I haven’t been doing a ton of reading lately, but I have been working my way through a Stephen King novel that I picked up off the bargain rack: Cell.

It’s not the sort of earth-shattering powerhouse that The Stand was, but it’s in a similar vein: post-apocalyptic survivalist us-vs-them quest to save the world.

I’m not going to write a full review or anything, but I just wanted to share something. In the novel, much of humanity is turned into, essentially, zombies by a mysterious transmission on their cell phones (get it? Cell? Social commentary, whee!). But as part of the mysterious transmission, the affected zombies develop this sort of hive-mind shared consciousness and begin to swarm and flock and generally do all kinds of freaky, unsettling stuff.

But one motif that sort of threads through the whole thing — and serves to defuse the abject terror of the situation — is that the phone-crazies huddle together at night to rest, reboot, and listen to some truly terrible music. One such piece of music is Baby Elephant Walk, by Henry Mancini. And, well, I just took it as granted that it was a ridiculous bit of fluff — with a name like Baby Elephant Walk how could it be anything but ponderous, playful, and harmless?

But I got to the end of the novel and it came up again, and I realized I needed to know what exactly the Baby Elephant Walk was all about. So I googled it, and now I know that I knew what it was all along.

Yeah. That’s basically the zombies’ theme in this post-apocalyptic horror-show novel. Fargoing fantastic.