The Colors of Dread
The long opening sequence of the story situates the monstrousness to come with a portrait of Norman Rockwell normality. The coming of the big bad exists only as a thunderstorm, but the imagery describing that storm subtly hints at something more sinister through a repeated motif of colors:
“The evergreens over there looked dusty and beaten. In the west, great purple thunderheads were slowly building up, massing like an army…thunderheads were getting closer, pushing away the blue…clouds twisted and rolled, now black, now purple, now veined, now black again…That was when I saw the silver veil rolling across the lake.”
That Fog ain't Right
That something strange and distinctly out of sync with normality is intruding upon the Rockwell family portrait is made clear by the otherness of this particular appearance of fog. The imagery is one suggestive of nature being bent out shape, if only slightly and existing midway between the familiar and unfamiliar:
“…glancing out at the mist again. It seemed closer, but it was very hard to tell for sure. If it was closer, it was defying all the laws of nature, because the wind—a a very gentle breeze—was against it. That, of course, was patently impossible. It was very, very white…mist isn't uncommon on clear days, but when there's a lot of it, the suspended moisture almost always causes a rainbow. But there was no rainbow here.”
Spielberg-esque
Stephen and Steven have much in common when it comes to manipulating their audiences. One of Spielberg’s signature trademarks is to shoot a scene so that the audience is looking at the characters who are looking at something amazing. The tension is then pulled as taut as he desires in that space of time between when the characters see it and when the audience finally sees it. In other words, that which is amazing is made the more so by not showing it. King does much the same thing whenever he refrains from visual description of creature attacks. Many of the most terrifying moments in the narrative are those in which King exploits the imagery of what can only be heard and not seen:
“The howl was abruptly cut off. There was no sound at all for what seemed to be forever. Then the old lady cried out…`Git it offa me!...Oh my Lord my Lord get it—'
Then her voice was cut off, too…and a sound came out of the mist—a thick, loud grunt—that made all the spit in my mouth dry up. It was like no sound I've ever heard, but the closest approximation might be a movie set in the African veld or a South American swamp…the sound of a big animal…low and tearing and savage…then it subsided to a series of low mutterings. Then it was completely gone.”
The Parts of an Unseen Whole
At the opposite end of the spectrum is the description of the final creature described by the narrator. The great big baddie of them all, so massive in its impossibility that while it can be described with visual imagery, it is just a collection of parts. The parts never coalesce into a whole. That job is left to the reader’s imagination:
“It was six-legged…its skin was slaty gray that mottled to dark brown in places…Its skin was deeply wrinkled and grooved, and clinging to it were scores, hundreds, of those pinkish `bugs’ with the stalk-eyes. I don't know how big it actually was, but it passed directly over us. One of its gray, wrinkled legs smashed down right beside my window, and Mrs. Reppler said later she could not see the underside of its body...only two Cyclopean legs going up and up into the mist like living towers until they were lost to sight.”
