SOURCE: "The Mist" and "Different Seasons," in Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, New American library, 1984, pp. 86-94, 104-11.

Winter is an American fiction writer and critic. In the following essays, he examines The Mist and Different Seasons.

In The Mist, Stephen King conjures the quintessential faceless horror: a white opaque mist that enshrouds the northeastern United States (if not the world) as the apparent result of an accident at a secret government facility. This short novel is a paradigm of the complicated metaphors of Faustian experimentation and technological horror consistently woven into the fiction of Stephen King. Those who read The Mist will not likely forget the haunting inability of its characters to comprehend, let alone explain, what is happening to them. It has been claimed that the central fantasy of horror fiction is "that the unknowable can be known and related to in some meaningful fashion...