Review Blog: Cell by Stephen King

Day 123.

I really have nothing special to share about my personal life right now considering my personal life at the moment revolved around all those unread books rotting in my bookshelf and those movies that seem to take forever to finish downloading. Yeah. I've been a bum the past few weeks after officially quitting the only thing that provided me a serious occupation. My mom says I should get a job. I say I should get a project. Whatever. I did say this blog isn't about my current personal issues, right?

Anyway, I just finished reading three books out of my hoarded literary treasures but this review will just be about one of them. Maybe I'll get around into writing about the other two in the coming days. So yeah. Here it goes - a side story to start.

I was in seventh grade when I started developing this fascination for novels, the ones whose covers call your attention when you enter a bookstore. Ever since then, I've been eyeing one author because his books' covers attract me the most but I was a kid and when you're a kid, your parents usually buy you stuff that normal kids want (like lots sweet foods and tons of toys you'd throw out after playing with for ten minutes). For the record, I wasn't normal and from the moment I laid eyes on those books, I've been obsessing over buying them all at one time someday when I'm already rich and a lady of dignified indifference. Since I'm not really that rich yet and I still care about some things in the world, I was able to buy one of those books I've been dreaming of buying since I was twelve just last week. And so here's a review.

It all started when graphic artist Clay Riddell witnessed The Pulse, an event that turned everyone within his vision range into people he later on called phone-crazies and it all began with a ring of a cellphone. Everyone started behaving like vicious beasts out to rip out one another's throats. There's blood everywhere, explosions left and right and before Clay could worry about his wife whom he's separated with and his son Johnny, he met Tom, a survivor as he'd call him, a lucky soul who didn't have a cellphone during the first wave of The Pulse. Madness spread around Boston like a virulent strain of some notorious virus out to strip humanity off its sanity and Clay and Tom went out of their way to stay alive. In their quest of finding a sanctuary from all those phone-crazies who now resemble zombies from those mainstream zombie apocalypse movies, they met Alice, a fifteen-year-old girl who lost her mother to The Pulse, a dreadful moment she witnessed firsthand. They became a team of survivors that geared themselves with whatever they could find along the way to Kashwak, a safe place for the normies (the normal ones) and a place where Clay hoped to find his lost family. They also met other survivors like the head of Gaiten Academy Charles Ardai and one of his students Jordan who offered them a place to stay in the middle of their journey. With the help of his two new friends, Clay managed to get through to these phone-crazies by studying their behavior and ended up burning a whole flock of them that resided in one of Gaiten Academy's big stadiums one fateful night. Then Clay and some of his friends started dreaming of the Raggedy Man who appears to be a representative of the phone-crazies and the one who actually brought them to Kashwak, the sanctuary they've all been trying to reach. Thanks to the three other additions to their group, Dan, Denise and Ray, their little gang of flock-killers got to bomb the largest flock once and for all at Kashwak. The story boils down to Clay leaving the group and going on his own way to find his son (since he already saw his wife hanging out with the phone-crazies on his way to Kashwak) which he did only his son is not really the same Johnny anymore. Recalling what Ardai told him about the phone-crazies being like computers whose hard drives (or brains) got cleaned out by The Pulse, Clay hopes to reboot his son by exposing him to the signal that did this to him. The story ends with Clay putting a cellphone against his son's ear.

This is an entirely different take on the concept of zombie apocalypses. Conventional zombie stories start with a virus that breaks down the human body by taking down the immune system first through the circulatory system. This one, on the other hand, turns a human being into a phone-crazy (or a zombie for that matter) by actually wiping out all the information inside the human brain with an electrical signal, something that goes against the natural electric circuits inside the human body. Everything that the brain knows will go away except for that prime directive that have enabled humanity to survive in the jungle of chaos and anarchy - murder. This is what made the whole story so scary to me, the psychological basis and stuff. But all the same, I loved it and I'm sure you will too. It's one hell of a thriller from the master storyteller himself, Stephen King.

Well, that's all.

Till next time.

Godspeed y'all!