KASHWAK=NO-FO

Stephen King has done it again. With this book, CELL. The inside cover proclaims, "There's a reason CELL rhymes with HELL." With a statement like that, you know you're in for an intriguing read. At least that's what I was thinking when I picked this book up in the school library.
The storyline turned out to be like that movie, The Happening, only with phones instead of plant chemicals. And about ten times as creepy and gory.
Clay, an average guy with an almost-ex-wife and a little boy named Johnny, is in Boston on business. Actually a job interview. He gets out of the interview feeling great and wants to call home to tell his boy how he got the job. He's gonna have to waitl, though, because unlike most Americans he refuses to own a cell phone.
So he's standing in line by the ice cream truck, waiting to get a celebratory cone, when he sees a man biting a dog's ear off. And then the lady in line right in front of him who was talking on her phone a second ago suddenly jumps at the ice cream truck guy and starts attacking him! And a second later, the two teenage girls behind him are exactly the same!
These events of horrific violence start what is known nation-wide as The Pulse, where everyone with a cell phone goes insane and starts killing each other. Clay bands together with a few other cell-phone-less stragglers and together they start following the signs. Guess what they say? KASHWAK=NO-FO.
Turns out Kashwak is an Indian reservation where there is no cell reception whatsoever. Seems like it would be safe, right? Clay thinks so, but he could be wrong...
Now what Clay and his friends are calling the "phone-crazies" are flocking together like birds and seem to share one collective consciousness. They all act together and they're somehow developing telepathy. How far will things go before Clay is completely in their control? You're gonna have to read this fast-paced novel to find out.
I've been noticing more and more how Stephen King will take childhood poems and nursery rhymes and weave them through his book to make them creepier somehow. And he does this with nonsense phrases too, like Kashwak=No-Fo. That's found throughout like half the book and it has an ominous feel to it. It's a neat method of writing, which is probably one of the reasons why we keep reading his stuff.
I enjoyed reading this book because the events were so unexplainable and yet terrifyingly realistic. I mean, a mass attack through cell phone could happen. And he also uses a couple of creepy characters to make you FEEL how scary it is, to the point that I was almost scared to sleep last night. Lucky I had my dog in my room with me.
One last note: watch out for the Raggedy Man. ♠♠♠