Pulse (novel)
Pulse (. English Cell ) is the title of an apocalyptic horror - novel by Stephen King from 2006, which was published in Scribner publishing house. Heyne Verlag published the German translation by Wulf Bergner a short time later.
content
A mysterious signal that suddenly spreads over the cellular network robs all people who use a cell phone of their minds and their humanity. The changed people immediately begin to mercilessly and extremely violently killing other people. The world is sinking into a chaos of torn corpses, destroyed vehicles and exploded tank systems.
Three survivors of the disaster, two men and a young girl, escape from Boston and make their way north. On the way you can observe the behavior of the Phoners, as the cell phone crazy people are called: if they were initially insane and attacked each other, they organize themselves in so-called swarms over the next few days . They still seem to be without individual consciousness, but they form a kind of collective consciousness, as we know it from swarms of bees: They move in lockstep through the streets, ransack supermarkets to get food. At night, the crush gathers to sleep in huge clusters on sports fields, where they are showered by music. The phoners develop telepathic abilities over time, with which they control the music in their sleeping places, and send dreams to normal people and influence their actions.
The group, now reinforced by a school principal and one of his students, manages to blow up a sleeping swarm in the sports stadium of a private school with two propane gas trucks. The phoners' collective consciousness is focused in a leader, a black man in a Harvard sweatshirt. He declares them and another group that killed a swarm to be "untouchables", which prevents the normal and the Phoners from attacking them in any way.
The phoners use their telepathic abilities to drive the surviving normals into a region, tricking them into thinking that they can live freely in that area. In truth, the people who come to this region are channeled through a reception portal, where they are offered telepathically to make one last call so that they too receive the pulse and also become phoners.
The group now meets the other swarm killers and is forced to telepathically set off to this region as well. The group is forced in without the obligatory cell phone call. On a fairground, the arrivals phoner collect to the next day kangaroo court witness. When they are back in their collective sleep that night, the group of untouchables is able to bring a bus with explosives into their midst, which they detonate with a cell phone.
Almost the entire swarm is killed in an explosion. The collective consciousness is thereby wiped out and with it the telepathic power of the phoners.
The group leaves the place, unmolested by individual disoriented staggering phoners, and hopes for a new future.
Characters
Clay Ridell is a young man who has been separated from his wife Sharon for half a year. He actually lives in the same Maine town as they do, where they raise a twelve-year-old son named Johnny together. At the beginning of the disaster he was in Boston where he was selling two comics. He was just buying an ice cream in the city park as a reward when the cell phone of the woman in front of him started to ring.
Tom McCourt is also in Boston City Park. There he and Clay meet a few minutes after the start of the disaster. After fending off several phoners together, they decide to go to Tom's house, which is not far away. Tom owns a cat named Rafe who broke his cell phone the day before. With a heavy heart, however, he leaves her alone to go looking for his family with Clay.
Alice Maxwell is a fifteen year old girl who meets the two men on their escape through Boston. If she is scared and disturbed at first and even flees from them, she later joins them. She was sitting in a taxi with her mother when she called her husband, which turned her into a phoner and murdered the taxi driver. Alice was able to fight off her mother thanks to her karate skills. At the beginning of the novel, she was still the protected, but in some situations she turns into a leader. Nevertheless, it is sometimes very unstable. She always has a baby's sneaker with her, which acts as her lucky charm.
Jordan is a twelve-year-old boy who was enrolled in a private school for boys on a scholarship. Since his family is very poor, he has no cell phone. In New Hampshire he joins the group of three. Now he is the youngest of the group, so Alice takes the part of the older sister and often takes care of the boy. When Tom, Clay and Alice want to move on, Jordan refuses because he doesn't want to leave the director alone.
Ardai is an old English professor and principal of the Jordan School. When the pulse was transmitted, he was in his house. The old man needs a walking aid to move around. He took Jordan into his care and together they observed the behavior of the cell phone crazy people and drew conclusions from it. The two have a kind of symbiosis in which they help each other. He later wants to commit suicide, realizing that he cannot move on with the group due to his disability. However, cell phone crazy people can telepathically murder him beforehand. Jordan, who wanted to stay with him, has the opportunity to go with the others.
Links with other works
- The Phoners are reminiscent of zombies, as King already dealt with them in other works: in home delivery (collection nightmares ), in the cemetery of the cuddly toys and to a certain extent also in Stark - The Dark Half (due because Stark never really lived ...). King also makes several references to George A. Romero and his zombie films, such as Dawn of the Dead .
- Clayton's comic about the dark wanderer is very reminiscent of Roland Deschain from The Dark Tower . The initials of the hero Ray Damon coincide with those of Roland, the villain Flak immediately calls to mind Randall Flagg, the villain from The Eyes of the Dragon and of course The Stand , as well as The Dark Tower. Clay's wife Sharon calls Ray Damon the "space cowboy".
- The protagonists meet a vehicle called "Charlie Tschuff-Tschuff" from Drei at a fairground .
- The area around the TR-90 was already central to Duddits and Sara .
- Tom McCourt has his house near Salem's Street - a nod to Burning Must Salem .
- The leader of the Phoner wears a Harvard sweatshirt: the color red (color of the Harvard coat of arms) is the color of the "scarlet king" from the Dark Tower.
filming
On March 8, 2006, Stephen King announced that Puls would be implemented on film under its original title Cell . Eli Roth could be engaged as a director and screenwriter, but he wanted to realize the continuation of Hostel beforehand . It was later announced that Roth had given up the film rights again because he likes King and his books, but wanted to turn to his own ideas. Information has been available since July 2009 that Puls is to be implemented on film as a four-hour mini-series.
In the meantime, the miniseries turned into a film that was released in 2016. The film was directed by Tod Williams with John Cusack (Riddell) and Samuel L. Jackson (McCourt) in the lead roles. Almost 3200 extras took part in the production .
literature
- Stephen King: Cell, a novel . Scribner, 2006, ISBN 9780743292337
- Stephen King: Pulse . Heyne, 2006, ISBN 3453028600
Web links
- Cell in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Text42: book review
- Detailed table of contents in KingWiki
Individual evidence
- ↑ reference