One of my friends put it best, ‘So apparently Cujo is just a bad lifetime movie with a rabid dog’ and although he was referring to the movie, it pretty much sums up the book as well. I just was not impressed and couldn’t get into the novel. The major plus side was that it felt like a short novel.
If you haven’t figured it out yet I didn’t enjoy this book. I am glad I can now say I’ve read a Stephen King novel but overall it was lack-luster and disappointing. I didn’t choose to read this novel on my own, it was the selection for our April Books into Movies library book group. So my disparaging review is totally legit. I did have major issues with the formatting of this book. I read this book through Overdrive from my local library and somewhere during the conversion process a lot of mistakes were processed. It was really distracting and felt more like a galley than an actual published book.
I had a lot of problems with the book especially after it started out with such a good sense of terror and what was to come. I definitely freaked out within the first ten pages, but that feeling slowly disappeared and never returned, a lot of this had to do with King’s writing. It felt like he was writing down to his readers, almost dumbing things down for them and this bothered me. (I will provide a caveat that I read this in the middle of reading Middlemarch which is incredibly well written.)
Rather than telling the reader that things were coincidental and beating them over the head with it, it would’ve felt a lot less forced if he would’ve slowly revealed the coincidences. Cujo is King’s 12th novel and I have to assume he’d grown as a writer, but I doubt I’ll ever find out as I just was not impressed.
The plot was interesting enough and made sense, but the suspense could have been better (see above paragraph), but I felt there were just too many tangential plot points trying to converge into one: the affair, the dog, the mental abuse, the ad campaign, and the health issues. It felt as if King didn’t quite have a grasp on what he wanted to write about and just sort of threw everything into this one story.
Recommendation: Pass. It wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read, but it was far from the best. And the movie is definitely outdated, plus the dog kept wagging his tail when he was supposed to be super-vicious (I know there’s only so much you can do with an animal actor). I can definitely imagine a remake which would be much more horrible and suspenseful.
Opening Line: “Not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine.”
Closing Line: “Its bones, so far as I know, still remain there with the bones of those small animals unlucky enough to have tumbled into that place before it.” (Whited out.)
I will say I liked the ending in the book a lot better than in the movie. It definitely wasn’t as happy, but it just made more sense.
Give some other Stephen King a chance. The Green Mile was a great book!
Maybe some day, but there are so many other books that I want to read and authors that impressed me with their first book. Who knows.
I’ve only read Rose Madder, and I wasn’t a huge fan of that. In is autobiography/writing memoir On Writing (which is actually really great), he mentions that book didn’t work well for him, so I’ll eventually try another from him. Maybe not Cujo, though.
I’ve heard good things about On Writing. Maybe that’s what I should read. I’d recommend staying away from Cujo too.
This was one of the King books I read as a teenager, and I remember nothing about it (or the movie, really), so it must not have impressed me, either. I’ll be re-reading it next month for my READ ALL OF SK project…I’ll let you know what I think. Perhaps I’ll live-tweet it.
Oh hopefully you’ll enjoy it. The people who like King in book group didn’t hate it as much as the rest of us. You’re right about the film though, it was completely forgettable.
The only scene I remember from the whole movie is the end (?) when they’re trapped in the car and the mother is all hurt and stuff. I don’t even remember how that scene plays out, though.
Oh that’s the biggest change! It happens one way in the book and another way in the film.
I do recommend On Writing. That’s a great book. I haven’t read Cujo and to be honest it doesn’t appeal to me. It seems that the story would get old fast. I enjoyed his novel Salem’s Lot and there are a few others by him that I want to read. Probably won’t include this one.
It’s funny. When I was reading it I thought it must be one of his first novels because of how poorly written it felt. But it was later and his first novels are apparently the best, including Carrie and Salem’s Lot.