No Straight Lines in Nature
The narrator of The Mist and Allie Fox in The Mosquito Coast may not share much, but they have one thing in common: they notice nature doesn’t provide much in the way of perfectly straight lines or right angles. The occurrence of such man-made concepts in nature tends to be a signal to men like these that, well, something ain’t right. The very first indication to narrator that this isn’t just your everyday kind of fog rolling in over the lake combines geometry and metaphor:
“The edge of the mist was nearly ruler-straight.”
Mrs. Carmody
Technically, of course, by virtue of the story’s body count, the monstrous creatures are the villains. But inside the store, where fear and paranoia are beginning to turn humans into monsters, the villain is a woman in a yellow pantsuit. When the weirdness is just barely beginning, the narrator compares her to an advertisement for Yellow Fever. After things have transgressed from weirdness to apocalyptic, however, Mrs. Carmody requires a comparison of much more sinister resonance:
“She looked like some crazed remnant of New England Puritanism in the gloom ... but I suspect that something deeper and darker than mere Puritanism motivated her. Puritanism had its own dark grandfather, old Adam with bloody hands.”
The Creatures
The mysterious, monstrous creatures on the outside trying to work their way to the inside are something from another place and another time; perhaps another dimension. Yet to the narrator there is something both inconceivably evil and impossible mundane about the way they look:
“It looked like one of the minor creatures in a Bosch painting-one of his hellacious murals…it also looked a little like one of those strange creations of vinyl and plastic you can buy for $1.89 to spring on your friends.”
Paranoia
The Arrowhead Project is a mysterious government experiment near where the mist starts and the creature come from. Maybe it is a red herring. Maybe it really is the source. The narrator never finds out for sure, but there are stories. Always stories. The one thing he does know for sure is that trauma can exert an influence of the brain that makes it much easier to buy into the paranoia of others:
“Terror is the widening of perspective and perception...When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload…Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.”
Meta-Fiction
Part of Stephen King’s legacy is that he has a reputation for lousy endings. The Mist is arguably his greatest ending…unless you hate ambiguity. Knowing what lays just a few pages ahead for the reader and perhaps wanting to avoid being accused of trying to sneak it in on those who dislike them, he has the narrator foreshadow the ending in a way so clumsily obvious that it’s clearly intentional. The narrator comes right and warns the reader not to expect a tidy conclusion and then expands on this in a way that is very meta, very postmodern by putting the onus to enjoy the ending directly onto those that dislike ambiguous endings, telegraphing that this ending will be one left up to the reader to decide or:
“I suppose, what my father always frowningly called an Alfred Hitchcock ending.”
