It focuses on all the right things. Great horror novel! ( )

I was incredibly bored. None of the characters were interesting, never mind likeable (well, maybe Cujo before the rabies kicked in). The story was dull, dull, dull. The Frank Dodd stuff went nowhere, the haunted closet went nowhere, and the idea that a terrible sequence of events led to an even more terrible tragedy was hammered home time and time again. The ad agency bits were even more boring than the rest of the book, and that's going some, and most of it seemed to be about bad marriages.

Most of King's work stands up because story and subtext gel. This was appalling - he sort of threw together marital problems, bad luck, crap characters, a haunted closet and a rabid dog, and hoped for the best. it just wasn't very... coherent. ( )

I like Cujo for several reasons. First, it's a very tight story that winds you up to the point where you just can't put it down. Second, it shows how a chain of events can create a circumstance, and I think it's not done in a contrived way. Finally, it does not pull its punches; it is a relentless book. ( )

Whether it be cars, dogs, or aliens, or just plain terror, this is classic King. ( )

With Cujo Stephen King finally mastered the thriller.

I've been reading Stephen King's books in order of publication and the last few (The Dead Zone and Firestarter) just didn't stack up to what he'd written before. It was clear he was trying to craft thrillers rather than the out-and-out horror of his earlier novels, but was coming up short.

With the simple premise of Cujo (a rabid Saint Bernard keeps a mother and child trapped in a sweltering Pinto) he knocked it out of the park.

King's trademark strong characters and multiple sub-plots dealing with the lives of small town people (in this case - a badly ended affair, a mother trying to show her bright son that there is more to life than small-town Maine and an ad agency dealing with a disaster) are all here as well, but he was able to tie every one of them in to the main struggle. Each 'story' supports and adds to another until they all dove-tail together in a way that never felt forced.

The book starts slowly, showing us slices of the various characters lives before dropping them each on their own personal chute to hell. Cujo is the darkest King book I can think of. The recurring theme of the book is the cruelty of fate. All of the threads that the book follows hinge on good people whose lives are thrown into chaos through sheerest coincidence or events beyond their control.

One problem I do have with the book is the supernatural undercurrent. Overall, it didn't detract from the story and could have been an interesting element. But at various times King goes out of his way to show that there are some ghostly things happening in Castle Rock. The thing is, this aspect of the book never seems to go anywhere. Tad being afraid of the closet monster and marrying that fear to the beast holding him hostage in the car was effective. Pointing out that the contents of the closet had indeed been rearranged by something other than the family in the house seemed pointless. Tad's fear of the monster would have been just as effective if we believed that the thing in the closet was inspired more by gravy than the grave.

The monster in the closet aside, I really enjoyed Cujo. It streamed along and held my interest. The cuts to the various side stories were effective and interesting and worked to build the tension. Cujo is not the thriller that Misery is, but it is respectable on its own. ( )