Misty-Eyed

We've growned up reading Stephen King ever since we first came across Needful Things on our cousin's bookshelf in UK back when we were in Form 1. We'd finished it and was hooked, and had frequented the Rent-A-Book store in Subang Parade almost every Sunday for a different King book. Admittedly we were a bit bias at the beginning - we didn't want to read Misery because we didn't like the actress Kathy Bates who acted in the movie of the same, and we didn't want to read Gerald's Game because we, uh, didn't like the name Gerald (because of an idiot named Gerald in our class at one point in secondary school whom tested our tolerance to the limit).

But we did read all the books in the end - and the ones that really gripped us were the ones that didn't feature ghosts or spirits: Cujo, Misery, Gerald's Game, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Tommyknockers, Cell...but almost all of his books were darn good reads. Yes, we say almost. Insomnia we managed fine once but we don't know if we could read it again, we won't want to read Bag Of Bones again, the Dark Tower series is just too slow for us to keep following.

We must say that we regret renting his books rather than buying them first time round. Now we just don't have the heart to cough up the cash, and have relegated King's books to the same category as Eddings and Agatha Christie - scrounge Pay Less Books/secondhand bookstores for them, and occasionally buy new from MPH/Borders/Times.

Well we can't rightly remember when we first came across word that The Mist (a novella from his Skeleton Crew book, although now they've released it as a book on it's own...go figure, The Mist selling for RM29.90 and Skeleton Crew for RM33.90) but we recognized it as the Stephen King novella and not some horror movie with the same title. So we were excited. Of course, the last time we read this book was more than 10 years ago, so our memory's more than slightly rusty but we do remember the movie to be about a group of people trapped in a grocery store when a mysterious mist descends upon them.

Yeah, so all we remembered was that they were stuck in there because there's something out there in the mist, and that we enjoyed the book pretty much. Couldn't even remember how the story ended. See how we can reread our books now? :P



Anyways, throughout February sis had been asking us if we'd already watched the show too, to which we replied that it hadn't started screening yet. Thankfully she didn't spoil the show for us except to say that "the ending a bit sad". Right. We thought we knew how it was suppose to be sad. The show started off very well, the pacing of the storytelling from the storm to our hero David Drayton heading down to the grocery store to the descending of the mist was well done. We recognized the main actor (Thomas Jane) to have acted in Dreamcatcher (yes, another Stephen King movie) as well as Punisher (ugh!), although at that time we couldn't remember his name (except for the fact that it had a girl's name in it).

Until we get to reread the book again, we'll say that the movie followed the book faithfully. It's definitely a good watch, and yes, the ending is a bit sad.

And yes, we also headed to Borders after the movie to compare the movie ending to the book - and find that the movie provided better closure. Now to hunt for a cheap copy of Skeleton Crew.