Cell (novel)
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| Author | Stephen King |
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| Cover artist | Mark Stutzman |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Horror novel |
| Publisher | Scribner |
| Released | January 2006 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 355 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-7432-9233-2 |
Cell is an apocalyptic horror novel published by the American author Stephen King in January 2006, in which a New England artist struggles to reunite with his young son after a mysterious signal broadcast over the global cell-phone network turns masses of his fellow humans into telekinetic hive-mind zombies.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
[edit] The Pulse
It is October 1, and a struggling young artist named Clayton Riddell has finally caught a break, which is good news for him, his estranged wife and their young son Johnny. He has come to Boston and landed a comic book deal with Dark Horse Comics that comes with a hefty paycheck and the likelihood that he can go from teaching art to making it. With a celebratory gift for his wife already in hand, Clay decides to treat himself to some ice cream in the Boston Common. As he waits in line at an ice cream truck, Clay's life, and the life of every human on Earth, changes forever. Somebody, somewhere, triggers "The Pulse", a signal sent out over the global cell-phone network which instantly strips any cell-phone user of their reason and humanity, locking them into a merciless homicidal frenzy. In minutes, civilization crumbles as the masses of "phoner" victims attack each other and any unaltered "normals" in view.
In the case of Clay, the business-woman at the head of the ice cream line savagely lunges at the truck driver, only to have her throat torn out by the teenage girl behind her. Clay knocks out the attacking girl with the heavy glass paperweight he bought for his wife. Cars begin crashing on all sides, people start jumping from the upper stories of the Four Seasons hotel across the street, and a string of ever-larger explosions rock the city. One of Boston's open-topped tourist Duck Boats, now piloted by a raving lunatic, crushes the ice cream truck then plows into a nearby building. A swarm of police and fire vehicles arrive at the hotel, only to be hit by the jumpers. Witnessing all of this with Clay is a short mustached man named Tom McCourt. (While the reader soon learns that Tom is gay, the book never reveals his pre-Pulse occupation.) The two of them are attacked by a knife-wielding phoner but Clay manages to knock the man to the ground and keep him there long enough for a policeman to appear and shoot the attacker in the head. After a brief conversation with the two, getting their information in case of future legal actions, the cop and his fellow officers are all summoned to Logan Airport. Clay, realizing the cause of all of this, warns the departing policeman not to use any cell phones.
Clay and Tom make their way to Clay's rather seedy hotel. There they are joined by a teenaged girl named Alice Maxwell, whom Clay saves from another attacking phoner. The three of them decide they have to get out of Boston, as the chaos outside is only getting worse. They set out on foot for Tom's house, located in the Boston suburb of Malden. While the city burns to the ground behind them, the journey proves to be not only successful but almost peaceful; the Pulse victims have all mysteriously dropped out of sight.
[edit] Flocks and Flock-Killers
The next morning the trio discovers that the phoners, while still engaging in spasms of violence, have reappeared and begun "flocking", migrating in lockstep in front of Tom's home, only to disappear once again as night falls. They are also beginning to regain a semblance of intelligence: three of them raid Tom's vegetable garden. Despite these new developments, Clay is unalterably determined to return home to Johnny in Maine. Having no better alternatives, the other two come with him, after they all stock up on firepower from the empty home of the neighborhood gun enthusiast.
They trek north by night across a devastated New England, having fleeting encounters with other "normie" survivors and catching disturbing hints about the activities of the phoners, who are still attacking non-phoners on sight. Crossing the border into New Hampshire, they find themselves at the Gaiten Academy, a prep school with one remaining teacher, the kindly but definitely "old school" Charles Ardai (or simply "The Head"), and one pupil, a very bright boy named Jordan. The two of them recruit Clay and his friends as they pass by, and show them where the local phoner flock goes at night: packing its compenents into the Academy's soccer field like sardines, "switched off" until morning. The Head also demonstrates that the phoners have become a hive mind, and are developing psychic and telekinetic abilities. The five of them decide that they have no choice but to destroy the flock, before its powers grow even stronger. They succeed in their task by parking two propane tankers on the soccer field, waiting for the flock to settle in for the night and blowing up the vehicles with a shot from a revolver. Clay tries to get everyone to flee the resulting scene of carnage, but The Head is too elderly to travel, and the others, particularly Jordan, refuse to leave him.
The sleep that follows is filled with horrific dreams, in which everyone but Alice sees themselves standing on a platform in the middle of a stadium, surrounded by hundreds of the phoners who telepathically broadcast a grim threat in Latin. A disheveled African-American man wearing a Harvard University hooded sweatshirt then approaches, bringing their death with him. Waking from this dream, the heroes compare notes and dub him "The Raggedy Man". A new flock then appears and surrounds their residence. The trapped normies open the front door to face the man (or body) wearing the Harvard hoodie, put forward as a metaphorical spokesman. The flock commits bloody reprisal on all other normals in the area, and orders the protagonists to head north to a spot in Maine called "Kashwak". To preempt one objection, the flock psychically compels the Head to commit suicide. Clay and the others bury him and travel north, mostly because Clay is still determined to go home.
En route, they learn that as "flock-killers" they have been marked by the phoners as untouchables, to be shunned by other normals. They are further disheartened to learn the phoners have now recruited normals to guard them while they "sleep". The worst blow of all hits when, following a petty squabble on the road, Alice is killed by a loutish pair of normals. Again the group buries its dead and pushes on. Arriving in Clay's hometown of Kent Pond, the remaining three discover two notes from Johnny which tell them that Clay's wife was turned into a phoner on October 1, but that his son survived for several days, before he and all the other local normies headed north to Kashwak, tricked by the phoner hive-mind into thinking it was a safe haven. Clay has another nightmare which reveals that once there, they were all exposed to the Pulse by the phoners. He is still intent on finding his son, but after meeting another trio of flock-killers (Dan, a technical school teacher, a pregnant woman named Denise and Ray, a construction worker with knowledge of explosives), Tom and Jordan plan to head west with them, avoiding the ceremonial executions the phoners clearly have planned. (It is also revealed that Alice's murderers were telekinetically executed as punishment for touching an untouchable.)
[edit] Kashwak
Clay sets off alone, but the others soon reappear driving a small school bus; the phoners have used their ever-increasing mental powers to force them to rejoin him. Ray secretly gives Clay a cell-phone and phone number, tells him to use them when the time is right, and shoots himself.
Kashwak is revealed to be the site of a half-assembled county fair. The travellers notice that more and more of the phoners are behaving erratically and breaking out of the flock; some (but not all) of these stragglers are promptly killed. Jordan theorizes that a rogue computer program was the source of the Pulse, and while it is still out there somewhere pumping its signal into the battery-powered cell-phone network, it has become corrupted with a computer worm, infecting the newer phoners with a mutated version of the Pulse which struck on October 1. Nevertheless, an entire army of phoners is waiting for the new arrivals; among them is the battered shell of Clay's wife, who the artist mentally and physically pushes aside. Night falls, and the phoners lock the group in the fair's exhibition hall.
As a sleepless Clay waits for his execution the next morning (very possibly at the hands of his wife), he realizes what Ray planned with the cell-phone: he covertly filled the trunk of the bus with explosives, wired a phone-triggered detonator to them, and then killed himself to prevent the phoners from telepathically discovering his plan. The heroes break a window large enough for Jordan to squeeze through, and he drives the bus into the midst of the inert phoners. Thanks to a jury-rigged cellphone patch set up by the pre-Pulse fair workers, the bomb works exactly as hoped, and another scene of mass carnage literally rains down. The flock has been destroyed, along with The Raggedy Man.
The majority of the group heads north into Canada, to get well out of cellphone coverage and let the approaching winter wipe out the region's unprotected phoners. Clay is still looking for his son, and after making arrangements for the others to mark their trail, heads back south. Against all odds, he finds Johnny, who received a "corrupted" dose of the Pulse when he arrived at Kashwak; not only did he successfully wander off before the bomb was detonated, he seems to almost recognize his father when they meet. However, Johnny is at best an erratic shadow of his former self, and his heartbroken father is determined to help him. Following a theory of Jordan's, Clay will give Johnny another blast from the Pulse, hoping to reset his son's brain to normal. The book ends with Clay putting a cell-phone to his son's ear, repeating what he would say in pre-Pulse days to his son when there was a call for him; "Fo fo you you".
[edit] eBay auction
A role in the story was offered to the winner of a charity auction sponsored by eBay:
"One (and only one) character name in a novel called CELL, which is now in work and which will appear in either 2006 or 2007. Buyer should be aware that CELL is a violent piece of work, which comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cell phone signals that destroy the human brain. Like cheap whiskey, it's very nasty and extremely satisfying. Character can be male or female, but a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female. In any case, I'll require physical description of auction winner, including any nickname (can be made up, I don't give a rip)."
Other authors like Peter Straub also participated in the online auction, selling roles in their upcoming books. The King auction ran between September 8 and 18, 2005 and the winner, a Ft. Lauderdale woman named Pam Alexander, paid over $20,000. Ms. Alexander gave the honor as a gift to her brother Ray Huizenga; his name was given to one of the zombie-slaughtering "flock killers" in the story, a construction worker who specializes in explosives.
[edit] Literary significance & criticism
While the book generally received good reviews from critics, some fans have expressed, especially through the customer review system of Amazon.com, that Cell is too much like King's older work. Some readers compare it to King's previous apocalyptic novel, The Stand, in which a "super-flu" wipes out most of humanity, leaving the survivors to deal with a supernatural threat. That being said, many professional critics have disagreed with this comparison. Stephen King scholar Bev Vincent has said that It's a dark, gritty, pessimistic novel in many ways and stands in stark contrast to the fundamental optimism of The Stand. [1] Furthermore, The Stand is an epic book laden with religious symbolism, and good and evil explicitly defined, whereas Cell features a straight-forward attempt to survive in a world gone wrong.
Fans have also expressed disappointment in the ambiguity of the ending; the characters in the book speculate on possible origins of the Pulse signal, but no definitive source is ever located. Additionally, the open-ended fate of protagonist Clay Riddell and his son frustrated others. In response to this second criticism, Stephen King posted a personal response on his website: Based on the information given in the final third of Cell—I’m thinking about the reversion back toward the norm of the later phone crazies—it seems pretty obvious to me that things turned out well for Clay’s son, Johnny. I don’t need to tell you this, do I?[2]
Other fans felt it was one of the better books King has written in years and a return to the grisly horror that made him famous in the first place. Prior to Cell, King's most recent books had been a short story collection titled Everything's Eventual the completion of The Dark Tower series, and the subversive pulp crime novel The Colorado Kid; the world had not seen a new stand-alone Stephen King horror novel since From a Buick 8, published in 2002.
The book still reached #1 on The New York Times bestseller list, and the motion picture rights have been sold.
[edit] Allusions/references to other works
[edit] Possible Dark Tower references
It is unknown whether or not Cell is actually part of the Dark Tower storyline, but there are some speculated references:
- The hero's comic-book character, the "Dark Wanderer" (Ray Damon), resembles Roland Deschain of the Dark Tower series; in addition to sharing the intials R.D., both men use large .45 Colt revolvers as weapons. Clay's wife, Sharon, referred to the character as Clay's "apocalyptic cowboy." Another possible analogue mentioned as being in the comic is the Wizard Flak (Randall Flagg).
- Late in the novel, the protaganists stumble across a half-assembled carnival, which includes a child's ride called "Charlie the Choo-Choo", a reference to the third and fourth books in the series.
- The unincorporated Maine township of TR-90, which features in the book, has also featured in Dreamcatcher and the Dark Tower-related Bag of Bones.
- Many numbers in the book add up to 19, a number that was cited as particularly significant in the latter three novels of the Dark Tower series. The number on the plane that crashes into a building at the begginning of the novel and the year Gaiten Academy was founded are two examples of this.
[edit] Other References
- The book makes reference to "the panic rat", which is a motif in King's work to showcase fear as an imaginary creature feeding away at the thoughts of the lead character. Clayton experiences this continually throughout the book in fear of his son's fate. This is previously mentioned in Gerald's Game, in which lead female character Jessie Burlingame experiences the panic bug as she's handcuffed to a bed.
- The enigmatic reference "Dodge had a good time, too", made by a traveller when "Lawrence Welk and his champagne music makers" can be heard playing Baby Elephant Waltz, is a reference to Dodge Division of the Chrysler Corporation (now DaimlerChrysler). It was The Lawrence Welk Show's in-studio sponsor early on, and was later replaced by Geritol.
- The concept of a auditory signal that can destroy a person's brain is very similar to the concepts put forth in Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. King also makes reference to Stephenson in the book, when Jordan called the other author "a god".
- The Raggedy Man is the name of a poem by the American poet James Whitcomb Riley[1].
- The book is co-dedicated to film director George Romero and sci-fi/horror writer Richard Matheson. Romero has worked with King on numerous occasions, including Creepshow and the feature film version of The Dark Half, and is most famous for his "Living Dead" horror movies, which feature swarms of zombies overwhelming human civilization; Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are both directly mentioned in Cell. In much the same vein as Cell, Matheson's novel I Am Legend depicts a lone "normal" waging a grim post-apocalyptic battle aginst an army of hideously-altered former humans.
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
On March 8, 2006, Ain't It Cool News announced that Dimension Films have bought the film rights to the book and will produce a film directed by Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever) for a 2007 release.
Says Roth about his approach to the film:
I fucking LOVE that book. Such a smart take on the zombie movie. I am so psyched to do it. I think you can really do almost a cross between the Dawn of the Dead remake with a 'Roland Emmerich' approach (for lack of a better reference) where you show it happening all over the world. When the pulse hits, I wanna see it hit EVERYWHERE. In restaurants, in movie theaters, at sports events, all the places that people drive you crazy when they're talking on their cell phones. I see total armageddon. People going crazy killing each other - everyone at once - all over the world. Cars smashing into each other, people getting stabbed, throats getting ripped out. The one thing I always wanted to see in zombie movies is the actual moment the plague hits, and not just in one spot, but everywhere. You usually get flashes of it happening around the world on news broadcasts, but you never actually get to experience it happening everywhere. Then as the phone crazies start to change and mutate, the story gets pared down to a story about human survival in the post-apocalyptic world ruled by phone crazies. I'm so excited, I wish the script was ready right now so I could start production. But it'll get written (or at least a draft will) while I'm doing Hostel 2, and then I can go right into it. It should feel like an ultra-violent event movie.[2]
[edit] Trivia
- As in many of King's works, the book features both telepathy and telekinesis as particularly crucial plot devices amongst the characters, as the phoners have these abilities when gathered together in large groups. Both subjects are also focal points of King's other works The Stand, Carrie and The Tommyknockers.
- The character of Charles Ardai was named after the entrepreneur who published King's novel The Colorado Kid.
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/James-Whitcomb-Riley/13678
- ^ http://www.liljas-library.com/section.php?id=35
[edit] External links
- Cell at the Internet Movie Database
