Stephen King doesn’t leisurely open a story. He doesn’t gradually introduce you to the characters, setting and basic conflict. He propels you into his world with the force of a rocket launch. His miserly use of words leads to the inclusion of only the most apt and, with just a few, we are firmly mired into the dark world of pending doom that he creates in Cell.

Clayton Riddell, a young man from Maine, just made the professional deal of his life. Just. His mind reels with hopes of the future, his son and possible reconciliation with his wife. He walks the streets of Boston feeling the lively pulse of the exciting city, feels it beating in him as well. Then The Pulse hits: an electronically transmitted signal of madness that strikes everyone whose ear is pressed against a cell phone. Within seconds utter madness reigns and human turns on human with pure physical hate. The Pulse wipes out thousands of years of evolution, reducing the human race to hysterical, vicious, primordial creatures bent on self-preservation, no matter the cost. An orgy of madness and violence ensues, where people literally rip each other apart, spilling the blood of their race to soak into the cold, hard ground.

Clayton is one of the few who does not have the device plastered to his ear at the time of The Pulse and now his struggle to survive becomes something he did not know he was capable of; performing acts that he didn’t know his being was capable of. He learns “that under conditions of extreme stress it (the human body) simply takes over and does what needs doing while the brain stands off to one side, unable to do anything but whistle and tap its foot and look up at the sky.”

Clay tries to make his way home, wary and defensive against the inflicted. He joins up with two other Pulse survivors and they struggle out of the depths of Boston as it explodes and burns, gripped in the destruction of the madness. Clay’s need to get to his twelve-year-old son in Maine repudiates all other considerations. It is as impelling and demanding as the madness itself.

The Pulse is indiscriminate; it affects all cell phone users regardless of what else they were doing: walking, driving a car, or flying a plane. It turns its victims into mindless, violent zombies. As the inflicted move as one, like migrating birds or the Borg of Star Trek fame, the survivors learn their ways and the way to salvation. But the road to deliverance is paved through a nightmare world of hideous imagination where the desperation of fellow survivors makes them as dangerous as those gripped in the throes of The Pulse.

As in the past, Mr. King sprinkles his fiction with his own assessments and suppositions of the world around him. In the deep folds of the story lies a statement, a damning judgment of human evolution: “Maybe Adam and Eve had picked a few apples before being driven out of Eden. A little something to munch while on the long and dusty road to seven hundred television channels and backpack bombs in the London subway system.”

Cell is slightly reminiscent of The Stand, with the vast devastation perpetrated on humanity and the struggle for survival by those remaining. The leader of the “phone-crazies” transmits his instructions to the “normies” as they dream, much like Mother and Flagg of The Stand as well.

Stephen King’s writing style is unparalleled perfection; he is a master of storytelling. His intellectual yet conversational style puts us right next to him on the first base line of Fenway Park, listening while he tells us his tale. He possesses the uncanny ability to perfectly capture the very essence of places and people, laying them bare between the pages of his books. Mr. King leaves us not only satisfied with the ending but still curious and panting, wishing and hoping for another few hundred pages.

Reviewed by Donna Russo Morin
© February 2006