What is it about?
This article discusses Stephen King's novel Cell from 2006. The focus of the article is the way in which the novel contributes to, but also complicates the border-thinking that dominates the Imperial Gothic. The article concludes that Cell is, at the same time, a conservative and a transgressive narrative about terrorism.
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Why is it important?
This article discusses how one of the most important popular authors in the US represents terrorism with the help of the horror narrative.
Perspectives
This article was written before the Paris terror attacks, before the rise of IS and before the refugee crisis that the war in Syria caused. These events also speak to the need to understand what terrorism function, and to dismantle the notion that terrorism is something done to the West by agents from the East. Cell is intimately interested in this precise notion, and it is just as vocal on these issues today as in 2006, when it was published. A film version of the novel is in the works here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0775440/.
Dr Johan A Höglund
Linnaeus University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cell, Stephen King and the Imperial Gothic, Gothic Studies, November 2015, Manchester University Press,
DOI: 10.7227/gs.17.2.5.
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