King wants to scare your pants off while also removing your moral blinders, and he succeeds.

The Stephen King miniseries on ABC have underwhelmed me. I found The Shining tarnished, The Langoliers laughable, The Stand rickety, It exhausting and The Tommyknockers oh so knockable. Storm of the Century, however, wowed me. It is the most effective King miniseries the network has presented. In this genuinely unsettling epic, good and evil face off on a small Maine island pounded by a nor'easter in 1989. [14 Feb 1999]

"Storm" is classic King, scary as heck and loaded with dark, psychological twists and turns. [14 Feb 1999, p.D8]

King's first original mini-series script is a marathon of communal anxiety with a spooky moral: we are ready to mortgage our children for our own restless comfort.

King, who wrote this directly for the TV screen, not as a novel, is a master of psychological terror, and Storm of the Century delivers plenty, with several fine performances from a huge cast. At the same time, it is not too violent nor too bloody, just a night too long. [12 Feb 1999]

Diverting but stretched-out...While entertaining at times, Storm of the Century, too, rises barely midway up the horror scale. If you’re looking for a major fright, in other words, look elsewhere.

The writing seems more writerly, perhaps a smidge more sophisticated, and here or there one hears a catchy turn of phrase. But basically it's the same old slogging, soggy spookery, derivative and uninspired, protracted beyond all sense of decency.