15 Stephen King stories ranked from heartwarming to horrifying

12. The Mist

First of all, the ending of The Mist differs greatly depending on what version you consume. The film is especially bleak there, what with a lot of death, mayhem, and an exceedingly cruel last-minute twist. King’s written version, however, is perhaps bleaker. More on that in a minute.

The Mist, for all of the creepy terror it packs, is only a novella. A determined reader could finish the whole thing in an afternoon, though good luck trying to forget what you’ve read. It starts with a destructive thunderstorm that passes over Bridgton, Maine. On the morning after the storm, the protagonist, David Drayton, makes his way to the local supermarket with his son, Billy, and their neighbor, Brent Norton.

All’s well until a thick, mysterious mist rolls into town. It’s bad enough that no one can really see through the mist, but things get far, far worse when creatures begin to appear out of the murk. They’re like nothing Drayton or his neighbors have ever seen—strange beasts with tentacles, or misshapen wings, or too many limbs, all seemingly bent on attacking the humans trapped in the market.

Even David and a few others make their way out of the supermarket (which is plagued by an incipient and bloodthirsty religious uprising) and to a waiting car. In the film version, the inhabitants of the car succumb to despair and commit suicide, only for the surviving David to encounter a group of soldiers successfully defeating the monsters.

That’s gut-wrenching, to be sure, but in a very bombastic, Hollywood sort of way. In King’s original story, though, there is no such rescue. Instead, the survivors simply drive through the devastation, shocked at what they see but not so driven to despair that they end their lives. They endure and push forward into an unknown and unresolved future. That’s arguably worse than the terrible finality of the film version.