Cell (Broché)

If we needed another reason not to want to own a cell phone, the Harvard University Center for Risk Analysis estimates there are as many as 1.5 million crashes annually in the United States, resulting in 560,000 injuries and 2,600 deaths, "due to phone use in moving vehicles" (so, to be fair, these might not all be cell phone related because you could get hurt trying to reach a pay phone by leaning outside your car window). In "Cell," King comes up with another reason not to want to own a cell phone when on October 1, God is His heaven, the stock market stands at at 10,140, and somebody somewhere launches what will come to be known as The Pulse and unleashes Hell on Earth.

This is not the same sort of Pulse that turns Seattle and the rest of America into a Third World nation in James Cameron's "Dark Angel." It is not an electromagnetic pulse that blanks computers and kills electronics. In fact, this Pulse requires the electronics to be functioning because it is transmitted through cell phones. You have probably heard about the conflicting claims regarding the dangers of cell phone radiation, and it is this particular ugly thought that King exacerbates in his story. When the Pulse happens those who are on cell phones or make the reflex action of getting on their cell phones to find out what is happening get their minds fried. Basically the Pulse turns them into gibbering homicidal zombies (only they are not really dead and they are definitely not gone). Clayton Riddell, a graphic (nee comic book) artist from Maine sees all of this happen in front of him on Boylston Street in Boston.

Surviving the moment is the immediate concern and Clay is able to do so because he hooks up with a couple of other survivors, a man named Tom McCourt and a young girl named Alice. Then the main agenda is staying alive, but Clay also wants to get back to Maine to find out what happened to his wife and son (although his imagination is well aware of the worst possibilities). They meet more survivors along the way, the most important of which turns out to be Jordan, a young boy at a military academy who knows enough about computers to have pieces together a hypothesis as to not only what happened with the Pulse but what is starting to happen in its aftermath. Jordan thinks the pulse wiped out brains like they were hard drives, which would explain why they are down to the biological imperative to kill or be killed. But it turns out things are worse than that, because those brains are now being reprogrammed and that 98 percent that is untapped is starting to come into play.

"Cell" is dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, and if you want to do the horror genre math that would be "I Am Legend" and "Night of the Living Dead," only Clay is not the last man alive and these zombies are not flesh eating corpses. In Stephen King terms we are talking post-apocalyptic nightmare ("The Stand") combined with the dark side of untapped human potential ("The Tommyknockers") with the fatherly imperative to save a child who has been lost ("Pet Semetary"). I like novels about how society tries to come back from the edge of extinction, but "Cell" is not really one of those because it turns out to be about avoiding extinction. Like most King novels the journey is superior to the destination and reading this book in bed after midnight the past week certainly heightened the impact of the dark parts, which is the main point, and why I rounded up on this one. Having trouble getting to sleep after what happened on the road to KASHWAK=NO-FO counts for something.

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