One is Tom, a quick-witted gay man with more intelligence than moxie, and Alice, a teenage girl who barely escaped the rampaging rioters bloodying up Beantown. He battles his way between these victims of portable communication (they come to be labeled “phone crazies”) and soon runs into the individuals who will follow him on a quest to return home. In one of the best beginnings the author has ever penned, Clay suddenly finds himself in a literal urban Hell, as one time docile citizens become mentally unhinged maniacs with mayhem and murder on their minds. Unfortunately, the “pulse” has other plans. Where once she threw his skylarking love of drawing in his face, convinced it would lead nowhere, Clay carries an expensive paperweight through the streets of Boston, ready to offer up a little metaphysical payback to the spouse when he gets home to Maine. He also now has the necessary dignity injection to stand up to his domineering doctor wife. He has just sold a comic idea to Dark Horse, and he finally has the funds to quit his half-assed art teaching jobs. We meet him on a very fateful day - October 1 - in the strides of success. He is estranged from his wife and 12-year-old son, but he still believes that his gift will get him somewhere.
He’s decided to keep the people populating his world as real as possible, allowing their fallibility to play a part in how the yarn is eventually spun.Īt the center of Cell is artist Clayton “Clay” Riddell, a man who has spent most of his life running from the responsibility of the real world.
For the first time in a long while, King has given up on the horror histrionics and the hero worship. Yet there is something different about this latest novel, something very post-millennial about the story it tells, and the characters contained within it. Granted, the author has been down this path before, using Armageddon as an allegory for man’s inner struggle to find meaning and morality within his otherwise superficial life ( The Stand) and technology as a tool both tainted and terrifying ( The Tommyknockers). Thus the world ends, and it’s the very people who protected and prospered upon it who are now intent on taking it down.įor Cell, his latest novel in a career of over 30 years, Stephen King has concocted one doozy of a premise. The insanity must be met with violence, quelling the instinctual bloodlust that lay dormant inside every person’s DNA.
As the feeling consumes its host, madness takes over, and there is only one way to satisfy this cruel craving. Even those within earshot of the gray matter draining signal suffer a kind of evolutionary epilepsy, reverting to a state of pure impulse and mental confusion. This is the way the world ends… not with a bang, but a whimper.Īctually, it ends with a “pulse” - an errant cell phone signal that wipes away the user’s humanity, ‘rebooting’ their brain back to something basic… primordial… and evil.
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