‘Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. By Halloween, every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory.’ The event became known as The Pulse. The virus was carried by every cell phone operating within the entire world. Within ten hours, most people would be dead or insane. A young artist Clayton Riddell realises what is happening. And together with Tom McCourt and a teenage girl called Alice, he flees the devastation of explosive, burning Boston, desperate to reach his son before his son switches on his little red mobile phone…
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The event that came to be know as The Pulse began at 3:03 pm, eastern standard time, on the afternoon of October 1. (1)
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(@HodderBooks, 1 January 2006, hardback, 432 pages, bought from @AmazonUK)
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I’ve only read Cell a couple of times and I forgot how much I enjoy it. I loved this book. Stephen King does zombie apocalypse, not bad at all. The movie is awful, not even John Cusack playing Clayton can save that turd. But the book is excellent, stellar King stuff. As usual, the book is not about the sinister event called The Pulse which turns everyone listening to a mobile phone into a sort of zombie, a zombie far from mindless but the true core of the book is how the survivors and those affected known as phone crazies and then phone people react to this strange new world. Those affected by The Pulse have sinister intentions against the remaining normies and strange powers they seem to have gained which threaten everything. This is a corker of book. I loved it. I’d recommend it.
5/5
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I’m currently reading through the lists of books with some connection to The Dark Tower from Stephen King’s own website, https://stephenking.com/darktower/connections. According to this link the connections between The Dark Tower and Cell are:
- Clayton Riddell, the protagonist of Cell, is a comic book artist. He has written a Western fantasy comic called THE DARK WANDERER. According to his wife, it’s about apocalypse cowboys. The main character in THE DARK WANDERER is the cowboy Ray Damon. (R.D., like Roland Deschain.) Ray Damon uses six-shooters, like Roland
- At the Northern Counties Expo, Clay and the others fighting the phoners come across a children’s ride called Charlie the Choo-Choo. Charlie the Choo-Choo is the name of a sinister children’s book which Jake Chambers buys in The Waste Lands
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