Both work in their own ways, but I can’t deny the discrepancy between expectation and reality. As such, I was caught off guard by the much subtler and more ambiguous ending presented here. Unaware that things had been changed from page to screen, I was fully prepared for the utter devastation that unfolds in the movie. Having seen the 2007 film adaptation many years ago, my reading experience was coloured by how truly haunting the film’s final sequence is. The imagery we are given is more than enough to spark the desired fear and revulsion – tableaus that are sure to linger in the mind.Ī needless sex scene aside, my only other critique of this feels unfair but unavoidable. With sightings often brief, frantic encounters amidst a haze of ‘thick as pea soup’ mist, we remain as tense and ill informed as the characters the full extent of the horror left to the power of our imagination. Physical descriptions of the monsters are fairly scant, but that proves highly effective in this instance. As with the best creature-based horror, it’s the culture of mistrust and the extremity of mankind’s selfish desire to survive that become the protagonists’ biggest threats. Despite the novella’s relative brevity, however, King still manages to create a tangible atmosphere. Though we are given slight hints as to the mist’s origins, the deliberate lack of context or resolution ensures the reader feels as unmoored as the characters. Unlike much of King’s work, The Mist is a fairly brief tale that drops readers into the action without fuss or fanfare.

A group of survivors holed up in a supermarket must find a way to escape whilst navigating the growing tension within the group, fuelled by a religious zealot who believes nothing but a human sacrifice will end the bloodshed.

In this classic from the master of horror, a town is engulfed by a dense, mysterious mist that hides a mass of deadly creatures. Published by Scribner, 2017 (first published in 1980)

Stephen king on the mist