Product Description

On October 1st, God is in His heaven, the stock market stands at 10,140, most of the planes are on time, and Clayton Riddell, an artist from Maine, is almost bouncing up Boylston Street in Boston. He's just landed a comic book deal that might finally enable him to support his family by making art instead of teaching it. He's already picked up a gift for his long-suffering wife, and he knows just what he'll get for his boy Johnny. Why not a little treat for himself? Clay's feeling good about the future.

That changes in a hurry. The cause of the devastation is a phenomenon that will come to be known as The Pulse, and the delivery method is a cell phone. Everyone's cell phone. Clay and the few desperate survivors who join him suddenly find themselves in the pitch-black night of civilization's darkest age, surrounded by chaos, carnage, and a human horde that has been reduced to its basest nature...and then begins to evolve.

There are one hundred and ninety-three million cell phones in the United States alone. Who doesn't have one? Stephen King's utterly gripping, gory, and fascinating novel doesn't just ask the question "Can you hear me now?" It answers it with a vengeance.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #367147 in Books
• Published on: 2006-01-24
• Released on: 2006-01-24
• Formats: Audiobook, Unabridged
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 12
• Binding: Audio CD

Amazon.com Review
Witness Stephen King's triumphant, blood-spattered return to the genre that made him famous. Cell, the king of horror's homage to zombie films (the book is dedicated in part to George A. Romero) is his goriest, most horrific novel in years, not to mention the most intensely paced. Casting aside his love of elaborate character and town histories and penchant for delayed gratification, King yanks readers off their feet within the first few pages; dragging them into the fray and offering no chance catch their breath until the very last page.

In Cell King taps into readers fears of technological warfare and terrorism. Mobile phones deliver the apocalypse to millions of unsuspecting humans by wiping their brains of any humanity, leaving only aggressive and destructive impulses behind. Those without cell phones, like illustrator Clayton Riddell and his small band of "normies," must fight for survival, and their journey to find Clayton's estranged wife and young son rockets the book toward resolution.

Fans that have followed King from the beginning will recognize and appreciate Cell as a departure--King's writing has not been so pure of heart and free of hang-ups in years (wrapping up his phenomenal Dark Tower series and receiving a medal from the National Book Foundation doesn't hurt either). "Retirement" clearly suits King, and lucky for us, having nothing left to prove frees him up to write frenzied, juiced-up horror-thrillers like Cell. --Daphne Durham

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. It's probably a good idea not to use your cell phone while you listen to Scott's beautifully understated reading of terrormeister King's latest take on technology run amok: you might just toss it down the nearest storm drain. The excellent film actor (who catches the power of his late father George C. Scott's voice but smooths off the rough edges) adds an important element—quiet believability—to King's bloody, occasionally over-the-top story of a short but lethal electronic signal that seriously damages everyone in the world using a cell phone at that moment. The Pulse, as it comes to be known, turns idle chatterers into weirdly rewired killing machines. Scott makes the lead character—a comic book artist from Maine (where else?) named Clayton Riddell, who is in Boston with his phone off and in his pocket—a touching and surprisingly tough survivor, much like the nonpods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He also resists the temptation to make the "phoners" (those affected by the Pulse) sound unusually strange or dangerous—until their real motives become obvious. Simultaneous release with the Scribner hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 2). (Jan.)
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From The Washington Post
If any writer is capable of producing the Great American Zombie Novel, it would have to be Stephen King. In the past, King has scared us with dead cats and rabid dogs, killer clowns and killer flus, sinister government agents, homicidal Plymouths and otherworldly Buicks, schoolyard bullies and strange men in yellow raincoats. He has frightened us with things as eldritch as the Lovecraftian horrors of "The Mist" and as mundane as the industrial laundry press in "The Mangler." Nor has he neglected the old monsters -- familiar friends from childhood and the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. He gave us vampires in Salem's Lot, created werewolves in It and Cycle of the Werewolf, used aliens in The Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher, and when he turned to ghosts, he produced The Shining, which ranks among the finest haunted-house stories of all time, right up there with Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. And now, with Cell, the zombie has shambled to the front of the queue, as might have been expected. What no one could have anticipated, however, was that the zombie would be clutching a cell phone. King's new novel opens with a young comic book artist named Clay Riddell strolling happily down Boylston Street in Boston, swinging his portfolio in one hand. Clay has just sold his graphic novel "Dark Wanderer" to Dark Horse Comics, and he is pretty pleased about it. He stops at a Mister Softee truck to treat himself to an ice cream in celebration, lining up behind a pair of teenage girls and a woman with a poodle. The girls are sharing a cell phone as they wait, and the woman with the poodle is talking on her own. Clay does not own a cell phone. That's what saves him when "the pulse" comes crackling through the cell towers. The woman closes her phone and tries to climb through the window of the Mister Softee truck to tear out the ice cream vendor's throat. When she fails, one of the girls rips out her throat instead, while the other backs away, half-mad and muttering. The poodle is run over by a careening limo, and down the block a businessman bites the ear off a Labrador. Clay doesn't understand what is happening, though he knows it is nothing good. We're a little ahead of him. We know that all the cell phone users in Boston, and maybe the world, have suddenly been transformed into crazed, carnivorous zombies. There is something wonderfully mordant about making zombies by means of a cell phone, rather than a virus or a voodoo curse. Cell is going to be especially unsettling for the traveler looking for something to read on the airplane. As he sits in the boarding area waiting for his seat to be called, he need only glance around to find a dozen zombies-in-the-making, locked into their own worlds, muttering into their mobiles. The telephone allows us to communicate with those far away; the cell phone isolates us from those around us. The pulse also works splendidly as a plot device. One of the major problems with a good many zombie films is the lack of a second act. When the story opens, there are no zombies around. Then one or two appear and attack the living, and suddenly hordes of zombies are all over the place, surrounding the few remaining bands of the living wherever they seek shelter. One is always left wondering where they all came from and why the police and the army were not able to put them down at the beginning, when there were only a few. That's not a problem in Cell. King creates millions of zombies in less time than it takes to fill an ice cream cone. And when all the madness breaks out, what could be more natural for the survivors than to reach for their cells to call 911 to report that the kid next door is eating his mother? Zombies are the Rodney Dangerfield of monsterdom, the poor relation none of the other monsters wants to admit to knowing. Vampires boast of ancient lineages and dwell in magnificent (if somewhat ruined) estates. They dress elegantly and quote poetry, and while they may not drink wine, you know that if they did, it would be only the best vintages. Werewolves tend to be average joes, ordinary working stiffs who say their prayers by night until stricken by lycanthropy. Aside from a few nights when the moon is full, they're just folks like you and me. Zombies, though? Rotting corpses, ripe and decaying, dressed in rags and covered with dirt, mindless, clumsy, slow, hideous and foul-smelling. The sheriff in "Night of the Living Dead" summed them up perfectly when he said, "They're dead ... they're all messed up." The zombie of Haitian folklore, created by voodoo to do the bidding of its creator, was mindless muscle, a ragged slave having more in common with Igor than with Frankenstein. But the traditional zombie is seldom seen these days, his ecological niche having been usurped by the new-style zombie created by George A. Romero in his classic black-and-white film "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), which influenced a whole generation of zombie-lovers and spawned numerous sequels and imitations. Romero severed the zombie's connection with voodoo and freed him from his slavery, sending him forth in search of human flesh. It was Romero who made the zombie a cannibal, and he has remained one ever since. Neither species of zombie is especially formidable, if truth be told. No special equipment is needed to dispose of them: no stakes or silver bullets, just a gun (an axe will do in a pinch). A shot to the head will put your zombie down for good, and they're so slow it's hard to miss. Whereas one vampire can ruin the whole neighborhood, one zombie is just an excuse for target practice. Zombies are truly terrifying only in large groups. (Is there a collective noun for the living dead yet? If not, let me propose "a shamble of zombies.") After the pulse, King's narrative proceeds in a straightforward manner. Clay has an estranged wife and a beloved son back in Maine, and he's desperate to get back to them. With civilization collapsing all around him, the only way to reach them is to walk. He meets other survivors along the way and joins forces with some of them. Before long they begin to see the phrase "KASHWAK=NO-FO" scrawled on walls and doors, pointing them toward an area of rural Maine without cell phone reception ... but is Kashwak a refuge, or a trap? King dedicates Cell to Romero and to Richard Matheson, and it is easy to see why. While parts of the narrative evoke faint echoes of Matheson's classic last-man-alive vampire novel I Am Legend, Romero's influence is stronger, a fact that even King's characters remark upon. "It's like the ... 'Night of the Living Dead,'" says the cop whom Clay encounters only moments after the pulse. The reader will have already noticed that, of course, but by giving voice to that thought, the cop somehow roots this story more solidly in the real world. The resemblance is only skin deep, however. While King's "phoners" do evoke memories of Romero's animate corpses, there are important differences. The phoners are not dead, for starters. And Romero's zombies are as hungry and implacable at night as during the day, but King's vanish mysteriously after the sun goes down. In a nice twist, night is the safest time for Clay and the other "normies." Also, whereas Romero's living dead are the next best thing to mindless, the phoners grow smarter as we get deeper and deeper into the novel. They begin to herd together, to commune with one another and to develop a taste for bad rock music. Before long, we have left Romero territory entirely and entered the land of John Wyndham and The Midwich Cuckoos. The phoners are evolving into something more and less than human, joining into nests, hive minds linked together by telepathy. That's something we have not seen before in a zombie story, and it makes the phoners considerably stranger and much more powerful ... and yet somehow less frightening. The monster who talks to you can never be quite as scary as the one who just wants to eat you. That said, Cell is hard to put down once you've picked it up. There is no shortage of harrowing scenes. The best is a sequence at an abandoned boys' school, where King introduces us to an elderly headmaster and the last of his charges, deftly drawn characters who immediately engage our sympathy. I only wish I could say the same of Clay. King always delivers the scares, but his best work does a great deal more. The Shining is a tragedy as well as ghost story, and at its center is Jack Torrance, who is as much a tragic hero as a monster. The Green Mile works so powerfully because we come to know every one of the all-too-human guards and prisoners in that prison. Andy Dufresne and Red of "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," poor doomed Carrie White in Carrie, the four friends who go looking for a corpse in "The Body" -- in all of King's best work, the characters are as memorable as the monsters. Not so in Cell. Early in the book, before the enormity of what has happened has quite sunk in, Clay fights off an attack with his portfolio, and is grieved and distressed when the sketches of his "Dark Wanderer" characters are damaged. It is a nice moment, and a defining one, but Clay has too few of those, and once the portfolio is left behind, he becomes more and more the standard-issue protagonist and less and less an individual. In Danse Macabre, his landmark critical study of horror in fiction and film, King writes that horror fiction "exists on three more or less separate levels, each one a little less fine than the one before it." The finest emotion is terror, King suggests, and below it lie horror and revulsion. "I recognize terror as the finest emotion ... and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out." Cell has plenty of gross-out moments and ascends to the level of horror more than once, but it never reaches true terror, let alone the heights achieved by King's best work. While it is a solid, entertaining read, I'm afraid we will need to wait a bit longer for that Great American Zombie Novel. George R.R. Martin is the author of numerous fantasy novels, among them "Illumination" and "The Binder's Road."

Reviewed by George R.R. Martin
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Don't Use Your Cell Phone
The wonderful thing about King's new novel, Cell, is that he takes a relatively ordinary phenomenon of contemporary life and turns it into a shocking horror fest. This is King's great talent, and no one does it better. From the pet cemetary in the woods to the nice family doggie (who now has rabies), King populates his middle-class American landscape with familiar things that have now turned nightmarishly psychotic. In Cell, King jams an urban myth into the highest gear. What if cell phones didn't cause cancer? What if they did something much worse? What if they turned the user into a zombie killing machine? From the first page to the last, you're hooked. It doesn't matter if the reading calories are empty; you can't stop reading. That's why King, above everything else (and perhaps in spite of everything else) has remained the best selling author in the world. You can't stop reading him.

Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets

Rumors of King's retirement greatly exaggerated
And I, for one, am glad King is still writing--even if I was nervous about picking up my cell phone for a couple of days!

The editorial reviews tell you everything you need to know about the plot, so I won't repeat it here.

When I read this book I saw comparisons to two novels; one of those books is Dean Koontz's "The Taking." Although the plots are superficially the same--a trip through a nightmare world--the books are very different in style, in tone, and in the "whys" underlying them. [Depending on your point of view, by the way, you'll find King's explanation either inspired or exasperating.]

The comparisons to the zombies of George A. Romero's movies are fairly obvious, but the descriptions of human life after the Pulse, for Clay and his band of struggling "normies," and of non-human life, if you will, for the "phoners," reminded me of a more classic novel, Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend." [King has noted his admiration for Matheson in the past, and, in fact, "Cell" is dedicated to Romero and Matheson.] What scared me most about this novel, as with "Legend," was the fact that everything in the book felt like it really *could* happen here.

And that plausibility carries through to the ending. It's difficult to write an ending for a book like this one, but King managed to write one that makes sense without false optimism (as the book's prologue notes, most of America is dead by the time the book ends) *or* unnecessary pathos.

All in all, King fans will be thrilled by this book; as an added bonus, it also includes an excerpt from King's next novel, "Lisey's Story" (due out in October 2006), which I am now eagerly awaiting.

You'll never think of those words: "Can you hear me now?" in quite the same way again...
If for no other reason, I thank Stephen King for taking those five words which haunt tv commercials:, "Can you hear me now?" and turning the phrase into something more than merely annoying..and into the realm of the truly ominous. While it might seem obvious to some of us that cell phones are horrible little devices, it still takes a pretty talented writer to write a book about evil spread by cell phones...and to keep readers riveted the entire time. I was one of those readers. Like King, I refuse to have a cell phone, an "electronic leash". No thanks.

But I'm really digressing here. Back to The Cell . If you think you don't like King's "supernatural" or "horror" style, I'd urge you to give The Cell a chance. I read it from cover to cover in one sitting.
I can't say it is the best book he's written but it was still a fine read and had many of the trademarks of King's superior writing - excellent characterization, an unpredictable plot and just enough plausability to make me think, "WHat if?" What if there WERE some way to use cell phones to affect people's brains, to create insanity in our population, with results leading to the brink of civilization's collapse?

It is to King's credit that he not only raises these questions but kept me wanting to find out what happened next, to see what happened to Clayton, a guy who happens to be away from home when all hell breaks out. By the time it does, I was already intrigued by this guy, someone who was trying to figure out a way to curry his estranged wife's favor, who had the usual worries and imperfections of the average man. He was no hero, just an ordinary guy, just trying to get by, thinking about his career and the next step in his day, the usual stuff..when everything changes in an instant and he faces the type of test that he never could have foreseen, not in his usual routine..nope, not him. All aroud him, people are attacking each other and there doesn't seem to be a reason why. Clayton is forced to think quickly to save himself and others, without any inkling of WHY all this is happening...at least, not at first.

I won't go into any of the "symbolism" that I'm sure some critics will have a field day exploring, maybe something about how cell phones represent "terrorists" and the horror and uncertainty akin to the type that hit New Yorkers after 9/11, when normal life was suddenly a speck in the distance. A detailed talk about symbolism and metaphor is for someone else to write.
All I can add is that I found this book to be one heck of a good way to spend the day, allowing me to forget about the small irritations in my own life (the dishes in the sink, the piles of laundry) and to ignore the twinges of guilt about that for a bit longer. I needed an excuse to avoid that, feeling tired and burned out on that particular day.

I'm glad I put off my usual routine a bit longer because when I finally came up for air, bleary-eyed at 4 in the morning after reading the very last lines in the book, I felt oddly reinvigorated. I stayed up most of the REST of the night washing dishes and finishing laundry as my nerves settled (thanks, King) but didn't regret a moment of the time I'd spend deviating from my usual routine...well, okay, maybe a little...but it was still worth it.