The Mist By Stephen King

source: personal copy
title: The Mist
author: Stephen King
genre: horror/science fiction horror
published: 1985
pages: 230
first line: This is what happened.
rated: 4 out of 5 stars

blurb:
In the wake of a summer storm, terror descends…David Drayton, his son Billy, and their neighbor Brent Norton join dozens of others and head to the local grocery store to replenish supplies following a freak storm. Once there, they become trapped by a strange mist that has enveloped the town. As the confinement takes its toll on their nerves, a religious zealot, Mrs. Carmody, begins to play on their fears to convince them that this is God’s vengeance for their sins. She insists a sacrifice must be made and two groups—those for and those against—are aligned. Clearly, staying in the store may prove fatal, and the Draytons, along with store employee Ollie Weeks, Amanda Dumfries, Irene Reppler, and Dan Miller, attempt to make their escape. But what’s out there may be worse than what they left behind.
This exhilarating novella explores the horror in both the enemy you know—and the one you can only imagine.

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my thoughts:
The Mist is one of my favorite King book to film adaptations, I liked both the film version and the tv mini-series which was cancelled after season 1.
One of the reasons I enjoy The Mist so much is that I like these kinds of stories based on a catastrophe that makes peoples true selves emerge. I also enjoy the post-apocalyptic stranded group of strangers setting where people need to work together to figure out a solution.

As the story begins there is a bad thunderstorm in Maine in the middle of July that brings with it a thick unnatural looking mist. David Drayton takes his son into town for supplies leaving his wife behind at their lakefront home. Once at the grocery store David realizes the mist is spreading and has enveloped the entire building. People begin to panic as they realize there is something unnatural and deadly waiting outside. David tries to keep his 8 year old son calm while also worrying about his wife back home. The group of people at the grocery store try to bond together to figure out what to do next. There is plenty of tension and danger as fear of the unknown begins to overtake people.

The setting of The Mist is great. As I said, I like these end of the world type stories. What would happen if you were stuck at a grocery store with a bunch of people with a deadly mist surrounding you? Most of the people know one another because they all live in town. I liked David and his son and I rooted for them. A few of the other characters are likeable while others not so much. King inserts a woman into the mix who begins to use religion as the cause of the mist and as a way to get others to act out in a dangerous way. This woman begins to get a following since some people begin to lose their minds over the situation. A few of the scenes are pretty gruesome in detail once the reader gets to see what is lurking in the mist.

That being said, while I enjoyed reading this novella, at times I found myself almost just going through the motions since I knew what was happening next. The film version stays pretty true to the novella, except for the ending. The ending is completely different in the book. I think I prefer the novella’s ending over the film.

King sets the mood perfectly here. He gives us a set of characters that pull us into the story and there is mystery and terror surrounding the origins of the mist making this novella the perfect dose of horror at 230 pages without too much commitment. All in all, I enjoyed reading The Mist and recommend it if you enjoy post-apocalyptic science fiction stories.


“There are things of such darkness and horror-just, I suppose, as there are things of such great beauty-that they will not fit through the puny human doors of perception.” p.226, The Mist by Stephen King

“You know what talent is? The curse of expectation.”- p.157, the Mist by Stephen King


I read The Mist as part of R.I.P. XV.




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Disclaimer: This review is my honest opinion. I did not receive any kind of compensation for reading and reviewing this book. I am under no obligation to write a positive review. I purchased my copy of The Mist by Stephen King. Some of the links in the post are affiliate links. If you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive a small affiliate commission. The book photo in this post is mine and not to be removed from here.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

source: purchased
title: I Am Legend
author: Richard Matheson
published: 1954
pages: 161
first line: On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when the sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.
rated: 5 out of 5

blurb:

It seems strange to find a 1954 vampire novel in Millennium’s “SF Masterworks” classic reprints series. I Am Legend, though, was a trailblazing and later much imitated story that reinvented the vampire myth as SF. Without losing the horror, it presents vampirism as a disease whose secrets can be unlocked by scientific tools. The hero Robert Neville, perhaps the last uninfected man on Earth, finds himself in a paranoid nightmare. By night, the bloodthirsty undead of small-town America besiege his barricaded house: their repeated cry “Come out, Neville!” is a famous SF catchphrase. By day, when they hide in shadow and become comatose, Neville gets out his wooden stakes for an orgy of slaughter. He also discovers pseudoscientific explanations, some rather strained, for vampires’ fear of light, vulnerability to stakes though not bullets, loathing of garlic, and so on. What gives the story its uneasy power is the gradual perspective shift which shows that by fighting monsters Neville is himself becoming monstrous–not a vampire but something to terrify vampires and haunt their dreams as a dreadful legend from the bad old days. I Am Legend was altered out of recognition when filmed as The Omega Man (1971), starring Charlton Heston. Avoid the movie; read the book. –David Langford

my thoughts:

Hello blog friends, I have been MIA and missed you all these few weeks but I did manage to read I Am Legend and wanted to share my thoughts on it. I’ve been busy with the usual work, family and just enjoying the summer. We even went on a mini-vacation to the beach last weekend. I’ll share pics on a Sunday post soon and I’ll be blog hopping this weekend and catching up.

Anyway, I picked I Am Legend out of left field really, it wasn’t a book I even planned on reading anytime soon but I found myself in a reading slump and this one helped get me out of that.
Richard Matheson wrote I Am Legend in 1954 and he set his futuristic post-apocalyptic thriller in 1976. The protagonist is Robert Neville, who has lived alone for a few years after losing his wife to a virus that infected most of Earth’s population and turned them into the living dead. The virus was thought to have been spread by mosquitoes after a war. Neville lives boarded up in his home, drinking often to ease the pain of his lone existence. He ventures out during daylight in search of food and supplies while also killing vampires. He spends his days trying to figure out the virus and how to cure it. I felt bad for him from the start. You get to see his past through a few flashbacks. I felt that Matheson wrote Neville’s loneliness and desolation masterfully and he was really creative with his storyline.

Horror he had adjusted to. But monotony was the greater obstacle, he realized it now, understood at long last. And understanding it seemed to give him a sort of quiet peace, a sense of having spread all the cards on his mental table, examined them, and settled conclusively on the desired hand.
p. 101, I Am Legend, Richard Matheson