If you have ever worried that using mobile phones might scramble your brain, Stephen King suggests you may just be right. It all happens at 3.02pm one afternoon, when everyone in the world using a cellphone suddenly becomes a violent maniac.

Stephen King is supposed to have retired. A year ago, he published the final part of his seven-book Dark Tower saga with the book of the same name - a novel so crushingly disappointing that, reluctantly, all but King's most ardent fans were forced to agree with the author himself that it was probably time for him to stop and enjoy the royalties from his 40 or so bestsellers.

Cell is Stephen King's first full-length novel since his threatened retirement in 2003. Of course, this most prolific of authors has not been idle during this period, penning a collaborative non-fiction book about baseball, a regular column for the popular US magazine Entertainment Weekly, several short stories, and even a short (and slightly puzzling) noir novel, The Colorado Kid, for small publisher Hard Case Crime. This is the first of two new novels to be published this year, with Lisey's Story to follow in October.

This is the way the world ends... not with a bang, but a whimper.
— T. S. Elliot

Actually, it ends with a "pulse" -- an errant cell phone signal that wipes away the user's humanity, 'rebooting' their brain back to something basic... primordial... and evil. Even those within earshot of the gray matter draining signal suffer a kind of evolutionary epilepsy, reverting to a state of pure impulse and mental confusion. As the feeling consumes its host, madness takes over, and there is only one way to satisfy this cruel craving. The insanity must be met with violence, quelling the instinctual bloodlust that lay dormant inside every person's DNA. Thus the world ends, and it's the very people who protected and prospered upon it who are now intent on taking it down.

If the stretch of years between Sept. 11 and last fall's Kashmir earthquake has reminded us of anything, it's that history can take a drastic turn in one day. Stephen King jumps into the middle of one such day on the opening pages of Cell, his first full-length novel since he came off what has to be the shortest-ever retirement not involving professional boxing. Happily wandering Boston after selling a comic-book pitch, artist Clay Riddell watches as the world goes mad when a mind-wiping electronic pulse turns everyone using a cell phone into a violent zombie.