This is what happened.
Simple, elegant and deceptively perfect. This may very be—almost certainly is—the best opening line Stephen King ever wrote. It may seem like any story could open with these words. Aren’t all stories boiled down to basically being told what happened? But the brilliance of this opening is deceptive and won’t be revealed until the end. The fact is that “this is what happened” is woefully inadequate as an opening for most stories because they not only tell what happened, but why. Generally speaking, people love to hear what happened, but they crave knowing why it happened. This is especially true when what happened bizarre and fundamentally inexplicable. Not to give anything away, but in this particular instance, “this is what happened” tells the whole story.
The Harrison side of the lake was gone. It had been buried under a line of bright-white mist, like a fair-weather cloud fallen to earth.
This is the first appearance of the mist. The part about the Harrison side gone missing is intended to be taken figuratively. Nothing bizarre or malevolent has occurred yet and won’t still for some time. The tension must be built and that tension takes the form of a domestic drama about a father and son, husband and wife, feuding neighbors and the first casual references to the Arrowhead Project. Normalcy must first be established before the intrusion of extreme abnormality annihilates it forever. The first twenty or so pages is like the first twenty or so minutes of an early Spielberg film: the appearance of the shark, the aliens or the ghosts is made more palpable by situating it within a typical family dynamic. That dynamic has to be put at risk eventually and so it is. Only later does the question begin to nag that maybe the Harrison side of the lake really was gone literally as well figuratively.
"A sacrifice. A blood sacrifice."
The story is not just of monsters. It is also a story about what happens to members of all those typical American families when normalcy says good-bye forever and the maintenance of not just individual but societal existence hangs in the balance. For the narrator, the natural response is cooperation out of necessity, rationalism in the face of the irrational and self-preservation at the expense of others as a last resort. Others respond differently and the extremity of that response is represented by the group of survivors the narrator terms Flat-Earthers because their response is to head in the opposite direction, backward through time and progress to the primitive ritualistic explanations anything defying rational explanation. The extremity of the extremes is Mrs. Carmody, a religious zealot who in the face of anything approaching preternatural circumstances looks to God or the devil as the responsible agency. When common sense collapses, people like Mrs. Carmody grab onto the only hope they have: the myths and fictions of the ancients.
No one knew for sure where the name Arrowhead Project came from and no one could tell you for one hundred percent sure that that really was the name of the project-if there was a project. Bill Giosti said there was, but when you asked him how and where he came by his information, he got vague.
Many of those who don’t turn to the myths and fictions of the ancients to help answer the why about what happened turn instead to the future unrevealed. The Arrowhead Project winds its way through the narrative both as flesh and blood soldiers said to be part of it and as myriad theories about what it is and as an unverified agent of responsibility. The opposite of believing in blood sacrifice to appease gods is believing in unproven (or sometimes even disproven) conspiracy theories. Both exist precariously on a foundation of pure faith, yet are treated by true believers if carved in stone. Whether the reader reaches the end of The Mist secure in the belief that the strange and horrifying creatures are the result of the Arrowhead Project would probably make a good litmus test for determining susceptibility to paranoid conspiracy theories. Nothing in the narrator’s account provides for the slightest bit of evidence that this is the case, but it is safe to say that a robust percentage of readers believe it does.
