Cell

Cell
Stephen King

Stephen King’s fifty-somethingth book starts off with a bang: A Romero-esque zombie apocalypse that has squads of the bloodthirsty living dead squeaking and gibbering in the streets. These zombies, however, are not your regular undead but rather human hard-drives wiped clean by a wireless power surge. Forced to reboot, we soon discover that underneath our civilized software we still have some instinctual programming for (oddly asexual) crazy violence. How this all works and what it all means is anyone’s guess. In any event, by the time the phone crazies start levitating we seem to have flown past Freud into the supernatural. A disappointment even for King fans, especially as his more familiar elements (plucky, threatened kids, anyone?) are starting to get more than a little stale.