Recommend: Yes
Weather is its own character.
In Blackheath, there are months where wind lashes the escarpment. It stings your cheeks. It infects you with a chill that rots your bones. It roars against the trees at night, keeping you awake.
But it’s the fog that is the eeriest. Once settled, the fog could be here for an hour or for days. Walking on the side of roads becomes suicidal, cars emerging violently from nowhere out of the thick mist. A light damp accumulates like sweat around your body. The day blends from dusk to dawn in gradients of grey. It could be any universe at any time in the fog. It’s always a sweet relief when it lifts.
If it lifts.
The Mist is fittingly my first Stephen King novel (technically this is marketed as a novella). David Drayton, the main character, lives in Maine (US). He and his family live in a town called Long Lake which, unsurprisingly, features a large lake that is popular with travelling out-of-staters. I was picturing a lakeside version of the Monterey of Big Little Liars fame: a small community of well-moneyed locals that elevate themselves above the transient tourist set.
A catastrophic storm rolls into town one humid Summer afternoon. Trees are felled. Powerlines are down and jumping across the ground, fuelled by live electricity. A barge from a neighbour’s lakefront property is floating down the lake. David Drayton is playing it cool though. “Just a storm, a bad one, but just a storm” he repeats seemingly endlessly to his nervous wife as they emerge from the basement to survey the wreckage the next morning. D.D. you hunkered down in a basement… Shit got real overnight…
Just as normality seems to be working it’s way back into the nuclear family – Mum’s fretting about groceries, Dad’s smashing bevvies while chain sawing big pinetrees blocking the driveway, Billy the kid is dumbly running around the block like a chicken not long for this world – a wide column of mist is spotted across the lake. It’s slowly advancing towards the property. That’s a bit unseasonal for Summer. Oh well, hand me another bevvie dearie. Okay, I get it, you need tomatoes and cucumbers for dinner. Let me take my idiot son Billy and go into town and get those tomatoes and cucumbers for you. Hmm… that mist is sure strange… it’s moving closer to us despite the wind pushing it back… Anyway, catch-ya later.
The plot is perfectly pitched as pulpy entertainment. Atmospheric framing of the mist is supplemented with funny little side-character interactions. The main character, David, and his family are generic in a way even A.I. wouldn’t be able to render. But this is not a character study. David is separated from his wife as the mist swallows the town, and he has a young son to protect. In one line, you have his whole character motivation, and that’s pleasingly economical. The strength of The Mist is that it is easy to follow, easy to read and easy to enjoy. The novel is tense to open as the storm unfolds and the domestic is destroyed, then it moves to the social microcosm of those who happen to be at the supermarket when the mist proper descends. Bits of action interrupt the fraying social structures of this wayward group. At 180 pages, it doesn’t take long to get to the ending of the novella, and I loved that too.
Now that this book is over, I go to close the blinds. It’s gotten grey so quickly. Is it time for dinner already?
But it’s only 2pm…
Why can’t I see anything out the window?
Declan? Where are you?
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