{"id":1194,"date":"2006-04-26T20:49:10","date_gmt":"2006-04-26T20:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1194"},"modified":"2006-04-26T20:49:10","modified_gmt":"2006-04-26T20:49:10","slug":"critic_at_large_2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1194","title":{"rendered":"Critic At Large: Cell"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I first read the plot summary of Cell<\/EM>, I was skeptical.  The story of a malicious Pulse broadcast to the world’s cell phones that turns their users into murderous drones sounded like a weak, even derivative, plot for a novel.  But while King is obviously paying homage to Romero<\/A> and Matheson<\/A>, his skill as a writer makes this iteration of the familiar zombies-take-over-the-world tale engaging and disquieting.  King is by no means the most nuanced of writers, but I like reading him because he knows how to balance character and plot.  I cared about the characters and what happened to them as they made the trek out of a devastated Boston and into the New England countryside.  Not everything in the book works.  King’s efforts to work in plot elements regarding computer viruses and worms felt a little clumsy.  But these quibbles are small; Cell<\/EM> is a satisfying piece of escapist fiction that is by no means phoned in.<\/DIV><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first read the plot summary of Cell, I was skeptical.  The story of a malicious Pulse broadcast to the world’s cell phones that turns their users into murderous drones sounded like a weak, even derivative, plot for a novel.  But while King is obviously paying homage to Romero and Matheson, his skill as […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-jg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}