Cell by Stephen King

Wipe my brain and fill it with Britney

In recent years, King has become equivocal about some of his fiction, and recent novels have ended with long afterwords explaining his motivations for writing the books and his attitude to concerns some readers might have with the conclusions. Cell doesn't end with such justifications, having only a short list of acknowledgements, and a handwritten extract from the next novel. Clearly, King thinks it can stand alone. He's right.

Every now and again, King seemingly gets the urge to go back to basics and write a full-throttle horror novel, almost to prove to himself that he is as capable of scaring the pants off his readers now as he was when he started out. While these novels, such as 2001's Dreamcatcher, are invariably satisfying, he makes it look so easy that they usually don't feel quite as bracing as the finest of his genre-stretching fiction. But while Cell is out-and-out horror, it has the deep and disturbing subtexts found only in the best of the genre.

The set-up is straightforward enough. Some sort of pulse, transmitted via mobile phones, is turning ordinary people into seemingly mindless zombies, driven to either suicide or violence. A handful of survivors band together, trying to work out what's happened to their world and what to do next.

It takes quite a long time for King to reveal his true intentions. Dedicated to George Romero, the horror director best known for his zombie films, Cell initially seems like a similar sort of social satire. The "phoners" affected by the pulse spend their time listening and transmitting soft rock, from Britney Spears to the Carpenters, suggesting that King is having a pop at conformity. It also seems as if King is borrowing back and extending the motifs that have driven a lot of modern horror. Telephones have always played an important part in horror films, but more so in recent years, with mobile technology increasing the possibility for scares in films such as the Scream trilogy; the Japanese Ringu; Takeshi Miike's Chakushin Ari (One Missed Call), and two telephone thrillers scripted by Larry Cohen: Phone Booth and Cellular. The plot of a slightly deadbeat father trying to save his kids during an apocalyptic invasion is also reminiscent of Spielberg's War of the Worlds adaptation, which pop-culture omnivore King explicitly namechecks. But having set up this scenario, the characters take a surprising detour to a boys' private school, where King uses an erudite headmaster to introduce the first of the psychological themes he addresses here.

Amid much talk about Freud, Jung, prime directives and the id, King addresses a question about human nature: if everyone's brains were wiped and they were to start again, what would be left behind? Is the drive to murder at the root of all human behaviour, and only held in check by social conditioning? This is basic enough but from there, he moves on to questions addressed previously in cyberpunk fiction as it becomes clear that the "phoners" are having their brains wiped and reprogrammed. King looks at what happens when human beings start being used as machines, a theme that has an obvious political resonance.

It would take a 20-page essay to fully analyse everything King's up to but here are a couple of brief observations. His protagonist Clayton Riddell, is a graphic novelist who has just sold his first work - "Dark Wanderer", about apocalyptic cowboys - just as King is about to move into the graphic novel field himself with an adaptation of his Dark Tower magnum opus, also about apocalyptic cowboys. So this is another of his "author" novels where he deliberately plays games with his own autobiography. There are the usual explicit references to his previous books, including the reappearance of a Dark Tower character, Charlie the Choo-Choo. The narrative structure also fits with the themes and motifs built up throughout his oeuvre, such as the psychic strength of a tight-knit group, always referred to in the Dark Tower books as a ka-tet. But all fans will need to know is that this is King on top form, and for the first time in a long while. Cell has a devastating ending that is as good as his most frightening conclusion to date: that of Pet Sematary.