only king could write something so utterly creepy and disturbing

My first Stephen King! Long overdue. What an excellent writer. Bummed by the (lack of) ending, but such is the short story life, I imagine.

I'll just never get into Stephen King at this point. I enjoyed IT well enough, the Gunslinger series (what I've read thus far) and Dreamcatcher despite being horribly named. I read Insomnia and will forever proclaim that to be one of my worst reading experiences I have had to date. If there was another book of his I have read, it wasn't significant enough in any capacity to lodge itself in my memory. The last of his works that I have in my library is The Body and after that I think I'll be done.

***Edit: I've apparently also read The Stand and The Eyes of the Dragon.***

King just doesn't do it for me. His writing is bloated. His male characters are often shitheads while women and POC feel like little more than props to placate and boost them up. Almost every MC is an artist and, as far as I'm concerned, a self insert, which somehow manages to make them even less interesting, and we see no break from this tradition in The Mist.

In fact I don't think there even was a non-white character in this novella.

The Mist was bland and uninteresting. Every trope from previous King works makes their appearance here for reasons I cannot altogether fathom, which only further strengthens my belief that he just isn't capable of writing people that are not himself.

I wasn't able to feel any real tension in this story. Build up between characters seemed sporadic and only served to move events along instead of having any real significance. I'll never understand why David needed to sleep with Amanda. I don't know that I got enough detail to care about the animosity between him, his neighbor, or the store manager. The "witch" who was slowly trying to convince people that human sacrifice was the only solution existed only to rile other people up but ultimately served no fruitful yield either. I remember a character named Ollie who was cut in half in the final pages of the story as well as the pharmacy workers who were found eviscerated next door, dinosaur-sized flies, some weird giant creature at the end, and an ambiguous dissatisfying conclusion which probably would have made more sense if this had not been from a first person POV.

Furthermore, I find it incredibly self serving that in an interview he once said being a fan of Lovecraft was "juvenile" when books like this and my other previously mentioned novels take very clear inspiration from said mythos. I'm not sure what he's playing at with this hypocrisy, or if his ego is so grand that he thinks he's improving upon this theme instead of stealing its most vanilla attributes for his own purposes.

I'll never understand how King is so popular. He hasn't grown out of the narrative anatomy of the 1970s that jettisoned him into popularity. His style has not aged well for modern audiences.

There are far better horror authors out there these days that don't get the recognition they deserve because King somehow continues to overshadow them all.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but the movie was better.

As good as I remembered. Reread in 2024 summer. Thoroughly enjoyed this for probably the third time.

Damn that Arrowhead Project.

This was a page turner. But very disappointed in the ending.

Well, that was stressful.