And yet, despite gloriously menacing sentences such as “Her blond hair was underground now, growing brittle on a satin pillow in the dark”, much of Revival is a long, long way from horror. And not alone.” This is dark stuff indeed. If that is so, we live in darkness like animals in a burrow, or ants deep in their hill.

Revival is narrated by small-town boy Jamie Morton, an averagely talented rhythm guitarist and former drug addict, and opens with his desperate denial of preordination – because if “these horrors” we are set to learn about were fated, “then there is no such thing as light, and our belief in it is a foolish illusion. But it is Lovecraft, and the quote “That is not dead which can eternal lie, / And with strange aeons, even death may die”, that reverberate throughout the book. Later on, Ray Bradbury’s Mr Electrico is also paid due homage. I’d say that it has arguably the fastest pace of any Stephen King novel, which is one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much – when I first started reading King, I thought his work was too long-winded, but he’s got better and better as time goes on at packing a lot of detail in while keeping the action (and the story) going.The book may be tricksy, but King signposts where we are going from the start: with the title, with the naming of Mary Shelley as one of “the people who built my house” in the dedication, alongside HP Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, whose The Great God Pan “has haunted me all my life”. One of the good things, though, is that this book hooks you in right from the get-go. But to say any more than that would be to give away the story line. It’s a bit like a cross between rage zombies and a glitch in the matrix, which turns people into homicidal maniacs, at least to begin with. After an event called ‘ The Pulse‘, which he witnesses up close and personal in the middle of Boston, every time someone tries to use a phone, they lose their minds.

Clay – as he finds himself in a world that’s falling apart. Loosely speaking, then, this book follows the story of young artist Clayton Riddell – a.k.a. Part of this comes back down to the premise – King takes the prevalence of a modern day object, the cell phone, and uses it as a narrative device to create a post-apocalyptic world where anything could happen. Sometimes he fails to live up to the hype, but with this book he proves that he really is the master of contemporary storytelling.

There’s an interesting concept behind this story, but then there always is with Stephen King and, as a reader, you come to expect it.

Stephen king the cell book review