First, it should fulfill an audience's desire to see aberrant acts of violence triggered by civilization's collapse, and in this respect 'Cell' does not disappoint: there's still no other writer who takes as much delight as King does in rendering the sight of a soccer field's worth of zombies being charbroiled out of existence, or a poodle getting run over by a car ('Fluff at one moment guts at the next'). And before you can say, 'They're coming to get you, Barbara,' Clay finds himself in a scenario straight out of 'Night of the Living Dead,' banding together with what remains of humanity to fight his way out of town, reunite with his missing son and figure out what he's going to do now with his unused rollover minutes.Īs you may recall from Aristotle's discussion of the form in the 'Poetics,' an effective zombie apocalypse story should satisfy two conditions. On the same day that the comic-book artist Clay Riddell has unfortunately chosen to be in Boston for a business meeting, a mysterious electronic pulse scrambles the brains of everyone using a cellphone, turning most of the populace into murderous zombies. In 'Cell,' the author's latest work of sadistic wish fulfillment, his wrath is largely directed at those little Lucifers who have cast God's natural order into disarray by talking constantly on their cellphones ('the devil's intercoms,' as one character calls them).

Who knows what brutality King, a die-hard Red Sox supporter, would wish upon me for being a garden-variety Yankees fan?

And don't let him overhear you fussily correcting other people's grammar, or he will imagine you driving a fountain pen into your brain, via your eye socket. If you're stingy or slow to help those in need, he may depict you hanged from an overhead light fixture with a bag pulled over your head. Because if King regards actual human beings the same way he thinks about the characters in his latest novel, his passion for enforcing rules of etiquette would most likely place him somewhere on the spectrum between Emily Post and Vlad the Impaler.

They say it pays to steer clear of one's heroes, and after reading 'Cell,' I can honestly admit I am scared as hell about the prospect of ever crossing paths with Stephen King.

Cell by Stephen King