FROM THE PUBLISHER 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.
CELL is classic Stephen King, a story of gory horror and white-knuckling suspense that makes the unimaginable entirely plausible and totally fascinating.
Gosh darn it! I didn't want to have to buy any more Stephen King books! My family has wasted a fair amount of money on them, and we all breathed a sigh of relief, before being sad, when he announced his retirement.
I guess King is going to be the next Michael Jordan. He will claim to be retired four or five times and then show himself to be liar and come back. Why, oh why?
It looks good. But I thought he was retiring.
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
Does he have alimony he needs to pay or something?
Posted by SteveRogers (Member # 7130) on :
Aside from the fact that I don't know....what does alimony mean?
Posted by The Rabbit (Member # 671) on :
Alimony is the allowance which a wife is entitled to from her husband's estate, for her maintenance, on separation from him for certain causes. (from the OED)
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
It used to be a formal, automatic entitlement based on a husband's duty to support the wife. Now it's non-gender specific and fairly rare. It is distinct from child support or property division. (Forgive me, I'm doing my family law outline.)
Posted by Boon (Member # 4646) on :
When we went before the judge the first time, the judge ordered my ex to pay $400 in spousal support. We'd had an agreement since before we married that he would work and I would raise children, and at the time of the divorce I was pregnant and had custody of his 2 1/2 year old daughter. The judge made him pay it until Dan was born and I could ask for child support.
Alimony/palimony is called spousal support here.
Posted by KarlEd (Member # 571) on :
Wow! 6 replies and not one of them on topic. That's gotta be a Hatrack record of some sort.
Posted by Lyrhawn (Member # 7039) on :
Hey! Mine was a reference to King! Just not to the book.
And I have to imagine that's nowhere NEAR the hatrack record for being off topic.
Posted by Goody Scrivener (Member # 6742) on :
He never actually said he was retiring. His statement was that he was not going to continue with the "so many books in so many years" contracts that he's been bound by for the last 30 years. He said he could never stop writing, even if it were only for himself, but if he wrote something he felt were worth releasing, he would do so.
Do you remember the First Amendment auctions on EBay, the ones where you were bidding on the right to have your name or a saying put into a major author's upcoming book? Cell is King's book from that auction.
He also has another book, Lisey's Story, coming out in (I think) late 2006 and is involved with Marvel Comics on a graphic novel Dark Tower story.
Posted by Architraz Warden (Member # 4285) on :
A truly horrific premise, in which the professor reveals to the normies a terrifying secret: calling the cell phones a second time will infuse the populous's skulls with so much radiation, their heads will explode (or asplode, as it were).
Sadly, the band of technophobes have no access to the malignant dialing machine of their adverceries and will be forced to dial each number, one at a time. Deciding to start with their own nation of the USA, The following years progress much like this...