Stephen King has written a dog story?

Well, yes and no. Mostly no, but it takes 30 or 40 pages to find out for certain. (p. 1)

[Cujo's] eponymous canine—a Saint Bernard belonging to the family of an aggressively uncouth auto mechanic by the name of Joe Camber—contracts rabies and turns from a gentle giant into an indefatigable engine of madness and death. Although Camber's garage lies in the boondocks well beyond Castle Rock, Maine, Donna Trenton and her 4-year-old son Tad drive out there to see about her malfunctioning Pinto. Her husband Vic, meanwhile, has flown to Boston with his partner to try to dissuade their tiny ad agency's most lucrative client from dumping them. When Cujo lays murderous siege to the stalled Pinto, and when Vic's long-distance calls to home go unanswered, the reader soon realizes that King's dog story owes more to Alfred Hitchcock than to Albert Payson Terhune.

Deft characterization and rigorous plotting, a la Hitchcock, inform the best of King's bravura experiments in the horror genre. A conscious awareness of this fact—elsewhere King has confessed especial admiration for the methods of Jack Finney, in whose work the alien and the bizarre often casually emerge from the mundane—has enabled him to develop a useful storytelling formula. By introducing believable middle- and lower-middle-class Americans into situations that defy conventional logic, King subjects the reader to a harrowing tour of the lives of characters who must attempt to defeat the irrational—whether prejudice, plague, vampires, or the cumulative evil accruing to a particular site—in order to restore a modicum of sanity to their world.

Cujo is carefully cut to this formula, but its supernatural element—a rabid dog's possession by the spirit of a psychotic killer from The Dead Zone, a previous King novel—strikes me as obtrusive and phony. Why go mucking up a good, if somewhat overlong, dog story with such drivel? Does King lack the confidence to forgo this nod to previous successes, or does he hope to justify Cujo's insane pertinacity and stamina by imputing to the dog the free-floating force of cosmic evil? The latter, I feel sure. The worm at the heart of Cujo, then, probably uncoils from the author's fear that no mortal animal, healthy or otherwise, could behave as does his doggy Rasputin. This fear, I think, is unfounded, and I wish King had been content to write a thriller without these annoying curtsies to the great grinning idol of the commercial horror novel.

Despite this objection and the inordinate number of pages devoted to Cujo's siege, King's ability to draw character and to marshal a complex series of forward-moving scenes redeems the book. By easy and justifiable reference to dozens of contemporary American icons—Darth Vader, Tupperware, Count Chocula, Where the Wild Things Are, Travis McGee, etc.—he skillfully evokes the here-and-now reality of his characters…. (pp. 1-2)

To resort to hackneyed terminology, we identify with King's characters. He has made it impossible for us not to. This feat, accomplished with such apparent offhandedness, deserves notice and praise. It suggests that King's talent could easily lend itself to the writing of fiction of a decidedly more "literary" order.

But I am fairly happy with what he has given us. Nineteenth-century England had Wilkie Collins for literate, headlong melodrama; we have Stephen King. Both tend to pile up the words along with the suspense, and excessive length is not really necessary for a dog story incorporating implicit observations about the nature of evil. (See Stephen Crane's "A Small Brown Dog" or Jack London's "Batard.") Cujo, however, is a dog story in which human beings dominate our concern. As an adult, I appreciate this fact and do not begrudge King the space he needs to bring them to life. He does it well. (p. 2)