Saturday, October 12, 2013

The Mist by Stephen King

This was a re-read. I listened to The Mist first when I was 12 years old (on cassette, in glorious 3D SOUND!) and remember liking it quite a bit. Then, I read it later on, in my late teens, as part of King's Skeleton Crew collection. It's funny how memory works. One thing about this story that has always stood out in my mind over the years is what I remembered to be long lists of brand names, paragraphs and paragraphs of listed brand names. When I was re-reading this, I kept waiting for those long lists to appear. They never did.

 I rarely re-read books (there are just too many good books out there to read) but re-read this one in preparation for watching the film adaptation, which I hear is great.

 None of the above really has anything to do with whether or not I like The Mist after all these years. I do. I think it holds up remarkably well. The only real problem I had with it was the fact that the protagonist's kid all too conveniently (for the plot) sleeps through events (on the floor of a grocery store during a crisis!) that no one would sleep through. This fairly minor quibble aside, this is a great monster story, a good post-apocalyptic story, and a really good horror story with nods to Lovecraft.

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