I’m not a huge Stephen King fan, as many are who read his novels. In fact, many of his movies came out when I was a kid and religiously rented 5 horror movies for 5 nights for $5 with my bestie, Andrea. We’d also order 12 coney dogs from a place called Pixie and spent the weekend largely unsupervised. I loved the 90s! However, just recently I’ve read a few King novels for no reason that I can think of. I mean, he’s prolific, so why not? Maybe that’s my thinking…

I did watch the 2007 film The Mist a few years ago. It has great special effects, a terrifying fundamentalist Christian, some illogical antagonists who choose the wrong thing at every turn, and a devastating ending that everyone remembers. The Stephen King book on which it was based was under 200 pages, which I didn’t know King was capable of.

We start with David and his wife and son. A massive, wild storm has passed through and knocked down trees and power lines, scaring the small family as they huddled in the bed in their basement to ride it out. The next morning, David and his five-year-old son head to the grocery store for supplies. As soon as they are in, a strange mist fills the air, preventing shoppers from even seeing out the giant wall of glass at the front of the store.

Before long, everyone is aware that something in the mist is dangerous, but they cannot see what. Before we see what’s out there, it’s hard to picture because King writes like he hasn’t left the house in his entire life. For instance, “…there was a long, drawn-out Aaaaa-rooooooo! that caused people to turn toward the blackness with frightened, searching faces. It was the sort of sound you’d imagine a bull alligator might make in a swamp.” I’ve never heard of an alligator baying like a silly dog let out at midnight to pee, but if you have, please tell me in the comments. The rest of the story proceeds like many scary stories: asking who the real monsters are, the things that go bump in the, erm, mist, or the people and how they behave when civilized behavior breaks down?

Although The Mist is short, once again, King includes too many characters. I could only tell a few apart, so when they start getting picked off after doubters head out into the mist, their deaths had no effect on me. Our protagonist, David, is hard to like. He falls into that stereotype of a man who chugs a beer to feel better when something hard happens, but then he uses some odd academic vocab choices like, “Whatever the concatenation was, it was coming my way.” David managers to sleep with a woman in the store despite professing to love his wife and wanting to get home to her. King didn’t even set up a rocky marriage, which would have been a motive for cheating at least.

The scariest person in the film, the Old Testament doomsdayer, sounded more like a person who needed medication and a sandwich in the novella. She both shouted Biblical passages to explain why there were monsters in the mist, but she was known in the community for creating potions and being all around witchy. Because I couldn’t get a grasp on her personality, she didn’t scare me in the book. The same character dug deep and poked me in my most vulnerable places in the film.

Overall, King’s novella wasn’t my favorite. Limiting the POV to David prevented the novella from having a richness of characters. David himself wasn’t that interesting, nor was he a hero. We do know he survives, however, because the story is told from the future. He thinks things like, “I could not tell then and do not know any better now if he believed in what he was doing or not. I think, deep down, that he knew what was going to happen.” If you’re looking for some cosmic sci-fi horror, go ahead and watch the film instead.