Cell : 15th Sep - 17th Oct 2015

I'm in two minds about Cell. On the one hand, I just didn't get on board with the overall conceit of a brain rebooting pulse that turns mobile phone users into 'zombies'. It's a shallow metaphor for the benign influence of mobile phones - and, considering our ever increasing enslavement to the smartphone - wholly accurate, but I'm not sure it's strong enough to hold up 400-500 pages. Telepathy loses my attention a bit too.

On the other, I welcomed a return to the familiar King territor of a band of survivors embarking on an adventure and taking on the bad guy (without all the trappings of The Dark Tower - I still have some unresolved feelings about the series, that i'll be working through. Don't worry, it's less weird than it sounds.)

I know how soft and cosseted it makes me sound to find comfort - and relief? in the familiar and formulaic, instead of hankering for King's ongoing creative evolution and waving the flag for his writing whatever he feels like writing, but in order to keep up what little momentum I have in this mission, I was happy for a 'standard-King'.

Lisey's Story is next. I didn't know a thing about it, but I've recently heard good things.