Will I love Cujo?

This is really how the Disney film Old Yeller should have ended, with a rabid canine raising hell and ripping out throats. What a phenomenal book.

My first foray into the world of Stephen King. I loved it so much I tried to name my dog Cujo … but I was overruled. We settled on Otto cause it sounds sorta similar. But, again, I love this book for the same reason I love Who Goes There?—a beast is terrorizing people who are trapped and can’t flee. It’s a simple formula for monster-themed novels, but it gets me every single… show more.

It probably goes without saying that King is the master of horror. So often what he does so well is conjuring supernatural baddies (The Mist, Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, The Stand, etc., etc., etc.) or showing the consequences of ungodly powers (Firestarter, Dead Zone, Carrie, etc., etc., etc.).

Cujo stands out for taking an absolute valid, absolutely realistic fear—because yes, in real life, in certain situations, dogs are scary as hell—and pushing it to the absolute limit. 

No horror list would be complete without a Stephen King entry, and of all his animal attack stories Cujo still reigns supreme. Set in small-town Maine, King unmasks the rotten underbelly of an archetypical American town. In classic King fashion, a childhood dream is turned into a nightmare when a friendly Saint Bernard dog, Cujo, is bitten by a rabid bat and transforms into a vicious monster. The story revolves around a broken family still reeling from the mother’s affair. When the father disappears to deal with a corporate scandal, the family is further threatened as Cujo traps the mother… show more.

Oh, come on. You can’t expect a wild, weird dog list without Cujo, the phenomenally popular, phenomenally scary 1981 novel made into a fair-to-middling movie, which is usually the case with King’s novels. What’s so good about this novel isn’t the supernatural—there is none!—but King’s evocation of small-town life and the troubled, boozy, cheating lives of its inhabitants and the big, friendly St. Bernard who chases a rabbit into an underground cave. Then emerges as death incarnate. The three-day car standoff is particularly vivid; so are the sequences written from the perspective of Cujo, which makes the novel all… show more.

This is maybe not the novel that leaps to mind when people are thinking about King’s cursed places—most readers would probably pick The Shining or Salem’s Lot. Yet I think this still fits the bill as a somewhat overlooked pick. It’s just that in this instance the cursed place happens to be a hole in the ground. Maybe I have a soft spot for this one, as it’s the first book of his I read, and I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s his best novel, but to me this work is more believable than most of his tales. As a… show more.

Of all the Stephen King books I’ve read (and I’ve read over half) this one connects with me the most because the monster is something typically beloved: the family pet. King has this special talent for making something ordinary and loveable seem terrifying. The rabid Saint Bernard dog of the title serves as a metaphor for the existential assault made on the family of an advertising exec