Stephen King is a master at turning everyday situations into orgies of horror. He's given us a geeky high-school girl with telekinetic powers who, at the end-of-year prom, wreaks blood-spattered, bone-cracking vengeance on the jocks and cheerleaders who bullied her (Carrie). He's treated us to the tale of a car - a 1958 Plymouth Fury - that has a mind of its own and an insatiable desire to hit and run (Christine). And he's given us a floppy-eared, lovable St Bernard that turns mad after contracting rabies and terrorises a mum and son stuck in a car on a blazing hot day (Cujo).
Now, in Cell, King depicts a world gone bonkers thanks to the ubiquitous mobile phone (or cellphone, as the Americans insist on calling it). Clay Riddell is a thirtysomething illustrator, a divorcee and a doting dad to 12-year-old Johnny. Most importantly, he does not own or desire to own a mobile phone. This might seem strange in a youngish man about town (the story is set in Boston and Maine), but it turns out to be a life-saver.
Everyone who does own a mobile and answers it on the morning of 1 October is transformed into a neck-chomping zombie or a self-harming psycho by something called The Pulse, a mysterious noise or vibration that spreads, virus-like, through the mobile networks. Before we know it, the world is split into "phone-crazies" and "normies" and, in King's pseudo-biblical telling, "every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory".
The action kicks off quicksmart. One minute Clay is queuing at an ice-cream van, the next he's watching a man bite off a dog's ear in a park, a woman in a power suit lunging for the ice-cream seller's throat, and a teenage girl, whose peppermint-coloured mobile plays the Crazy Frog song (she obviously deserves to die), bashing her head against a lamp-post. Soon it becomes clear that the phone-crazies are not so crazy - their behaviour modifies, and they develop skills of telepathy and telekinesis. It falls to a band of unlikely heroes (comprising, besides Clay, a nice gay man called Tom, a 15-year-old girl whose mum has succumbed to The Pulse and a computer whizz-kid) to work out where The Pulse came from, what exactly it is doing to its victims, and to get to Maine before Clay's son unwittingly uses the mobile that his mum and dad bought for him weeks earlier. The film version, when it's made, will be bloody and brilliant.
Cell owes a whopping debt to the director George A Romero. At one point one of the characters says:"It's like the fucking Night of the Living Dead" - and indeed, it is. No matter. For this King fan, Cell represents a welcome return to form after the author's disappointing venture into fantasy-writing in the seemingly never-ending Dark Tower series. With Cell, he's back where he belongs, in the real world, doing what he does best: making the real world seem like a totally freaky place.
Essentially, what King has done is taken our irrational fears and made them more irrational still. How many times have you seen newspaper headlines claiming that mobile phones fry our brains with radiation? There may be no hard scientific evidence that mobiles pose a threat, but we are still counselled to use them only when necessary and to avoid buying them for young children. After all, you never know what they might be doing to us. King takes our "What if . . . ?" worries to their logical conclusion by asking: "What if mobiles turned us into demented flesh-eaters?" The heroes (that is, those who don't use mobiles) speak of the phones as if they were little nukes: "They emit radiation, are you aware of this?"
If Romero's zombie flicks captured cold-war America's fears of the red threat from without, King's Cell captures the contemporary dread of new technology, of what we might be doing to ourselves by pushing the boundaries of science and invention. In other words, he's nailed the zeitgeist, which says that human ingenuity can cause even more problems than it solves. That we think like this today is, in itself, pretty scary.
Brendan O'Neill is deputy editor of Spiked (www.spiked-online.com)
