Yet again, early King’s obsession produces another cringe-worthy story. Overall, this is not as hard to read as Strawberry Spring, but that’s mostly attributable to its shorter length. Continuing the trend of King’s unfortunate early obsession with young men murdering women in the city, this story starts out very pleasant, but towards the end it hits you with a sudden murder scene, involving the death of a woman lured in by the flowers the serial killer had bought. While this is by far the shortest story in this entire collection, it’s also one of the darkest. Luckily, King grew out of this phase, but going back to these themes in his early work feels a bit awkward. One has to wonder why a young King wrote so much about this subject. His worst novel, Rage, uses this storyline to dismal effect and so does this forgettable story. One of the worst aspects of King’s early writing is his reliance on stories about school shootings or murders around a campus. It’s a musty homage to the original Dracula, and its placement is rather unfortunate, as it’s the first in the collection. This prequel, however, lacks all the power and energy of its source material. Carrie may be his first novel but ‘Salem’s feels like the first real Stephen King book.

It makes sense that ‘Salem’s Lot would be on King’s mind, as that would end up being the blueprint for many of his other books.

‘Salem’s Lot gets two stories set in the titular town in this collection, and the story that would spawn The Stand also features. Much of Night Shift acts as epilogues and prologues for King’s novels. Like we did with Different Seasons, let’s rank the stories from worst to best. In our opinion, Night Shift represents some of King’s finest work and is easily his best short story collection, but it’s not all equal. It was called Night Shift, and ever since its release King has been known equally as a novelist and a writer of short, spooky stories. In 1978, Stephen King released a collection compiling some of his previously published stories into one volume.

Stephen king different seasons stories