One of the things I like most about King–and I consider myself a big fan, even though I feel like he hit a turning point around Rose Madder and has been heading downhill since, with only a few exceptions–is his portrayal of real life. That last one is the simplest thing to cover, so rather than starting with the ending and ending with the beginning, let's take those three things in reverse order:ģ) The film skips straight to the action. And 3) the film skips the setup as much as possible, and jumps straight to the action. Carmody–the batshit-loony religious crazy played by Marcia Gay Harden in the film–is handled very differently in the film than she is in the book, which leads to a major shift in emphasis. 1) The movie fills in the novella's blanks, spelling out everything it left ambiguous. There are a whole lot of little alterations between the two versions, but they largely boil down into three categories. That's also one of the three main differences between King's story and the currently-in-theaters adaptation written and directed by Frank Darabont. 'The Mist' is another one of those King classics where things just happen, and it isn't clear why. We don't always get answers in life–even if they're out there, we don't necessarily have the perspective or access to them, and sometimes we just have to work with what we have.

But in a case like Stephen King's novella 'The Mist,' it feels more like sophistication. If done wrong–if the writer clearly has no idea why a character did something, except to make a story work–it can feel like narrative laziness. And these days, I tend to appreciate stories with that kind of ambiguity. Then I grew up and found out that in the real world, things happen without pat, precise explanations all the time.

The mist stephen