August 2 - "Strawberry Spring"

Sundays with Uncle Stevie“Strawberry Spring”
by Stephen King
Night Shift (1979)

* * * (Good) Horror

Hidden in the fog, a killer haunts the campus of the New Sharon Teacher’s College during the strawberry spring of 1968.

King does a better job with the setting and the mood of the story here than he does with developing the characters. Which is unusual. That’s not to say that he foregoes setting and mood in his greater works – in fact they are a large part of many of his stories – but they are usually combined with interesting, realistic characters. Here the narrator does little more than recollect fragments of that time when Springheel Jack stalked the campus, killing coeds in the fog. The twist at the end of the story is of little surprise, and by the end, it doesn’t appear to be much more than your average slasher/horror story.

[This story was read on August 2. The review was not posted until later due to laziness on my part.]