Strawberry Spring

Much of King’s work relies on the trope of an adult or group of adults finding catharsis by reflecting on their traumatic childhoods. From Bill Denbrough, who returns to Derry, Maine to reunite with his friends in the 1986 novel It, to 90-year-old Gary in the 1994 short story “The Man in the Black Suit,” who writes about his mysterious childhood meeting with the devil, King’s characters often journey back into a disturbing past to make sense of the present.

A newspaper article about Springheel Jack prompts the narrator of “Strawberry Spring” to recount his experience during 1968 when the first murders took place. His journey into the past leads him to the realization that he is (perhaps) the murderer, responsible for the four murders eight years prior and the fifth murder the previous night.

In the horror genre, the past is often the source of evils that haunt the present. “Strawberry Spring” is not a ghost story, but the narrator is haunted by his past. Even if he committed the murders while in a dissociative state, as the text implies, the newspaper article unlocks a memory that compels the narrator to face the horror of his actions.

King is particularly interested in the transition from childhood to adulthood. Coming of age is always traumatic in his stories. One could interpret the monsters and demons that populate his stories as allegories of the trials that children must face to reach adulthood, but reaching maturity does not vanquish the monsters. They linger in the background, wreaking psychological havoc, forcing the protagonist to face them again and again.

In his 1981 nonfiction book Danse Macabre, about the horror genre in popular culture, King writes that childhood is a kind of “insanity”: “Looking back into this well of insanity as adults […] we attempt to make sense of things that make no sense […] and remember motivations that simply don’t exist” (380). Similarly, although the narrator’s reminiscence in “Strawberry Spring” leads him to realize that he is probably the murderer, it provides no motive or explanation.

One can characterize “Strawberry Spring” as psychological horror for its reliance on mystery, paranoia, and an unreliable narrator. Some may attribute the narrator’s murders to a psychotic or dissociative state, but King reaches deeper into our collective experience, illustrating the inescapability of the past and the difficulty of reconciling our past and present selves.

Student activism was a powerful social response to the Vietnam War. Contemporaneous with civil rights activism, anti-war war protests proliferated on university and college campuses among the growing body of students who opposed the war’s protracted violence and the threat of nuclear conflict.

Anti-war protests in the 1960s were part of a larger trend of anti-authoritarianism among American youth, who rejected what they saw as oppression by institutions such as the police and military. They were responding, in part, to the McCarthyism of the early 1950s, which was an aggressive campaign to root out supposed communist influences in the United States during the Cold War. Part of the “Red Scare,” McCarthyism unfairly targeted individuals and cultural figures associated with left-wing politics with smear campaigns, blacklisting, and revocation of passports. By the late 1950s, the Supreme Court had ruled most practices of McCarthyism illegal, and the repression largely came to an end. The Vietnam War, which began in 1955, only heightened the public’s distrust of the government.

“Strawberry Spring” is set during 1968, when opposition to the war was at its height. The war is part of the fabric of student life, providing an unnerving backdrop to an already sinister situation. For example, the morning after the second murder, the narrator wakes and assumes the clamor in the hallway is due to another student being drafted (185).

The ineffectiveness of the police deepens the theme of anti-authoritarianism. The police are described as “blue beetles [that] patrol the campus ceaselessly” (186). In a comical instance, a police officer mistakes a student who passed out from the flu for a dead body (186-87). Adelle Parkins is killed while “six police cars and seventeen collegiate-looking plainclothesmen (eight of them were women imported all the way from Boston) patrolled the campus” (189). The police’s failure to catch Springheel Jack signals to the reader that traditional authorities are not to be respected or trusted.