniseries of that novel to see if maybe I missed something in my reading. Nope. The TV version was every bit as obtuse and bloated as the book - no resolution. That should have done it, right?
Barnes and Noble has a lovely practice of setting out new hardcover books that aren't selling like the might for about the price of a trade paperback. Among the authors who show up on these tables regularly is Mr. King. I picked up "Dreamcatcher" back in 2001 because it was written during his recuperation after his brush with death. Maybe it was a sympathy purchase. As it turns out, there were all kinds of ways that it reminded me of the things I liked best about his work. It was scary and unsettling, set in a world that started out familiar, then turned abruptly unsettling and then grotesque. Then it just ran out of steam. I kicked myself for falling for the same trick again - even though it was a pretty good trick.
Fast forward to this morning. "Witness Stephen King's triumphant, blood-spattered return to the genre that made him famous." And there I was, salivating with my finger on the "click to pre-order" button. I continued to read: "Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of "normies," must fight for survival, and their journey to find Clayton's estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution."
Then I stopped. All those elements, especially a world full of zombies attached to cell phones, drew me in. The words "toward resolution" stopped me dead in my tracks. I don't want to be left near a resolution, I want resolution. Maybe it's a flaw in me as a reader, but I want an ending. I don't care if the zombies end up ruling the earth because everybody else gets eaten, I want all that writing and reading to have a payoff.
I backed off the pre-order button, caught my breath and went back to work (or what amounts to it on Sunday morning). In a few months "Cell" will be sitting on a table in Barnes and Noble for the low, low price of just - well - let's just say that I'm listening to Cheap Trick's "Dream Police" on my MP3 player while I wrap this up. Junk food is still food.