"Cell" by Stephen King

I completed reading this book today, 16 September 2016. 450 pages.

I like zombie stories.

Many zombie stories are metaphors for reality. How? Zombies are like some - too many today? - real people. Walking appetites... with no impulse other than to exist... to survive off the increase of producers. You know... Mitt Romney's 47%? (Heh heh... just kidding).

Max Brooks"WW Z" was the last book I read of this genre; a wonderful book (the movie, with Brad Pitt, was not so good).

Sometimes, zombie stories conflate with the post-apocalyptic genre. Such is the case with Stephen King's 2006 novel "The Cell," movie of which is due out soon - 2016.

Post-apocalyptic stories usually imply that civilization as we know it has been destroyed. The remnant population starts anew. The authors imagination conceives scenarios on what a post-apocalyptic world would look like.

Examples (I liked all of them, even though some were panned by movie reviewers):

Waterworld (panned - Kevin Costner)
Mad Max (five or six in the series; the latest with Charlize Theron).
Blade Runner (Harrison Ford)
Book of Eli (low rotten tomatoes - Denzel Washington)
The Road (Cormac McCarthy's famous novel. Good movie too).
The Postman (panned - Kevin Costner)

"The Cell" is a zombie story, but it's also post-apocalyptic. A conflation of the two, as it were.

So, the "end of the world" doesn't, as in traditional post-apocalyptic lore, give rise to conflict between factions of survivors. Rather, in "Cell," the "end of the world" gives rise to conflict between remnant humans and zombies. But King's zombies are a bit different.

A "pulse," whose source is never identified in the novel, surges through the cell phones being used by denizens of Boston, and more broadly, New England. The pulse causes those who hear it to "zombify."

Early on the pulse affected "zombies" brutalize one another... but then, they also begin to attack "normies," normal people, who weren't using a cell phone and didn't hear the pulse.

A threesome of normies determines the zombies are inactive at night. During the night the threesome, an artist, a businessman, and a fifteen-year-old girl, moves north in search of one of the artist's wife and son, but also, they seek a safe scene away from the cataclysm they are witnessing in Boston.

Over the course of their migration, they have various encounters with other normies and with zombies ("phoners"). They learn that the phoners are morphing into a collective that operates via telepathy. There is a leader of the phoner group - Raggedy Man - who can read normies' minds, and that phoners, when they emote, can levitate and cause disturbances in the physical world by telekinesis. Think, in a way: Star Treks "Borg" led by the Borg Queen. King's device of a telepathic collective led by a scheming leader, is not new!

The threesome teams up with other normies. They find a way to decimate a phoner collective at night. The phoner leader starts messing with their heads and in a phoner induced dream they learn that the phoner leader, Raggedy Man, is setting up a plan to have them executed as an example at a huge phoner gathering. So, telepathically, he prods the protagonist normies to continue north to his "event."

We never find out the source of the "pulse" but a resourceful boy, along the way, determines that the "pulse" has the same effect on humans as a hard drive of a computer wiped clean.

The computer analogy carries forward throughout the rest of the story. Like a computer wiped clean is there a "save to system" feature that retained the wiped data in a sub file. Could the same be the case for humans? How do the normies capitalize on this information?

Read the book to find out. And, while reading, reflect on the effect that technology is having on mankind, certainly, there, an underlying message coming from King's book.

The book moves in typical King flow with allusion after to allusion to cultural phenomena.

One example: the phoners all sleep in a collective at night surrounded by boom boxes playing 80's semi popular music... Michael Bolton, Tony Bennett. Only one boom box has the CD and it "talks," telepathically to the other boom boxes and they echo the music of the sole boom box with the CD. In successive nights, the music becomes more sophisticated - Pachelbel's, "Canon," as the zombie collective becomes stronger. More computer analogy... the collective is downloading information that unifies and strengthens it... But wait... there is a "worm" in the collective's programming!

I've read that this stuff flows from King's brain. That he writes stream of conscious. A unique brain is his, to be sure.

Lots of unanswered questions.

The pulse continues to be operational throughout the novel. How do cell towers stay operational when all power is down?

What is the source of the pulse?

Is the pulse just a phenomenon in King's beloved New England? Or is it worldwide?

The book requires a good willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy.

The book's OK. Good escape... which a reader needs from time to time.... to reboot (:-0).