Product Description

Don't miss CELL: A topical and terrifyingly plausible novel from the hard drive of the King of contemporary horror. 'Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. By Halloween, every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory.' The event became known as The Pulse. The virus was carried by every cell phone operating within the entire world. Within ten hours, most people would be dead or insane. A young artist Clayton Riddell realises what is happening. And together with Tom McCourt and a teenage girl called Alice, he flees the devastation of explosive, burning Boston, desperate to reach his son before his son switches on his little red mobile phone...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10362 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-25
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Guardian
`Very clever and brilliantly written... you won't use your mobile for days.'

Mark Billingham, Daily Mail
'Fans will rejoice that King has gone back to his horror-novel roots'

Synopsis
'Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. By Halloween, every major city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory.' The event became known as The Pulse. The virus was carried by every cell phone operating within the entire world. Within ten hours, most people would be dead or insane. A young artist Clayton Riddell realises what is happening. And together with Tom McCourt and a teenage girl called Alice, he flees the devastation of explosive, burning Boston, desperate to reach his son before his son switches on his little red mobile phone!

Customer Reviews

Oh dear, another poor offering by Mr King
I keep persevering and buying Stephen King's books because I used to love them - he was my favorite author for many years. I keep hoping that he will have a return to form and all the money I have wasted on his more recent novels will eventually be rewarded with another one of his long awaited great stories.

Guess, I'll just have to keep the faith and wait for the next one because this one is "average" and from the once mighty Stephen King, that's a real shame.

So Stephen....So What?
I have always held Stephen King is high regard as the best horror writer of his generation. But really Cell is nonsense. It was a nonsense I took on holiday with me to Cornwall.

King returns to the theme of humanity turned into zombies, with a handful of newly found friends trying to survive. It has a similar theme to his other novel The Stand. So it's all been done before. At times the plot is laughable.

Humanity (or of course in this case America) is hit by a phone virus that turns anybody using a cell phone into a flesh eating zombie. Zombies come together in flocks. The good guys band together with the main character desperate to find his son. And guess what at the end of the book he just comes across his offspring by chance. If I've made the plot sound ridiculous I can assure you that's deliberate.

Firstly we never find out who is behind the deadly "pulse" and of course we have no idea whether the whole of America or the world is similarly affected. In the end I really wasn't interested whether Clay found his son or not - after all most of American humanity had been turned into zombies so what would one more matter.

It's a muddled book that smacks of a good author who has obviously pretty much run out of ideas, deciding that a modern theme is for him and then waffling in over 400 pages in American horror slang. Only to be recommended to real King fans or completists who want to ensure they have read all his output. Truely horrifying stories are always based on the believable. This one is not.

Unexpected joy
I came to this book without any knowledge of it- I didn't even read the blurb. I thought it would be fun to approach a book with no preconceptions and decided King was the perfect writer to try this with. After all, how far wrong can you ever go with the King?
Unfortunately 20 pages in I was pretty much ready to give up on the thing and burn it as retribution for claiming 6 pounds from me. Zombies? I thought. Zombies?! I didn't think I could stand 500 more pages of pulp nonsense. Zombie chase teenage girl. Girl die. Boyfriend find chainsaw. etc.
I ploughed on with the thin hope that King would pull something out of the bag and deliver another hit. And of course he did. What King has done here is to very cleverly put aside all preconceptions we/he may have of the Zombie genre. In place of this he has constructed something enitrely of his own fertile imagination.
King's Zombies are not mad, supernatural or (the popular modern choice) infected. They are instead (to use one of his own character's metaphors), humans that have had their hard-drive's wiped. They are just people with nothing left but fundamental core instincts and drives (feed/survive/etc).
Whilst this may not initially seem like a great leap, the shift of causation in fact moves us into a whole new range of possibility. King uses his premise to permit his "zombie hoards" to redevelop their perceptions of the world around them (reboot, if you will) and as time goes by they become something altogether different. They evolve, develop telepathy, eventually operate by way of a hive mind, ultimately co-ordinate thier efforts and then set about an elaborate plan to elimate all remaining humans in neo-nazi death-camp style. In essense they plan a revolution and take steps to realise a new social order. By the end of the book this is not really even reading a zombie romp- it is closer to a science fiction invasion story or a war story between opposing intelligent species.
In short- it turns out to be unexpectedly excellent and original. King has done something I thought impossible, which is put a new twist on the tired Zombie genre. I would suggest that naysayers have focused on the obvious zombie cliche fears and not absorbed the subtle differences that take us in an entirely new direction.
Give it a go. This is King at (near) his best.