first extremely vulnerable (holding onto a miniature sneaker as if it were a talisman); she has a charming quality about her that puts the other characters more at ease, but she is also tough and willing to fight. She says:I want to wipe them out. . . . The ones on the soccer field, I want to wipe them out. . . . I don’t want to do it for the human race. I want to do it for my mother and my dad, because he’s gone, too. I know he is, I feel it. I want to do it for my friends Vickie and Tess. They were good friends, but they had cell phones, they never went anywhere without them, and I know what they’re like now and where they’re sleeping: someplace just like that . . . soccer field.

As they begin to head north, where Clay hopes against reason to find his son Johnny (and maybe his wife, Sharon, also), they take refuge at Gaiten Academy, a boys’ prep school deserted except for headmaster Charles Ardai (The Head) and twelve-year-old Jordan, the only remaining student, the two of whom share a bond of mutual respect and devotion. The Academy is an old school in the most traditional sense, with its Tudor-style buildings with names like Cheatham Lodge, representing the last vestige of a civilization gone to ruin. It also has a soccer field, where Clay’s group makes a horrifying discovery: more than a thousand zombies lying unconscious during the night, packed together and literally filling every available inch of the field (a flock). While Clay and his companions must travel by night, when the creatures are dormant, they must remain hidden inside by day as the beings roam, foraging and feasting, an ironic reversal of the vampire myth. It is this flock that Alice is so furiously intent on destroying.

The aging Ardai (“Of course, I’m an old man and my time is almost over in any case. I’ll abide by any decision you make. . . . As long as it’s the right one, of course”) and the budding computer genius Jordan believe that the cell phone signal stripped human brains down to their lowest level of functioning, wiping them clean as one would a hard driveand that they are being reprogrammed. No one knows who or what is responsible for the catastrophe, but the group comes to believe that they must destroy the flock at Tonney soccer field, fearing that other flocks are gathering and may eventually come together if not eliminated. They accomplish this massive destruction but at a terrible costa supernatural presence causes The Head to commit suicide by thrusting a fountain pen into his eye, after subjecting the brilliant man to the indignity of being forced to write the word for “insane” in fourteen different languages.

It is at this point that King makes his greatest misstep in an otherwise compelling novelthe introduction of the Raggedy Man, or the president of Harvard University. The novel does not need him, and while it can support him, King’s readers have seen this figure too many times beforemost pertinently as Randall Flagg in The Stand, to which Cell inevitably will be compared. In both novels the supernatural antagonist leads a group opposed to the protagonists and sets the protagonists up for execution. In a novel already destined for comparison with its apocalyptic predecessor, inviting unnecessary comparisons by introducing this needlessly familiar parallel element may have been an unwise choice.

That said, King proves his literary powers in the novel’s most shocking, horrifying, and moving passage: the unexpected, utterly senseless death of one of the major characters. It feels real because it comes as death often does, suddenly and without warning, without the sense of its being a plot device. It evokes pathos because it is a character for whom readers have built great empathy and with whom many identify. It shakes the foundations of both readers and characters because it forcefully brings home the fragility of life: that death is real and can happen to anyone, any time. The terrible vengeance wreaked upon the killers brings cold comfort. This section of the novel demonstrates King writing at the height of his literary abilities.

The survivors move on and meet Dan Hartwick, Denise Link, and Ray Huizenga, traveling companions who have also been eliminating flocks of semi-human creatures along the way. It soon becomes evident that the surviving normal people are being herded like cattle to Kashwak, Maine, an area where there is supposedly no cell phone reception. It is equally evident that the survivors are to have their memories destroyed, while the group of flock-killers is being prepared for a public execution. A combination of ingenuity, self-sacrifice, loyalty, revenge, and luck combine in the novel’s suspenseful climax.

While the climax resolves the dramatic tension for most of the principal characters, there is an open-ended coda: It denies closure to one of the final surviving characters, or, rather, it withholds the fate of a character’s loved one from the reader. This twist is another difference from King’s usual pattern, which is to tie up all loose ends. Cell is also shorter and faster-moving than many of King’s novels, with very short chapters. The in-depth description for which King is so well known is played down as well. For example, King provides no physical description of the main character, Clay Riddell, at all. He is described as “a young man,” and, except for changes in facial expression, that is all. All readers are left to project onto Clay the appearance they envision for him. (King describes other characters in greater detail.) It is difficult to know what to make of this tabula rasa, so drastically different from the minute detail that has become one of King’s defining literary qualities.

Finally, Cell seems a fusion of King’s earlier writing style as seen in works such as The Stand, ’Salem’s Lot (1975), and The Shining (1977), with a new writing style informed by zines, e-books, instant messaging, text messaging, and audio books (a format in which Cell is, in fact, available.) Cell demonstrates the persistence of theme in the face of changing literary forces.