Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Scribner (2006), Edition: Large Print, 384 pages
Description
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)
Media reviews
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.
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
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probably time for him to stop and enjoy the royalties from his 40 or so bestsellers. Show Less
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
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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. Show Less
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
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
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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. Show Less
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
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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. Show Less
If any writer is capable of producing the Great American Zombie Novel, it would have to be Stephen King.
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
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for enforcing rules of etiquette would most likely place him somewhere on the spectrum between Emily Post and Vlad the Impaler. Show Less
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.
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.
''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
Getting deja vu? That's because King's weighty, marvelous 1978 epic, ''The Stand," is about a mutating flu virus
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that wipes out humanity, leaving a tiny, ragtag band of survivors to battle evil and save the world. Show Less
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.
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
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
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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. Show Less