Cell: A Novel (edition 2006)

by Stephen King

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11,611	262	565	(3.45)	1 / 176
Civilization doesn't end with a bang or a whimper. It ends with a call on your cell phone. What happens on the afternoon of October 1 came to be known as the Pulse, a signal sent though every operating cell phone that turns its user into something...well, something less than human. Savage, murderous, unthinking-and on a wanton rampage. Terrorist act? Cyber prank gone haywire? It really doesn't matter, not to the people who avoided the technological attack. What matters to them is surviving the aftermath. Before long a band of them-"normies" is how they think of themselves-have gathered on the grounds of Gaiten Academy, where the headmaster and one remaining student have something awesome and terrifying to show them on the school's moonlit soccer field. Clearly there can be no escape. The only option is to take them on.… (more)

▾Book information

Member:	JFair5150
Title:	Cell: A Novel
Authors:	Stephen King
Info:	Pocket Star (2006), Mass Market Paperback, 480 pages
Collections:	Your library
Rating:
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Work Information

Cell by Stephen King

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▾Conversations (About links)

	Group › Topic	Messages	Last Message
	King's Dear Constant Readers: July 2013’s SK Flavor of the Month – Cell	6 unread / 6	LibraryLover23, September 2014

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▾Member reviews

English (238) Italian (4) Danish (3) French (3) Dutch (3) Spanish (2) Finnish (2) German (2) Hebrew (1) Portuguese (Portugal) (1) Portuguese (1) All languages (260)

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Showing 1-5 of 238 (next | show all)

I really liked this book, even though I wasn't crazy about how it ended. It's definitely one I could read, and enjoy, again. (

)

thatnerd | Mar 2, 2024 |

Honestly - even those this concept is a little outdated - I enjoyed the ride. It was a fun audiobook and it kept me intrigued. In Cell, everyone who is on their cell phones on a normal October afternoon, are suddenly turned into crazies. They will bite and attack anyone or anything that gets in their way. Clay is in Boston for an important meeting and is instantly terrified. On the way back to his hotel he bands up with another man, Tom, and they carefully try to see shelter. They rescue a teenaged girl named Alice and soon the trio realizes they need to flee Boston before it burns to the ground. Clay desperately wants to get back to Maine to see if his son and ex-wife are ok - but doing so seems near impossible. The phone crazies are everywhere and they are starting to organize - they start flocking together and soon it is only safe to travel at night. A new apocalyptic tale that doesn't seem as relevant since no one really talks on phones anymore - they just text. Still a fun (and gory) horror read filled with interesting characters. Gotta love Stephen King! (

)

ecataldi | Feb 19, 2024 |

(2006)Only fair tale about the world being hit by some mysterious ?pulse? that causes any cell phone user on the phone at the time to go crazy. This is only a bad retelling of King's classic, The Stand. Seemed like a good idea but the story fails to resolve any questions that are raised such as ?why? and ?who?.

derailer | Jan 25, 2024 |

Pretty good at the time of the birth of cellphones. Probably dated now. (

)

37143Birnbaum | Jan 7, 2024 |

Leave it to Stephen King to make the ubiquitous cell phone an instrument of death and destruction. :-)

GordCampbell | Dec 20, 2023 |

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Showing 1-5 of 238 (next | show all)

▾Published reviews

12 reviews

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thingScore 69

If you have ever worried that using mobile phones might scramble your brain, Stephen King suggests you may just be right. It all happens at 3.02pm one afternoon, when everyone in the world using a cellphone suddenly becomes a violent maniac.

added by stephmo | editThe Guardian, Matthew Lewin (Feb 25, 2006)

Stephen King is supposed to have retired. A year ago, he published the final part of his seven-book Dark Tower saga with the book of the same name - a novel so crushingly disappointing that, reluctantly, all but King's most ardent fans were forced to agree with the author himself that it was probably time for him to stop and enjoy the royalties from his 40 or so bestsellers.

added by stephmo | editDaily Telegraph, Justin Williams (Feb 19, 2006)

Cell is Stephen King's first full-length novel since his threatened retirement in 2003. Of course, this most prolific of authors has not been idle during this period, penning a collaborative non-fiction book about baseball, a regular column for the popular US magazine Entertainment Weekly, several short stories, and even a short (and slightly puzzling) noir novel, The Colorado Kid, for small publisher Hard Case Crime. This is the first of two new novels to be published this year, with Lisey's Story to follow in October.

added by stephmo | editThe Independent, Matt Thorne (Feb 12, 2006)

This is the way the world ends... not with a bang, but a whimper.
— T. S. Elliot

Actually, it ends with a "pulse" -- an errant cell phone signal that wipes away the user's humanity, 'rebooting' their brain back to something basic... primordial... and evil. Even those within earshot of the gray matter draining signal suffer a kind of evolutionary epilepsy, reverting to a state of pure impulse and mental confusion. As the feeling consumes its host, madness takes over, and there is only one way to satisfy this cruel craving. The insanity must be met with violence, quelling the instinctual bloodlust that lay dormant inside every person's DNA. Thus the world ends, and it's the very people who protected and prospered upon it who are now intent on taking it down.

added by stephmo | editPop Matters, Bill Gibron (Feb 9, 2006)

If the stretch of years between Sept. 11 and last fall's Kashmir earthquake has reminded us of anything, it's that history can take a drastic turn in one day. Stephen King jumps into the middle of one such day on the opening pages of Cell, his first full-length novel since he came off what has to be the shortest-ever retirement not involving professional boxing. Happily wandering Boston after selling a comic-book pitch, artist Clay Riddell watches as the world goes mad when a mind-wiping electronic pulse turns everyone using a cell phone into a violent zombie.

added by stephmo | editOnion A.V. Club, Keith Phipps (Feb 8, 2006)

If any writer is capable of producing the Great American Zombie Novel, it would have to be Stephen King.

added by stephmo | editWashington Post, George R.R. Martin (Feb 5, 2006)

They say it pays to steer clear of one's heroes, and after reading "Cell," I can honestly admit I am scared as hell about the prospect of ever crossing paths with Stephen King. Because if King regards actual human beings the same way he thinks about the characters in his latest novel, his passion for enforcing rules of etiquette would most likely place him somewhere on the spectrum between Emily Post and Vlad the Impaler.

added by stephmo | editNew York Times, David Itzkoff (Feb 5, 2006)

On an ordinary Boston afternoon, all the people who use cellphones are zapped by a mysterious pulse that transforms them into flesh-craving automatons with no mental function except the desire to kill. Horrified witnesses whip out their cellphones -- and turn into zombie cannibals themselves.

added by stephmo | editWall Street Journal, Kyle Smith (Jan 26, 2006)

Stephen King once lamented that critics rarely afforded genre writers the chance to revisit themes and settings (à la John Updike and his Rabbit Angstrom novels) without accusing them of rehashing plots due to little or no imagination.

added by stephmo | editSeattle Times, Dorman T. Shindler (Jan 24, 2006)

''Cell," Stephen King's new Boston-based horror tale, is about an evil phone call that wipes out humanity, leaving a tiny, ragtag band of survivors to battle evil and save the world.

Getting deja vu? That's because King's weighty, marvelous 1978 epic, ''The Stand," is about a mutating flu virus that wipes out humanity, leaving a tiny, ragtag band of survivors to battle evil and save the world.

added by stephmo | editBoston Globe, Erica Noonan (Jan 24, 2006)

Sick and tired of having to endure other people's dreary, long-winded, one-sided cellphone calls?
Stephen King, who says he doesn't own a cellphone, has dialed up his own horror filled fantasy about what happen to those yakkers who do.

added by stephmo | editUSA Today, Carol Memmott (Jan 23, 2006)

Life is kind to the writers of horror stories these days. All they have to do is sit back and watch.

So Stephen King's "Cell" invokes the events of Sept. 11, 2001, the kind of disaster in which "clothes floated out of the sky like big snow." It echoes the upheaval caused by last year's monstrous tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. It reflects the violent anarchy to be found in Iraq. It shivers at the threat of bioterrorism and the menace of computer technology.

added by stephmo | editNew York Times, Janet Maslin (Jan 23, 2006)

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▾Other authors

» Add other authors (16 possible)

Author name	Role	Type of author	Work?	Status
King, Stephen	—	primary author	all editions	confirmed
Rekiaro, Ilkka	Translator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed
Scott, Campbell	Narrator	secondary author	some editions	confirmed

▾Series and work relationships

Belongs to Publisher Series

Heyne Allgemeine Reihe (56509)

Hodder Paperbacks

Kolekcja Mistrza Grozy (55)

Loisto

Wilhelm Heyne Verlag

Èxits (73)

Is contained in

The Shining / Cell / Misery by Stephen King

Stephen King Classic Collection: The Shining / Bag of Bones / Christine / Cell. Halloween Editions by Stephen King

Has the adaptation

Cell [2016 film] by Tod Williams

▾Awards and Honors

Distinctions

New York Times bestseller (Fiction – 2006)

Publishers Weekly Bestseller (Fiction – 2006)

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▾Common Knowledge

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Canonical title

Cell

Original title

Alternative titles

Original publication date

2006-01

People/Characters

Important places

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Malden, Massachusetts, USA

Gaiten Academy

Kent Pond, Maine, USA

Kashwak, Maine, USA

Important events

Related movies

Cell (2016 | IMDb)

Epigraph

The id will not stand for a delay in gratification. It always feels the tension of the unfulfilled urge. - Sigmund Freud

Human aggression is instinctual. Humans have not evolved any ritualized aggression-inhibiting mechanisms to ensure the survival of the species. For this reason man is considered a very dangerous animal. - Konrad Lorenz

Can you hear me now? - Verizon

Dedication

For Richard Matheson and George Romero

First words

The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time, on the afternoon of October 1.

Quotations

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)

Disambiguation notice

Publisher's editors

Blurbers

Original language

English

Canonical DDC/MDS

813.54

Canonical LCC

PS3561.I483

▾References

References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (2)

Cell (novel)

Stephen King bibliography

▾Book descriptions

Civilization doesn't end with a bang or a whimper. It ends with a call on your cell phone. What happens on the afternoon of October 1 came to be known as the Pulse, a signal sent though every operating cell phone that turns its user into something...well, something less than human. Savage, murderous, unthinking-and on a wanton rampage. Terrorist act? Cyber prank gone haywire? It really doesn't matter, not to the people who avoided the technological attack. What matters to them is surviving the aftermath. Before long a band of them-"normies" is how they think of themselves-have gathered on the grounds of Gaiten Academy, where the headmaster and one remaining student have something awesome and terrifying to show them on the school's moonlit soccer field. Clearly there can be no escape. The only option is to take them on.

▾Library descriptions

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▾LibraryThing members' description

Book description

Cell is an apocalyptic horror novel concerning 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 zombies.

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