and I don’t feel real good about using my cell phone anymore.

I’ve only begun to get into the Stephen King catalog, but I had heard many good things about this new book, Cell so I originally picked it up as an unabridged audiobook when I was doing a lot of driving last weekend. I was hooked instantly. I only got halfway through the audiobook by the time I got home, so I didn’t hesitate to go directly to B&N and pick it up in hardback to finish that night and add it to my bookshelf to keep. I love the way King describes his characters and the world he creates for them. There is nothing about it that seems remarkable from an English lit point of view, yet some how it seeps into the reader’s brain and its as if you’re there (even though its not usually a good place to be). I’ve also realized in the few King books that I’ve read that I shouldn’t get too attached to any one character, because their untimely death is possibly just around the next page turn.

Obviously from the title, one can tell that cell phones are going to be a key point in the plot. I really don’t want to give any of the story away because its just so compelling and engrossing, but I’ll just say that it definitely made me paranoid about my cell phone and cell phones around me for a few days, not to mention it made me making mental lists of how I should get some disaster/survival gear together, because you just never know what could happen.

In the end, I found Cell to be a perfect mix of the frighteningly fantastic with the realities of our modern world.

Worth Consuming! Best novel by Stephen King in years!

For a man who retired after he finished the Dark Tower saga, Stephen King sure is working hard. Not that I’m too upset about it, mind you since I’m a big fan and every new book by King is like crack with pages to me.

King’s latest novel is an end-of-the-world type thriller similiar to “The Stand” in that things go to hell in a handbasket and a group of rag-tag survivors must band together to figure out what happened and survive. Instead of a deadly plague, this time the end of the world comes from cell phones, which all send out a deadly pulse that turns users into zombies. The world descends into chaos as the zombies take over, but instead of just running around undead and eating brains, the zombies begin to organize and follow a group-mind mentality ala the Borg from Star Trek. We meet a group of people, led by Clay who are struggling to stay alive and for Clay to get back to his family.

King does a great job, as usual, with taking an every man character and putting him into an extrodinary situation and seeing if and how he’d cope with things. The overriding arc of Clay’s wanting to get home to his family drives the story and the story does end on a Twilight Zone like moment. It’s not so much an ending where everything is neatly resolved so much as it’s that this part of the story has reached a conclusion. King recognizes this and doesn’t let the story over stay its welcome, though I imagine some readers may be disappointed by that.

I wasn’t.

While it’s not as great as “The Stand” or “Bag of Bones”, “Cell” is still an example of why Stephen King is one of the best writers we’ve got working today.