Cell

It is October 1st, and Clayton Riddell, a struggling artist with an estranged wife and a young son named Johnny, has come to Boston from his home in Maine and landed a lucrative comic book deal. As he prepares to celebrate, 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. Civilization instantly crumbles as the masses of "phoner" victims attack each other and any unaltered "normals" in view. Amidst the chaos, Clay is thrown together with mild-mannered homosexual Tom McCourt and teenager Alice Maxwell. While the city burns behind them, the three of them walk to Tom's house in the Boston suburb of Malden. The journey is not only successful but almost peaceful; as night falls the Pulse victims all mysteriously drop out of sight.

The next morning the phoners, while still engaging in spasms of violence, reappear and begin "flocking", migrating in lockstep outside Tom's home, only to disappear once again at dusk. They also begin to regain a semblance of intelligence: three of them raid Tom's vegetable garden. Despite these new developments, Clay is unalterably determined to return to Johnny. Having no better alternatives, the other two come with him, after they 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 still attack non-phoners on sight. Crossing 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 "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 must 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 in a stadium, surrounded by hundreds of phoners who broadcast a grim telepathic threat in Latin. A disheveled African-American 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 (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 psychically marked as 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 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 compelled into committing suicide as punishment for touching 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. 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 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. Jordan theorizes that a rogue computer program was the source of the Pulse, and while it is still 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 arrivals; among them is the battered shell of Clay's wife, whom the artist 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; not only did he successfully wander away from Kaskwak, he seems to almost recognize his father when they meet. However, Johnny is at best 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 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 phonecall; "Fo fo you you."

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'.

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.

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 extraterrestrial 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.

The second series of the relaunch of the show Doctor Who featured two episodes ("Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel") where people were controlled by earpieces that were meant to be reminiscent of cell phones. They were marched into factories, and then subsequently turned into Cybermen: human brains in metal armor with a hive-mind mentality. Similiary, in the three-part finale of the third series, the Master used subliminal messaging through cell phones to get the population to vote for his Mr. Saxon persona, allowing him to unleash an alien invasion and take over the world.
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, which is is the town where King's novel Carrie was set.

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. 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.

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

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.

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