Cell

Cell
First edition cover
Author	Stephen King
Cover artist	Mark Stutzman
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Horror novel
Publisher	Scribner
Publication date	January 24, 2006
Media type	Print (Hardcover)
Pages	355
ISBN	0743292332
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 22
LC Classification	PS3561.I483 C38 2006
Preceded by	The Colorado Kid
Followed by	Lisey's Story

Cell is an apocalyptic horror novel published by American author Stephen King in 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 the majority of his fellow humans into mindless vicious animals.

Plot Summary

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Clayton Riddell, a struggling artist from Maine who is estranged from his wife, Sharon, and his young son, Johnny, has landed a graphic novel deal in Boston. As he prepares to celebrate, somebody, somewhere, triggers "The Pulse," a signal sent out over the global cell phone network that instantly turns all cell phone users into bloodthirsty, homicidal creatures. Civilization crumbles as the Pulse's victims—dubbed "phone crazies" or simply "phoners"—attack each other or any unaltered people in view.

Amidst the chaos, Clay is thrown together with Tom McCourt, a good-natured homosexual man about Clay's age. The two decide to find shelter at the hotel that Clay was formerly staying at, where they meet an employee (referred to as Mr. Ricardi) who lets them inside after some minor arguments. Before they enter, Clay notices a girl standing across the street, but who at the sight of him runs away. Mr. Ricardi reveals that he had already shut off the elavator systems and blocked off the staircase with luggage in order to block off the guests that were turned into phone crazies.

Suddenly, the girl that Clay had noticed begins to pound against the hotel doors, pleading to be let in. She is being chased by a phone crazy, whom Clay kills after letting the girl inside. The girl, Alice Maxwell, explains that her mother owned a cell phone and was turned into a phone crazy while the two were riding in a taxi cab. Alice managed to escape before her own mother could kill her, and since then had been in a sort of catatonic state. Explosions echoeing outside, Clay advises that the four leave Boston, for fear that in time it will burn to the ground. Alice and Tom agree, but Mr. Ricardi is hesitant and decides to stay.

The three head towards a deli across the street to find food for the upcoming trip. Before leaving, Clay remembers that he left his portfolio of drawings in the hotel and upon returning to retrieve it, discovers that Mr. Ricardi had commited suicide, much to Clay's disdain. Clay informs Alice and Tom of Mr. Ricardis fate before the three make plans to travel to Tom's house in Malden to take shelter. As they leave Boston, they discover that the city had in fact, burned to the ground.

Upon arriving at Tom's house, the three take shelter and prepare for sleep, with Clay taking watch. However, Clay is woken by Tom to reveal that three phoners have broken into Tom's garden and are eating his vegetables. After a while, a phoner kills an elderly phoner before the two remaining phone crazies flee to the front yard, where Clay, Tom and Alice discover a large number of migrating phone crazies, only to disappear once again at dusk. They also begin to regain a semblance of intelligence, and forage not only for food, but also radios and CD players. Despite these developments, Clay is determined to return to Maine to rescue Johnny. Having no better alternatives, Tom and Alice come with him. They trek north by night across a devastated New England, having fleeting encounters with other survivors and catching disturbing hints about the activities of the phone crazies, who still attack non-phoners on sight.

Crossing into New Hampshire, they arrive at the Gaiten Academy, a prep school with one remaining teacher, Charles Ardai, and one surviving pupil, Jordan. The two of them show the newcomers where the local phoner flock goes at night: packing its components into the Academy's soccer field like sardines, "switched off" until morning. They also notice that there are many radios and speakers throughout the field, playing random songs each time. Ardai demonstrates that the phoners have become a hive mind, and are developing psychic and telekinetic abilities. The five of them decide that they must destroy the flock before its powers grow even stronger. They do this by parking two propane tankers on the soccer field and waiting for the flock to settle in for the night. They then blow up the vehicles with a shot from a revolver, killing the flock.

Clay tries to get everyone to flee the resulting scene of carnage, but Ardai is too elderly to travel, and the others refuse to leave him, especially Jordan. The sleep that follows is filled with a horrific dream, in which everyone sees themselves in a stadium, surrounded by hundreds of phoners who broadcast a grim telepathic threat in Latin. A disheveled man wearing a Harvard University hooded sweatshirt approaches, bringing their death. Waking, the heroes compare notes and dub him "The Raggedy Man". A new flock surrounds their residence, and the trapped normies face the flock's metaphorical spokesman: the man 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", where there is no cell phone reception. To pre-empt one objection, the flock psychically compels Ardai to commit suicide after writing the word "insane" in multiple languages. 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 psychically marked as untouchables, to be shunned by other normies. They also learn the phoners have recruited normals to guard them while they "sleep". Following a petty squabble on the road, Alice is tragically killed by a loutish pair of normals. After burying her, the group arrives in Clay's hometown of Kent Pond. They discover notes from Johnny which tell them that Sharon turned into a phoner, but that her son survived for several days, before he and the other local normies were prompted by the phoners to head to Kashwak. 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 group of flock-killers, Tom and Jordan plan to head west to avoid the ceremonial executions the phoners clearly have planned for them. Before leaving, the group discovers that Alice's murderers were compelled into suicide as punishment for touching Alice, an untouchable.

Clay sets off alone, but the others soon reappear driving a small school bus; the phoners have used their ever-increasing powers to force them to rejoin him. One of the other flock-killers, a construction worker named Ray, secretly gives Clay a cell phone and a phone number, telling him to use them when the time is right. Ray then commits suicide. The group arrives at Kashwak, the site of a half-assembled county fair. The travelers notice that the phoners are beginning to behave erratically and are breaking out of the flock. Jordan theorizes that a computer program was the source of the Pulse, and while it is still broadcasting its signal into the battery-powered cell phone network, it has become corrupted with a computer worm that has infected the newer phoners with a mutated version of the original Pulse. Nevertheless, an entire army of phoners is waiting for the flock-killers; among them is Sharon, whom Clay pushes aside. As night falls, the phoners lock the group in the fair's exhibition hall.

As a sleepless Clay waits for his execution the next morning, he discovers what Ray planned with the cell phone: he filled the rear of the bus with explosives, wired a phone-triggered detonator to them, and killed himself to prevent the phoners from telepathically discovering his plan. After Clay informs the group of the plan, they break a window for Jordan to squeeze through so he can drive the bus. He drives the vehicle into the midst of the inert phoners. Thanks to a jerry-rigged cellphone patch set up by the fair workers pre-Pulse, the explosion works exactly as hoped, and another scene of mass carnage rains down. The Raggedy Man and his flock are destroyed.

The majority of the group heads north into Canada, to get out of cellphone coverage and let the approaching winter wipe out the region's unprotected phoners. Clay still seeks his son; after making arrangements with the others for a later rendezvous, he heads south. He searches a town called Gurleyville where surviving phoners wander around, now without a flock mind, utterly disoriented. Some have begun to regain speech and somewhat normal actions but are still insane. He finds Johnny, who received a "corrupted" dose of the Pulse; not only did he successfully wander away from Kashwak, he seems to almost recognize his father. However, Johnny is an erratic shadow of his former self, and so, 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 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 to Johnny in pre-Pulse days when there was a phone call; "Fo-fo-you-you."

Ending

Allegedly, Stephen King himself wrote the following in an online message board (posted 12:41pm March 24, 2006)^{[citation needed]}:

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? -Steve

eBay auction

A role in the story was offered to the winner of a charity auction sponsored by eBay ^[1]:

"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 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 in the aid of the "flock killers" escape.^[2]

Reception

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 ^[3]. 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".^[4]

Allusions/references

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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 was previously mentioned in Gerald's Game, in which the 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 Walk, 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.^[5]
• 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, which is the town where King's novel Carrie was set.
• The town of Kashwak is said to be somewhere in the vicinity of the unincorporated township of TR-90 - the setting for King's earlier novel Bag of Bones .
• In the story, the Head's vegetable garden is called the 'Victory Garden', the same name as was given to the vegetable garden at Hetton House in King's Blaze. This was also a common name given to gardens grown by people during the Second World War. They were intended as a way for people on the home front to help by growing as much of their own food as they could rather than buying it, thus helping to alleviate demand for food back home and increase supplies for the war effort.
• The story mentions the Micmac Indians several times. In Pet Sematary, Church, Gage, and Rachel were buried and brought back to life in the Micmac Burial Ground.
• As is typical of King's novels, several elements of the Cell reference King's The Dark Tower series. A "half-constructed kiddie ride" at Kashwak is named Charlie the Choo-Choo, which is also the name of a plot-important children's book in The Dark Tower series. Also, the graphic novel that Clay sells prior to the Pulse is called Dark Wanderer, a story (as his wife puts it) involving "apocalypse cowboys." The story, and its characters, are likely a reference to the Dark Tower series and the gunslingers of King's apocalyptic fantasy world. Most notably, the protagonist of Clay's novel is named Ray Damon, who shares the initials of Roland Deschain, the hero of The Dark Tower Series. King frequently creates alter-egos of repeated characters with identical initials, such as Randall Flagg. There is also a recurring motif, in which many of King's villains are linked in one way or another: The Raggedy Man wears a red hooded garment, which mirrors one of the many forms of the Crimson King, who is the main antagonist of the Dark Tower series. The Raggedy Man wears a Harvard sweatshirt; Harvard's sports teams and daily newspaper are both nicknamed Crimson, another allusion to the Crimson King.
• While sitting at the kitchen table with Clay, Tom says "That's all right, then." In King's novel Bag of Bones, Mike Noonan's wife Jo always said the same thing when Mike finished a novel.

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 that was supposed to be directed by Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever) for a 2009 release.

Says Roth about his approach to the film:

I... 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.^[6]

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. On July 10, 2009, he dropped out of the project, stating the following:

There was just sort of a difference in opinion on how to make to film and what the story should be, and there’s a different direction the studio wants to go with it. It was very friendly because it’s the Weinsteins, they made Inglourious Basterds and we’re all friends. I said, ‘I’m not really interested in doing the film this way. You guys go ahead and I’m going to make my own films.’ I’ve also learned that I really am only interested in directing original stories that I write, that’s another thing I learned through that whole process.^[7]

On November 11, 2009, Stephen King announced at a book signing in Dundalk, Maryland that he had finished a screenplay. He stated that he had complaints with the ending of the book and it was redone for the screenplay.^[8]

References

External links

• Cell at the Internet Movie Database
• Literary review at Reader Meet Author