Following a freak summer storm, David Drayton, his son Billy, and their neighbour Brent Norton join dozens of others and head to the local grocery store to replenish supplies.
Once there, they become trapped by a strange mist that has enveloped the town. Violent forces concealed in the mist are starting to emerge. And there is another shocking threat from within – one group of survivors, led by a religious zealot, is calling for a sacrifice.
Now David and his son must try to escape. But what’s outside may be even more dangerous.

The cover is beautifully designed but it almost put me off the book. When I first saw those tentacles, I thought ‘The Mist‘ might Stephen King’s riff on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft’s horror never does it for me so I hesitated. Then I thought, “I wonder what Stephen King would do with a Lovecraft story?” and decided I wanted to know the answer. I’m glad I did. ‘The Mist‘ was a fascinating novella about sanity-threatening fear.

I like a lot of Stephen King’s writing, especially his shorter pieces, but it’s been a while since I read any of his early stuff- ‘The Mist’ was published forty-four years ago in 1980 but it doesn’t feel dated in terms of storytelling style. It’s told as a from-the-shoulder narrative being written down so that the main character, David Drayton, can leave an honest and factual record of what happened to him and his son when the mist rolled off the lake and over their small town in rural Maine.

I liked the gradual progression from the normal to the mind-bendingly strange in this story. It begins with a storm after a long hot summer. It’s a bad storm, the kind that causes damage to property and injures people, but, while it’s stressful, it’s something that David has the competence to survive and move on from. Until the mist and the things in the mist arrive and trap him and his four-year-old son in the local Federal Store.

What happens over the next three days is bleak but it felt true. What made the story work for me was that Stephen King didn’t focus on the tentacles (and other things) in the mist but on how people react to prolonged exposure to an unexpected, unknowable, lethal threat. This wasn’t a story about heroes and villains, It was a story about ordinary people coming to terms with being powerless in the face of a threat so strange, so inimical and so overwhelming that it is hard to hold on to the truth of it. The responses include shock, denial, and letting go of rationality as a form of self-defense.

Maybe it’s my imagination, but the tone of the story was harder than King’s current writing. I think that this is mostly because the story is shaped by how David Drayton sees the world. He’s the narrator, so he takes his own views for granted. He describes his emotions and the emotions of the people around him but he’s not a man prone to introspection. Part of the joy of reading the story was seeing both the narrative and the narrator, even when the narrator doesn’t see himself.

David Drayton’s narrative had a very male taste to it: locker room testosterone, rut musk and fear sweat. He describes the people clearly enough to make them real but it’s a reality filtered by the judgments he makes about people: the men he sees as threats or allies, the women sees as attractive or not attractive or simply odd. Even so, ‘The Mist’ is not an alpha malewish-fulfilment fantasy. It confronts shock and fear and despair and the corruption of hope into hate head-on.

In a way, this was Stephen King’s riff on Lovecraft but in the way an atheist might write a riff on religion. The things in the mist are not immortal and are not gods. What they are and how they came there aren’t questions David Drayton has or wants the answers to. He’s more interested in how they hunt, how they can be harmed and how he and his companions can evade them. I liked that superstition of the snake-oil-selling revivalist-tent kind rears its head inside the Federal Store and becomes as much of a threat as the things outside.

I loved (but won’t share) the ending. For me, it cemented the reality of the story.