The Mist (Stephen King)

The Mist
Stephen King
Viking
Fiction, Horror
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: The summer storm was the first sign of trouble in Bridgton, Maine, a vicious and hungry beast that destroyed trees and houses and brought down power lines all over town. At his lakeside home, David Drayton, his wife Steffy, and young son Billy rode out the worst of it in the basement. The next day, David notices a strange white mist across the water, lingering despite the sun and the breeze, but has more pressing concerns than a little odd weather, cleaning up storm debris and clearing the road.
He should have paid more attention to the mist.
When David, Billy, and a neighbor head into town to fetch groceries and supplies, the mist spreads, eventually reaching the supermarket parking lot... and those who venture into it do not return. Worse, with power and phone lines down, there's no way to call for help - and no way to know if there's anyone left to even call. Now David and his son are stranded in the store along with dozens of neighbors and strangers - as well as Mrs. Carmody, a local eccentric and religious zealot to whom the deadly mist is proof of the End Times at hand. The longer they're stuck, the more people fall under the sway of her words... and her conviction that the only way out is through blood sacrifice.

REVIEW: This classic horror novella packs plenty of terror, tangible and psychological, into its relatively short page count. From the first dark clouds of the impending summer storm to the last lines, a tangible weight of doom hangs over David and his small family, premonitions of deadly danger that nevertheless fall short of the actual horrors he and his son encounter. What, exactly, is the mist? Nobody knows exactly, and nobody can know. The beasts it births do not seem like anything of this world, lending some weight to the wilder theories bandied about concerning a nearby government base known as Project Arrowhead, but the sheer monstrous nature of them also makes Mrs. Carmody's insistence that Hell has opened up upon the Earth not entirely out of the realm of possibility. The cause, ultimately, hardly matters to those stuck trying to survive an inherently unsurvivable situation. The supermarket, which had seemed a salvation, soon becomes a trap, between Carmody's increasingly-fervent talk of damnation and sacrifice and a splinter sect of "Flat Earth" deniers who refuse to believe there's anything threatening in the fog despite all evidence on hand (all too relatable in modern times) and the general slow-creeping insanity of being stuck in a box with strangers and dwindling supplies and no plausible hope of outside rescue. David is no perfect hero; his commitment to his son's survival (and his own) leads him to some desperate acts (or non-acts, as when one desperate mother pleads for help getting home to her own children beyond the mist and finds no takers). As in other King tales, the characters become real people, even incidental ones, making their almost inevitable gruesome deaths hit all the harder. With the exception of Carmody (who has echoes in other King works, a figure seemingly energized and empowered by terrible circumstances who spreads confusion and lies to make bad situations even worse, as though in service to some darker purpose), there are few outright villains, just ordinary people pushed beyond the limits of psychological and physical endurance by an impossible situation. The tension and terrors keep rising throughout, leading to a fitting conclusion, if not a neat and tidy one.

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