Krishna
This is a fairly short book by Stephen King’s standards and is still interesting. It has shades of some of his other books but given the number of stories that the man has written over the years, perhaps that is inevitable.
The premise is fascinating. Let us turn to the story.
Clayton Riddell has sold his first graphic novel for a good sum and cannot wait to share this with his ex wife Sharon. He celebrates by going to buy an ice cream from a van. He has with him a paperweight with a scenery as a present for her.
A woman in front of him suddenly seems to go crazy and lunges at the ice cream vendor with intent to hurt. Another man with a phone to his ear bends down and bites the ear of his dog off (a piece of it anyway). You get the sense that something has gone far wrong. Then when one of a set of friends lunges at the lady and rips her neck off with her teeth and you hear cars crashing all over the place and the girl also lunges at the other suddenly, the sense of chaos is complete for the reader. The ice cream van refuses to help and tries to flee and gets flattened by a crazed driver in a car coming and hitting it head on.
Clayton realizes that all the people he saw so far had the cell in their ears when they went crazy (at around the same time). He hears explosions in the city. He sees a man with a butcher knife coming at him to slash him to pieces while he was slashing himself at intervals. He meets Tom, another sane man in the middle of this mess.
They escape him and then go off in search of a safe place. Clayton takes Tom to his apartment and also takes in a girl called Alice Maxwell. They realize that Boston is not safe and decide to get out – Clayton to get to his divorced wife and daughter but Tom and Alice just to get out of the city – in the country (at least at the time of writing of this novel) cell phones were rare to nonexistent.
When they leave for Tom’s place in the suburbs, they meet a crazy lady who is insanely pleased that the ‘apocalypse has come’ and knock her down.
They take refuge in Tom’s house. In the morning, they see the ‘zombies’ more docile but witness sudden violence when one of them (George, as Tom knew him before he became ‘one of them’) kills an old man to get at the pumpkin he split. Even more weirdly, all of them go in order somewhere to another part of the city as if called by a central command.
They locate a radio in Tom’s house but are afraid to switch it on and listen to the news, ‘just in case whatever was sent on cell phones to drive them nuts is also being broadcast over the radio’. They see the human flood go the other way during nightfall and guess that these things go back to sleep at the start of darkness. They set out in the dark.
When they walk into the neighbour’s house to collect any guns for protection they see the mother and the daughter dead with gun shots and guesses that the daughter was on the phone and the mother had to kill her and then herself. They find the arms cache downstairs.
They stop at a school and meet Charles Ardai, the ex headmaster and Jordan, a student. They show the trio how the crazies have used the auditorium and (at night) are lying together staring up into the sky. They have also rigged continuous music because somehow music appeals to them.
They are alarmed to realize that the group seems to somehow get more coherent in its behaviour and realize that they can be a danger to all of the sane people. And also they theorize that the cell phone pulse somehow erased all that is stored in the brains except some unalterable ‘core’ of humans which is essentially capable of violence, and that now the whole group seems to be programmed from some unknown command centre.
They also seem to display weird behaviour, for instance through telepathic communication, as well as through some kind of telekinetic phenomena when they seem to wordlessly argue with each other (as in one of the crazies wanting some of the Twinkies that the other was carrying)
The team manages to roast the group using trucks filled with petrol and shooting a hole through them. Once that is done, they realize intuitively that they had done something terribly wrong. They want to move on, but the headmaster cannot go – he is too old. The boy Jordan refuses to leave without the Head, the girl Alice will not leave without Jordan. So, through growing unease, they decide to stay.
They all have identical nightmares of being captured and interrogated by a horribly damaged man that they call Raggedy Man. When the man arrives at their door with an enormous horde of crazies from another area that afternoon and indicates that they should leave, they discover that the crazies have been able to force the Head to commit suicide in a gruesome manner. They wonder why they have been spared, if the people have such power and also physically outnumber this tiny group. However, they spend the night burying the Head properly and are thus forced to stay another night against the direction from the head of the crazies, the Raggedy Man.
When they proceed to the place where they were directed, they meet a couple of men who taunt them and when insulted take offence. They come back and with a carefully aimed concrete block, end the life of Alice. The others bury her and then promptly meet three more people who are also declared outcasts (Dan, Ray and Denise)
The thing briefly turns into a long journey, like The Stand.
When the others decide not to follow the ‘direction’ from the group consciousness (represented by the Raggedy Man but not organized by him) and go west, Clay stubbornly goes North to Kashwak. This is even after he dreams that they are trying to herd all the saners and then zap them with a cell phone pulse in a queue, later. He also sees a strange site of some phonies wandering in the night, pre-dawn, a sure sign of their evolving capabilities.
The others meet him ahead and tell him how they had ‘no choice’ but to go back to Kashwak, mainly due to the mind control that the phonies were able to exert on them.
They are given a van to drive (already had by the others who joined Clay) and when all seems lost, because they can read minds, and because they seem to be able to force you to do what they want against your will, Ray meets him secretly (claiming to have contacted poison ivy while taking a dump) and gives him a cryptic note and a cell phone and kills himself immediately.
This proves the saving grace of the group when they finally figure out what it all means – the nice thing is that since they did not know until the critical moment, they really have no clue and so could not communicate any thoughts to the phoners.
Clay sees his wife (as a phoner) in the crowd but decides not to tell others. Then, after the destruction of the large crowd one night before their expected execution, he leaves the others again and goes in search of his son.
He finds his son and what happens afterwards is surprising. And the end is very touching and is interesting.
A very interesting read. 7/10
– – Krishna (January 2020)