Cell (novel)

Cell

Author	Stephen King
Cover artist	Mark Stutzman
Language	English
Genre	Horror novel
Publisher	Scribner
Publication date	January 2006
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	355 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-7432-9233-2

Cell is an apocalyptic horror novel published by American author Stephen King in January 2006. The plot concerns a New England artist struggling 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.

Plot summary

The Pulse

It is the afternoon of 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 lucrative comic book deal, offering the likelihood that he can go from teaching art to making it. As he waits in line at a Boston Common ice cream truck for a celebratory treat, 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 had previously 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. 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. The two of them are attacked by a knife-wielding phoner but Clay manages to knock the man to the ground long enough for a policeman to appear and shoot the attacker dead. The cop and his fellow officers are then 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 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.

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 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 show Clay and his friends where the local phoner flock goes at night: packing its components 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 do this 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 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 flock's metaphorical spokesman: the man (or body) wearing the Harvard hoodie. 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 as untouchables by the phoners, 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 phoners 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, avoiding the ceremonial executions the phoners clearly have planned. (It is also revealed that Alice's murderers were telepathically compelled into committing suicide as punishment for touching an untouchable.)

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 are waiting for the new arrivals; among them is the battered shell of Clay's wife, whom 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, 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 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 gives Johnny another blast from the Pulse, hoping that the increasingly corrupted iterations of the Pulse will destroy each other and allow his son's brain to reset 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".

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, but then later commits suicide, saying that the group's current way of life is 'no way to live'.

Literary significance & criticism

The book generally received good reviews from critics. Publishers Weekly described it as "a glib, technophobic but compelling look at the end of civilization" and full of "jaunty and witty" sociological observations . Stephen King scholar Bev Vincent said "It's a dark, gritty, pessimistic novel in many ways and stands in stark contrast to the fundamental optimism of The Stand".

The book reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list, and the motion picture rights have been sold.

Allusions/References

Similar plot devices in other Fiction

• In the September 30, 1994 episode of the TV series The X-Files titled "Blood" (episode 2x03) a small town in Pennsylvania sees a spree of random killings as people go into fear-driven berserk rages after receiving hypnotic messages urging them to kill via LCD read-outs of various electronic devices such as scanners, elevators, ATMs, cell-phones, clocks etc. and television screens. An illegal pesticide used on the area is also involved in triggering the fear response. The 1996 X-Files novel Fear adapted the episode as a novelization for young readers.
• The 2002 British horror movie 28 Days Later features a very similar plot: The outbreak of "the rage virus" causes the majority of the populace (in this case of the British Isles) to turn into homicidal blood-crazed maniacs and go on a killing spree, while motley groups of uninfected survivors try to reach the supposedly safe sanctuary of the city of Manchester. By and by, the infected are dying of starvation.
• The television show Threshold featured an extaterrestrial audio signal that transformed the DNA of humans that were exposed into an alien DNA, making them violent and relentlessly self-replicating and -defensive, and with hive mind-like properties.
• 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, Firestarter, The Tommyknockers, and Dreamcatcher.

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 traveler 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. It was The Lawrence Welk Show's in-studio sponsor early on, and was later replaced by Geritol.
• The concept of an 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 references Stephenson in the book, when the character of Jordan calls him "a god".
• The Raggedy Man is the name of a poem by the American poet James Whitcomb Riley.
• The book is co-dedicated to film director George A. 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 -- although the effects of The Pulse more closely resemble the effects of the bioweapon in Romero's 1973 film The Crazies, in that phoners are not dead and that they indiscriminately attack each other and normals, unlike Romero's ghouls who exclusively attack the living. In much the same vein as Cell, Matheson's novel I Am Legend depicts a lone "normal" waging a grim post-apocalyptic battle against an army of hideously-altered former humans.
• In the story, King makes a reference to Juniper Hill (a mental hospital), which he has used in other stories as well, such as IT.
• Clay's son goes to a middle school in Chamberlain, Maine. This is the town where Carrie took place.
• In Carrie a prediction is made that Chamberlain would grow dead. But here we see Chamberlain is still alive.
• A "half-constructed kiddie ride" at Kashwak is named Charlie the Choo-Choo. This was the name of a plot-important children's book in King's The Dark Tower series.

Outside References

• The character of Charles Ardai was named after the entrepreneur who published King's novel The Colorado Kid.

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 2008 release.

Says Roth about his approach to the film:

I f***ing 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.

According to IMDB, the film will be released in 2009.

On June 15, 2007, Eli Roth posted in his MySpace blog that he will not be directing Cell "anytime soon", as he plans to spend the rest of this year writing other projects.

External links

• Cell at IMDb
• Literary review at Reader Meet Author