Ana V.

Once again, Stephen King tries and succeeds towards a story that sends shivers down your spine. Though I'm not a big fan of zombie stories, and I really am picky when it comes to plot and pacing in a living-dead situation, "Cell" managed to fulfill all my needs and desires. It's a fast paced book, in which you have a main character of a certain type, you have the usual dilemma, when the man has to go after his family, and of course a very powerful ending.

In our world, cellphones are an indispensable item to have. You are nowhere and no one if you don't own one. But some of us do abstain from having such a frivolous thing, and they don't care for what advantages they might have if they had one. Such is the case of Cell's main character, Clayton.

He is an illustrator, a grown man who lives a normal life. He is divorced but still loves his wife and is in good terms with her, and his kid is the most beautiful thing that ever happened to him. This morning, he woke up and went to his business, achieved more than the usual and was happy with his breakthrough. When walking through the town, though.. apocalypse strikes. Suddenly, people start fighting each other to death, a man eats a dog, a girl gets killed in front of his eyes and he gets attacked by a stranger, out of nowhere, who seems to act like a mad animal on steroids. Scared, he seeks refuge.. And hopes them monsters out there won't find them.

Then, he realizes, there is no way he could stay here. He has to go back to his city and find his son and see if he is alive, because that is his duty, his most important duty, to be a father to his little boy. So, along a group of people that also escaped disaster, he takes to the road in order to find his family. Will he make it alive? And more importantly, will he, at the end of the road, find his son sane or in the form of a living-dead-zombie-like-creature?

This book is surely one you will read so fast even you won't believe it. It's not complicated, it's clearly written for a fast and easy lecture, but it's very good from these points of view, and it's in the style of the master of horror, Stephen King.

There really is no one who can do it like him out there.