Cell (novel)

Cell

Author	Stephen King
Cover artist	Mark Stutzman
Language	English
Genre	Horror
Publisher	Scribner
Publication date	2006
Publication place	USA
Pages	355
ISBN	ISBN 0743292332

Cell is a novel published by Stephen King in January 2006.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler The novel begins on October 1st. Clayton Riddell is a struggling young artist who 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 major comic book deal with Dark Horse Comics that promises a hefty paycheck and the real possibility that he can go from teaching art to making it. He feels a little celebration is in order as he triumphantly returns from the Dark Horse meeting to his hotel. With his wife's gift 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 a matter of minutes, civilization crumbles as the masses of "phoner" victims begin attacking each other and any unaltered normals in view.

In the specific case of Clay, he gets his first taste of the looming catastrophe when he witnesses a phoner using his teeth to rip off the ear off of a luckless dog in the Common. He then watches in shock as the business-suited woman at the head of the ice cream line lunges at the truck driver, only to have her throat torn out by the teenaged girl behind her. Clay knocks out the attacking girl with the heavy glass paperweight he bought for his wife. The girl's former friend, who only received a partial blast from the Pulse, brutally mashes her own face against a light post, and runs off screaming. Cars begin crashing on all sides, people start jumping from the upper stories of the hotel across the street (with some fighting each other to death), and a steady string of ever-larger explosions rocks the city. When the ice-cream man tries to drive off and escape, his truck is crushed by one of Boston's tourist Duck Boats, now piloted by a raving lunatic. A swarm of police and fire vehicles arrive at the hotel. Witnessing all of this with Clay is a short mustached man in a tweed suit named, it is soon revealed, Tom McCourt. (While the reader also soon learns that Tom is homosexual, the book never reveals what his pre-Pulse career was.) The two of them are attacked by a male Phoner wielding a large kitchen knife; Clay is forced to use his artist's portfolio as a shield to save Tom from being gutted. They are able to knock the phoner to the ground and keep him there long enough for a policeman to appear from across the street and put the attacker out of his misery by shooting him in the head. The cop asks Clay and Tom for their personal information against the possibility of later legal questioning, but then is summoned along with his fellow officers to get to Logan Airport, itself the likely host of numerous particularly massive explosions. Clay, finally realizing what is triggering all of this, warns the departing cop not to use any cell phones.

Clay and Tom make their way to Clay's rather seedy hotel. In the lobby of the hotel, they deal with the prickly desk clerk, Mr Ricardi, before they are joined by a teenaged girl named Alice Maxwell, whom Clay saves from an attacking phoner. The shell-shocked Ricardi refuses to "abandon his post", even after having received a (non-cellular) phonecall from his frantic wife back at home, but Clay, Alice and Tom come to the decision that they have to get out of Boston as soon as they can; the chaos and explosions outside are only getting worse, climaxed by the destruction of a nearby gasoline "superstation", which has gone up in a firestorm which threatens the entire area. They gather supplies from the restaurant next door, and when Clay goes back to the lobby to reclaim his mutilated portfolio and to offer Ricardi one more chance to join them, he finds the clerk has hanged himself in his office. The three head to Tom's house, which is located in the Boston suburb of Malden; during the trip they pause with other normal survivors on the Mystic River Bridge and watch the city burn to the ground behind them. In the end the journey is not only successful but relatively peaceful, as the Pulse victims have all dropped out of sight. The next morning, watching the scene outside of Tom's house, the trio discovers that the phoners, while still engaging in spasms of violence, have reappeared and begun "flocking": migrating en mass and near lockstep through the ruined streets as they search for food, only to disappear once again as night falls. They also see that phoners are beginning to regain a semblence of intelligence: three of them raid Tom's vegetable garden before joining the flock. Despite these new developments, Clay is unalterably determined to return home to Johnny in Maine. Having no better place to go and unable to stay where they are, the other two come with him, after they all stock up on firepower from the home of the neighborhood gun enthusiast, which is empty except for the corpses of the man's wife and teen-aged daughter. Clay leaves his portfolio behind.

They trek north across a transformed New England, having fleeting encounters with other "normie" survivors and catching disturbing hints about the activities of the phoners, who are showing a strange interest in music and are still attacking non-phoners on sight. Crossing the border into New Hampshire, they find themselves in a (fictional) town called Gaiten. This is the home of the Gaiten Academy, a prep school now with one remaining teacher, a kind elderly eccentric called Charles Ardai (or simply "The Head") and one pupil, a very bright young 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 ever-more-numerous compenents into the Academy's soccer field like sardines, "switched off" until morning. The Head also shows them that the phoners have become a hive mind, are developing psychic and telekenetic powers, and are now able to play their music on a ring of unconnected boom boxes. The five of them decide that they have no choice but to try and destroy the flock, before its powers grow even stronger. They apocalyptically 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 the others to flee the scene of burning carnage, but The Head is too elderly to travel, and the others refuse to leave him. The Head tells Clay that he plans to commit suicide, in order to get Jordan to leave.

The group soon learns the extent of the phoners' true power; after a sleep filled with horrific (and prophetic) dreams, a new flock silently surrounds their residence, with a man (or a body) wearing a Harvard hoodie put forward from the ranks as a metaphorical spokesman. The flock commits bloody reprisal on all the other normals in the area, and orders the heroes to head north to a spot in Maine called "Kashwak". The Head does not get a chance to kill himself as originally planned: the man in the hoodie (dubbed "The Raggedy Man" by the heroes) eliminates The Head via the flock's psychic abilities, making the academic drive a fountain pen through his own eye and into his brain. The others bury him, and travel on north, mostly because Clay is still determined to go home.

Enroute, they learn that as "flock-killers" they have been given a reputation by the phoners as "the Gaiten bunch", 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 tearfully buries its dead and pushes on. Arriving in Clay's hometown of Kent Pond, the remaining three discover two notes written by Johnny which tell them that Clay's wife was turned into a phoner on the day of the Pulse, 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 outside of cell-phone coverage. Clay has another nightmare which reveals the intentions behind the phoners getting the normals to come to that particular location: they turned them all into phoners by lining them up and leading them into a tent at the edge of cell-phone coverage, to answer a cell phone held out by a phoner under the false pretense that it's a loved one. Clay is still intent on going on to find his son; however, after meeting up with another trio of flock-killers (Dan, a technical school teacher, a widowed pregnant woman named Denise and Ray, a construction worker with a knowledge of explosives) Tom and Jordan plan to head west, avoiding the ceremonial executions the phoners clearly have planned. (They also learn that Alice's murderers have been forced to commit suicide, punishment for touching an untouchable.)

Clay sets off alone, but before long is reunited with the others; the phoners have used their ever-increasing mental powers to force them to return and join him. Ray gives Clay a cell-phone and phone number, tells him to use them when the time is right, and shoots himself. The others drive a small school bus to Kashwak. Arriving there, they find a half-assembled county fair and an army of phoners waiting for them, among them Clay's wife, a bloody shell of her former self whom Clay both mentally and physically pushes aside. They also see that more and more of the phoners are behaving erratically, and breaking out of the flock. Jordan theorizes that a computer program was the source of the Pulse, and while it is still out there somewhere pumping out the signal into the battery-powered cell-phone network, it has become corrupted with a computer worm, distorting the message, meaning that the newer phoners have received a mutated version of the Pulse which originally struck on October 1st.

As they spend a sleepless night locked in the fair's exhibition hall waiting for their execution the next day, Clay finally realizes what Ray had planned with the cell-phone: he filled the trunk of the bus with explosives from a construction site, and wired a phone-triggered detonator to them. They manage to break a window big enough for Jordan to squeeze through, and he drives the bus right into the midst of the inert phoners. Thanks to an illegal 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.

Everyone but Clay heads north, to get well out of cellphone coverage and wait for the rapidly approaching winter to wipe out the rest of the region's unprotected phoners. Clay, still looking for his son, heads back south. Against all odds, he finds Johnny, who received a "corrupted" dose of the Pulse when he arrived at Kashwak, and fortunately wandered off before the bomb was detonated. Johnny is an erratic shell of his former self, and a heartbroken Clay is determined to help him: following Jordan's advice, he will give Johnny another blast from the Pulse, hoping that it will 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 tell his son when there was a call for him ("Fo fo you you") before the Pulse hit.

eBay auction

This project is unique because a role in the story was offered to the winner of a charity auction sponsored by eBay. The winner of the auction was a Ft. Lauderdale woman named Pam Alexander, who gave the honor as a gift to her brother Ray Huizenga. The character named after the lucky recipient was one of the "flock killers" in the story.

The terms of the contest can be seen below.

"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 are also participating in the online auction, selling roles in their upcoming books. The King auction ran between September 8 and 18, 2005 and the winner paid over $20,000.

Film

On March 8th, 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.

Trivia

• King dedicated the book to friend George Romero, the film director who helped create the zombie genre with his Night of the Living Dead series. Romero has worked with King on numerous occasions including Creepshow and the feature film version of The Dark Half. King wrote about Romero's passion as a filmmaker in his column for Entertainment Weekly, and Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead are both directly mentioned in the book.

• The book is also dedicated to sci-fi/horror legend Richard Matheson whose novel I Am Legend similarly depicts a clash of "normal" against paranormal.

• A Japanese movie with a similar plot in which technology causes apocalyptical consequences, Kairo, was released in 2001. It is being adapted into an American version titled Pulse, which will be released on July 14th, 2006. Similarities between the works are purely coincidental.

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

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:

• When Riddell first watches the 'flock' behavior from inside a house, there is a passing reference to a 'herringbone pattern' in the shadows along the path the phone crazies. This is a possible reference to the look of the Beams of the Dark Tower series; however, the pattern dissipates and the phone-crazies immediately begin to move randomly again.

• Late in the novel, Riddell stumbles 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.

• Just after Clay, Tom and Alice meet up with Jordan and Ardai, they decide to kill the "flock" with tanker trucks from Academy Grove Citgo. In DT4, Citgo is the name of the field of oil derricks where Roland and Susan go to count working oil pumps.

• Riddell's comic-book character, the "Dark Wanderer", resembles Roland Deschain of the Dark Tower series.

• The large .45 Colt and its ammunition play an important part in the storyline, and it is mentioned in The Drawing of the Three that this is the type of ammunition required for Roland's guns.

• 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.

• The number 19, which is prominently featured in the later volumes of the Dark tower series, is referenced to several times, including the year that the Head's academy was founded (1864 adds up to 19), the "Route 19" travelled by the characters during the tale, and the numbers that Clay has to dial on the cell phone near the end of the book (919 and 8911 both add up to 19).

Other references

• The book also 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" is mentioned by a traveller when "Lawrence Welk and his champagne music makers" can be heard playing Baby Elephant Waltz. This is the 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.

Critical reception

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 apocalyptic masterpiece, The Stand. In Cell the world ends because of cell phones instead of a super flu. 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 about good versus evil with good and evil clearly defined, whereas Cell is more about the attempt to survive in a world gone wrong. Furthermore, the religious symbolism in The Stand is absent in Cell. When one looks at the story closely, Cell really couldn't be more different.

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, and everything expressed in the book about it is actually speculation by the characters.

The open-ended fate of protagonist Clay Riddell and his son frustrated others. In response to this, Stephen King has 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?

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 last books were a short story collection, Everything's Eventual and the completion of The Dark Tower, and the subversive pulp crime novel The Colorado Kid, and the world had not had 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.

External links

• Cell at IMDb