Oh noooooooo, there’s a dog with rabies on the loose and a dead serial killer’s rotten soul has possessed it. A very Kingian novel, like with many King novels, it’s a banger with some caveats to be aware of.

Despite the boring premise, Stephen King sucks the reader into the world with real feeling depictions of life, parenthood and kids haunted by their ominous premonitions of the future. Cujo is a banger as long as you’re willing to put with King’s many idiosyncrasies.

The constant explicit descriptions of human (and dog) bodily functions such as pissing, farting, shitting, vomiting, ejaculating may bother some. King’s caricatural depictions of overweight and/or low-income white people might bother others.

But if you’re a fan of King’s work, this shouldn’t be unexpected but I’ve never read a King novel with this much “going for the gross out” moments. It’s so egregious that it feels like he’s parodying himself at certain points (see the mailman’s POV for evidence of this).

Cujo reminds me of Under The Dome (Stephen King) but is a tighter, more focused version of that. I like Under the Dome more because the bigger scope and science fiction-al bent to that story is more up my alley.

Despite all that, it’s really surprising to me (but perhaps not so surprising considering how mainstream and popular Stephen King was at his peak) how good King, nominally a white man, is at telling stories from the point-of-view of kids and women.

Specifically in Cujo, Charity and Donna’s chapters are great. Both of these women are mothers to young boys, in relationships with abusive and workaholic men, respectively, and their struggles they find themselves in and their attempts to get out of them alive and well are depicted in really compelling and real ways. None of this moments with these characters feel cheap, they feel earned.

It’s no secret that King was raised by his mother and that his father just left them at some point, never to return. And, it seems like that could have had an impact on King, perhaps allowing him to more easily empathise with and tell stories from these perpectives like the his mother’s which would have so unlike his own.