Book Thirty - The Mist

I am still shaking off the heebie jeebie spiders after reading this one, but it was a lot of fun. The Mist by Stephen King was originally published as a novella in "The Skeleton Crew", but it works well as a stand alone novel and at 230 pages is long enough to stand alone as well.

Although I enjoyed reading The Mist, I have already seen the movie so the plot left few surprises. It is very well written, and I did find the book to be better than the movie. The ending was changed for the movie, and I would be hard pressed to pick which ending I preferred, although I can see why they went with the more shocking movie ending.

The Mist begins following a terrible storm in a small town in Maine. Our main characters notice a strange mist across the lake then father and son head off to the store to get groceries. Then all hell breaks loose, the mist covers the town, the doomsday whistle blows and people start dying. All kinds of creatures start coming out of the mist and the cast of the book have to figure out how to survive, or at least how to not go crazy.

There are a lot of characters in the book, and if it had been fleshed out into a longer novel it might have been easier to know one from the other. There are a few that stand apart, but some I couldn't keep track of. Also it would have been interesting to hear some more stories of survival from other points of view.

I am going to read the rest of the Skeleton Crew soon, but I was glad to be able to find "The Mist" packaged on its own, it was a nice quick, pleasant yet terrifying read.