Clay is away from his Maine home, in Boston for the day, when people begin attacking strangers. He notices that the attackers go from normal to berserk after using their cell phones, like a switch is flipped. Clay doesn't have a cell on him, and neither does Tom, a man he joins up with, and this is what saves them. They rescue Alice, and the three head north, hoping to reach Clay's family and see if they're alive or have turned into "phone-crazies". The group watch as the days and weeks change the crazies, they begin organizing under the direction of one man who can be anywhere the survivors are and send telepathic messages.

This isn't one of my favorites from King, in fact, the first dozen pages or so were a little ham-fisted, lacking the je ne sais quoi of most of his work. The annoying, constantly crying female character that is in other King novels is here in Alice, who reminded me a lot of Frannie from The Stand, and The Raggedy Man had a little of Randall Flagg about him. But the allegory of cell phones turning humans into mindless zombies is clear. ( )

A King fan told me this was his best story. I wondered if it was about a telephone, or a cage! Yes indeed the mobile-phone is evil, capable of wiping the brain of human users (or, phoners), and reducing them to zombies. The end of the book states King does not own a cell phone (ha ha). Entertaining, if a little far-fetched. I was curious that this novel (in 2006), of how small a percentage of the population purportedly owned a mobile/cell phone, and wondered if this was correct. Certainly here in the UK I had by then already lived through the paranoia of consumers worried about the radiation; but nonetheless, I was glad King had seized an opportunity to write about human fear concerning this. Fun horror, lots of killing mass zombies. ( )

Initially, I enjoyed this book. The premise was quite original: cell phones were transmitting a signal that turned people into zombies. However, for me the book fell flat. It seemed unnecessarily long and I found the talk of 'worms' 'mutating' rather unbelievable. The ending was a bit of a let down. ( )

Fine for a Stephen King horror-zombie-apocalypse book, I guess. Not my fave genre. ( )

ooh! a fun, easy-to-read, modern life is rubbish apocalypse book! And it's not taking itself too seriously! ( )