King rings up the horrors of cellphone creeps

By Carol Memmott, USA Today:

Sick and tired of having to endure other people's dreary, long-winded, one-sided cellphone calls?

Stephen King has a text message for you, and he's sending it through "the devil's intercom."

Cell, the horror master's latest tale of a world gone wrong, is for anyone who has ever wished that the person standing next to him or her, droning into a cellphone, would spontaneously combust or, at the very least, get disconnected.

King, who says he doesn't own a cellphone, has dialed up his own fantasy about the best thing that can happen to these incessant, mindless yakkers.

On a seemingly typical afternoon, anyone who is talking on a cellphone becomes a victim of "The Pulse." This worldwide act of terrorism turns cellphone users into zombie-like, bloodthirsty "phone-crazies."

Crazies kill other crazies as well as "normies" (i.e.: people who don't use cellphones or at least weren't on their phones when The Pulse struck). Children kill their parents. Husbands kill their wives. There seems to be no rhyme or reason - or is there?

Told mostly from the perspective of a small "cell" of unaffected normies, Cell is a gratifying tribute to George Romero, the crown prince of zombie movies, to whom King, in part, dedicates the book. Near the beginning of Cell, a Boston police officer compares the phone crazies to Night of the Living Dead "except these people aren't dead."In another scene, a teenage girl says, "To me it looks like a special effect in some big summer movie."

And indeed King's descriptions of the gore-soaked, mutilated crazies is worthy of any R-rated horror film fest.

But Cell is more than a litany of spilled intestines, oozing wounds and eyes dangling from sockets. It's a soothing balm to the world's technophobes and a disturbing send-up of what the world can be reduced to in an "us against them" situation. You get the feeling that King sees the world as just one big community of alienated factions waiting for their personal "pulse."

It also may be that King is poking a finger into a personal sore spot when a normie starts ranting about Lucifer and "the great Tribulation." The proselytizing normie gets a punch in the nose and a warning: "The lions are out of their cages, and you very well may find that they'll eat the mouthy Christians first."

In a world gone mad, King lets some characters hold on to an indefatigable pursuit of survival, solutions and family ties. It's just that they seem to be in the minority as herds of normies begin to cross over to the dark side.

Whether you are a Luddite or a mannerless cretin who can't leave home without a headset and a phone charger, King wants you to know he has your number.