Burner

Charles Wilson has left home in rural Pennsylvania for the most important sales call of his career when he realizes on the way to the airport that he has forgotten his cell phone; his lifeline to the business world with over a thousand contacts stored in its memory banks, Wilson's cell phone has radically transformed him as a businessman and has changed the way that he conducts business since before such a device had entered his rather simple life and now he can't live without it. In fact, "nowadays if he was without his cell phone for even as little as an hour, Wilson felt completely cut off from the rest of the world, a world that provided him with a substantial income." Charles decides that since he has most of his contacts stored upon his laptop the best thing to do would be to have his wife overnight the phone to his hotel and in the interim he would look to purchase a "burn phone" - street vernacular for a pre-paid cellular phone. Unfortunately, luck does not seem to be on Wilson's side as all of the kiosks are closed at the airport and when he arrives at his hotel it is too late to make such a purchase. Charles is frustrated and berates himself for his foolishness when he is directed down a dark street (an alley, really) that runs along the side of the hotel by a strange man sitting in the lobby - perhaps the fates will favor him after all and he will find what he is looking for? And so begins Charles Wilson's hellish journey, and thus begins "Burner," a novel of Lovecraftian horror and cosmic menace by Thomas M. Malafarina.