Every Version of Cell

From the page to the pulse

Stephen King published Cell in January 2006, just as mobile phones were cementing themselves as permanent fixtures of daily life. The novel imagines a single catastrophic moment: a signal broadcast over the cellular network (King calls it the Pulse) instantly lobotomises every person who hears it through a phone, reducing them to savage, flocking creatures. Graphic artist Clay Riddell is one of the handful spared, and the story follows his journey through a New England that has become an open-air asylum.

King has said the book grew from his own ambivalence about the always-connected world, and from watching strangers walk through cities with phones pressed to their ears, oblivious to everything around them. The horror is baked into the metaphor: the device that connects you is the thing that destroys you.

The novel was optioned quickly, but the film adaptation had a notoriously long and troubled journey, spending nearly a decade in development before finally arriving in 2016. The screen version reunited two actors who had shared a King adaptation before: John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson, who had starred together in 1408. Beyond that one film, Cell has remained largely a literary property, its ideas migrating culturally into a wave of zombie and post-apocalyptic narratives rather than into direct sequels or spinoffs. The book stands alone.