Cujo, by Stephen King

[rachelmanija]

I read or re-read a lot of Stephen King this year. (Of the new-to-me ones that I have not yet reviewed, so far my favorite is The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.) In some cases, the re-reads were of books I’d read once thirty years ago. Cujo was one of those. I hadn’t re-read it before partly because I’d vaguely classified it as a high-concept potboiler along the lines of Christine (“car/dog/lawnmower turns EVIL”), and partly because I remembered it as really emotionally brutal. But when I was sorting through King’s long backlist, I realized that those two recollections don’t mesh. So I re-read.

The latter is correct. Along with Pet Sematary, it might King’s most emotionally traumatizing novel. It’s surprisingly well-written and interestingly constructed, with way more going on than “rabid dog traps mom and son in car.” And I will probably not re-read it for another thirty years, so you’re getting the long analysis-for-posterity now.

King, of course, is a horror writer. But I’d like to separate out two worldviews that often get lumped together as “dark,” “grimdark,” or “horror,” but which are actually quite different.

One is “everything sucks.” Terrible things happen because most people are terrible, there is no God (or God is evil), and good people are either idiots for trying to do right or subconsciously not good at all, but merely deluded or self-righteous.

The other is “life isn’t fair.” Terrible things happen for a lot of reasons (bad people also have free will and may exercise it on you, nature can kill you, etc), God may or may not exist but either way is unlikely to personally reach down and save you, and while most people are not terrible (in this worldview, usually most people are neither angels nor monsters), neither altruism nor innocence is a shield of protection.

In general, King’s worldview is “life isn’t fair.” One of his main themes is “Why do bad things happen to good people?” This is one of those huge life questions that doesn’t have any easy answers, and if you read a lot of his books you see him tackling it in different ways and providing different possible answers.

In The Stand, an interventionist God exists, but can only save the world from the Devil at the cost both of a huge death toll of innocents and the willing sacrifice of good people; this brings up questions like is “Is it worth it?” and “Is that God worthy of worship?” In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, God probably exists but is not interventionist in large or obvious ways, though he/it may be in small and subtle ones; bad things happen because tiny errors can snowball and nature is an inhuman force that’s much more powerful than any given human, though that doesn’t mean the human doesn’t have a chance. Cujo reads like there is no God and no Devil, just people: some good, a few bad, most flawed but trying, in a universe that doesn’t even know they exist.

A lot of King’s books say, “Bad things happen because life is like that. Maybe you made a mistake or a bad choice, but we all do because we’re all human. You got caught and chewed up in the cogs of fate or chance, not because you did anything to deserve it, but because we live inside a big scary machine and sometimes it eats people. What happened to you could happen to any of us. And if along the way you were brave or good, even if it didn’t save you or anyone, even if no one but you will ever know, at least you tried. And that matters.”

There can be a bleak but real comfort in that worldview, and if you feel it, King is a good writer to read when you’re going through hard times. (Apart from the more obvious comfort of “My life sucks but at least I’m not imprisoned by a killer fan who addicted me to painkillers, cut off my foot, and is forcing me to write on a typewriter missing the letters r, n, and e.”)

Sometimes what you really need to hear isn’t “Everything will be okay.” Sometimes you need, “Maybe everything won’t be okay. But it’s not because you did something wrong. It has nothing to do with you at all. It’s just the way life is.”

(You may be thinking, “How the hell is that comforting?” Two reasons. One is that if things are going sufficiently badly, hearing nothing but “No they’re not! Stuff like that can’t happen!” is unhelpful at best, crazymaking at worst, and definitely makes you feel like people aren’t listening. The other is that the alternative possibility is that everything is your fault and if you can’t fix it, it’s because you personally are a failure and also suck.)

Cujo is the purest expression of the “Bad stuff happens because life is like that” view that I’ve read from King so far. A lot of its literary interest is how that theme is reflected in both content and structure. And in case you missed it, toward the end King states the theme explicitly:

It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good dog. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN, and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.

Huge book spoilers from here out.

Short summary of Cujo that you probably know if you haven’t actually read the book: A St. Bernard named Cujo gets rabies, then traps a mom and son in their car.

This is correct, but incomplete. The book is written as three (or four or more, depending on how you’re counting) interwoven stories without chapter breaks. They flow in and out of each other, which has the obvious effect of making the book hard to put down but also gives it a deceptively unified feel. The three main plotlines don’t intersect much until near the end, and one of them has almost no direct connection to the other two beyond that it involves the family that owns Cujo. It’s an unusual structure that really hammers in the theme, which is chance. (Or fate.)

For a horror thriller about two people trapped in a car by a rabid dog, it’s got a surprisingly large amount of other stuff going on, and pulls off the unusual trick of not feeling padded or irrelevant despite a structure based on theme rather than plot and a plot based on the idea that everything is relevant. Some of the best parts are Cujo’s POV, which is heartbreaking and beautifully done, steering just to the right side of over-sentimentality. King obviously loves dogs and Cujo feels very believably doggy.

Plotline # 1. Donna, Tad, and Cujo. Donna is a discontented mom who had an affair with an asshole named Steve Kemp; when the story begins, she’s already broken it off and thinks her husband, Vic, doesn’t know. Tad is their young, over-sensitive son. When Vic has to leave town due to a work crisis, Donna takes Tad with her to get their car fixed. They end up trapped inside the car by Cujo, the rabid St. Bernard owned by Joe Cambers, the mechanic.

Plotline # 2: Vic and the ad campaign. Vic is an ad executive who came up with a genius ad campaign using an actor with a sort of Mr. Rogers persona to persuade kids’ parents that his company’s cereal is healthy. In a recent screw-up, a new cereal dye turned body fluids bright red, leading to parents rushing their kids to the ER thinking they’re bleeding to death. It’s harmless physically and but catastrophic in terms of PR, so Vic and his partner rush out of town, in theory to fix it but knowing that it’s unfixable. Mostly they’re hoping to not get fired. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Vic has just found out about Donna’s affair via a note from Kemp, who is a real asshole.

Plotline # 3: Joe Cambers’s family. Cambers is an abusive asshole mechanic who owns an isolated garage and a sweet St. Bernard named Cujo. His wife, Charity, has gotten scared that her son, Brett, is going to grow up to be like Dad, so she plots and executes what she hopes will be their escape, taking him to her sister’s place out of state for a vacation she hopes to make permanent. It turns out to not be that simple, because the sister isn’t that great either – not abusive, but still not a good place for her son. Now what?

Other plotlines: The main one is the story of how Cujo got rabies in the first place, and follows Cujo from his POV. He chases a rabbit, sticks his head down a hole, and gets bitten by a rabid bat. Because Brett is gone and Joe is irresponsible, no one realizes until it’s too late.

There’s also storylines following Kemp, Joe Cambers, and a cop looking for Donna. Mostly they explain how the entire tragedy was constructed from individual decisions that made sense in context, but led to horrific, unpredictable, spiraling consequences. In the one part of the book where the Horror Of Cujo takes on a distinctly gleeful tone, Cambers gets gorily eaten. (It’s okay, he deserves it. However, it’s notable that this is almost the only time anything happens to anyone because they deserve it.) In a cleverly plotted cringe-at-the-trainwreck storyline, Steve Kemp vandalizes Donna’s house in revenge for her dumping him. This has the unintended consequence of making the cops think he kidnapped her and Tad, so they go on a wild goose chase after him and no one follows up on Donna’s mechanic visit until it’s too late.

What all of this does is point up the role of chance/fate in life. Cujo, who isn’t vaccinated because Cambers is that kind of guy, finds the ONE rabbit that goes into the ONE hole with the rabid bat. An intricate chain of events involving a huge number of unconnected chance factors gets Donna and Tad trapped in the car, then ensures that no one finds them before it’s too late for Tad. If even one of those incidents hadn’t happened, no one would have died, or only Cujo would have, or maybe Cujo and one other person, but certainly Tad wouldn’t have. (There’s a hint of supernatural forces (something in Tad’s closet), but if they even exist, they’re clearly an omen rather than a direct cause of anything.)

Within each story, there’s additional emphasis on chance, unpredictable consequences, and things that happen by accident or don’t depend on the actions of the people who are trying to affect them. The ad campaign and red dye story, which is at once hilarious and tragic and weirdly suspenseful, both occurs and resolves due to factors mostly unaffected by the actions of the characters we follow within it. Donna, who starts off as a very ordinary person whose one bad action (the affair) is done out of weakness, ends up resourceful and ultimately even heroic, but to no avail. Her affair affects the plot, but it’s not why she gets trapped and Tad’s death is not her punishment. Charity and Brett, both doing their best in circumstances where the seemingly right decision has an unexpected price, find an equally unexpected deliverance that has only the most circuitous relationship to the trip that was supposed to save them.

So, why did any of this happen? The closest thing to a root cause is Joe Cambers not vaccinating Cujo. But really, it happened because rabies exists.

Why does rabies exist?

Why do children die?

Why can’t life be more fair?

The entire structure of the book says: because the universe is a thing without consciousness, not an entity with feelings. Because chance. Because fate, if you believe in that. (But then, why that fate?)

The story wraps up with a sense of “This happened; what more can I say?” And it ends as it should, with an elegy to Cujo, who in a just world would never have been an instrument of terror and who, no matter how terrifying he became, was always also pitiable. No one’s fault: just a disease.

Just.

Comments

[alatefeline]

Brrrr. I'm glad I read your review of Cujo. It sounds like both a very good book and one I would prefer not to read, ever.

[rachelmanija]

It is definitely not a book I would recommend unless you really want to read that sort of thing! King has a lot of books that are genuinely uplifting. But that's not one of them.

I feel a little bad for everyone who thought, based on the premise, they were going to get more of a normal horror novel. The whole thing easily could have been written in the style of the part where the wife-beating mechanic gets his comeuppance by being gobbled up by his own dog, and if you're into that sort of cheerfully gory horror, it would have been a fun book to read on a plane. But apart from that one part (well, and the ad agency storyline, which is both funny and a little sad - the poor ad execs!) Cujo is really not that book.

[movingfinger]

As a side comment on the rabies issue, apparently there are a lot of people who still don't get their dogs vaccinated. My suburban mother's kind neighbor the fire chief was one. His dog, kept in a fenced area in their yard or indoors, occasionally allowed an off-leash romp across the joined backyards of their house and a couple others, tested positive for rabies. He didn't go slavering mad, but they had to have him euthanized.

[rachelmanija]

ARRRGH. I was literally just thinking, "Nowadays it would probably be harder to sell the idea that any American wouldn't get their big outdoor dog vaccinated for rabies."

[commoncomitatus]

This is such a compelling review. I went through a King phase about a year ago, and Cujo was so far down my shortlist that I never got around to it. Reading your thoughts, I'm almost tempted to put my current reading aside and get stuck into this one instead.

[rachelmanija]

Link me if you do!

Which books did you read/re-read? Did any especially stick with you?

[shati]

I'm not likely to read the book, but the condensed version via review was compelling! (I was going to say I enjoyed it, but I think appreciated is a better word...) And now I'm thinking over other King books in this light.

[rachelmanija]

I know, this is such a "Here is a good book that you probably don't want to read" review.

What are your favorites of his?

[iknowcommawrite]

(continued spoilers)

Another thing keeping this in the "life isn't fair" category rather than the "everything sucks" category for me is that Vic and Donna's marriage holds true: it would be realistic enough, admittedly, for it to collapse, to not be able to survive the affair, let alone the death of their son, but their ability to hold onto each other and help each other has a kind of beauty to it. They not only survive their circumstances but continue to love each other throughout them. It's hopeful.

I often find King's novels sad, in some ways, but I hardly ever find them depressing, and I think the "life isn't fair" vs. "everything sucks" distinction is a big part of why.

[rachelmanija]

Same here. Well, the Bachmann books I've read have been on the depressing side, but I also haven't much liked the style of those for the same reason I'm not usually into King's short stories - too stripped down, when the stuff that isn't there is what I like best. But King's novels tend to be tragic (if they're going that way) rather than depressing, which is a big distinction for me.

I also really liked that Vic and Donna stayed together. They had every reason to break up, sink into despair or alcoholism, stay together but never forgive each other... but they didn't.

[alatefeline]

It's an excellent distinction.

Interestingly, my *reading experience* of King books leans closer to the 'everything sucks' side because of the sheer prevalence of depressing stuff even when the writing thematically leans towards 'life isn't fair'; it's one reason why I love, but rarely reread, certain of his novels.

Also, I enjoy the 'life isn't fair'/'bad stuff happens' theme handled elsewise, with more emphasis on 'so fuck it, let's try anyway.' (I also tend to use a slightly different concept with the title 'life isn't fair...', thus my renaming of it.) That can be done in fiction or nonfiction, but the immersive quality (or lack thereof) of the narration makes or breaks it for me. Horror and its cousins are very hit or miss for me, though I enjoy many things that are often misclassified as horror. Frex, 'the monster wins' stories wherein 'monster' is a sympathetic character (for me) by means of either higher morals, sadly familiar experience, or sheer charm. (If the monster kills everything, and then dies, it usually isn't winning.)

[rydra_wong]

A lot of King’s books say, “Bad things happen because life is like that. Maybe you made a mistake or a bad choice, but we all do because we’re all human. You got caught and chewed up in the cogs of fate or chance, not because you did anything to deserve it, but because we live inside a big scary machine and sometimes it eats people. What happened to you could happen to any of us. And if along the way you were brave or good, even if it didn’t save you or anyone, even if no one but you will ever know, at least you tried. And that matters.”

This is causing me to have emotions and I object. *g*

(Thank you for writing a great review of a book I will probably not want to read.)

[sholio]

Agreed about King's overall theme being "life isn't fair" rather than "life sucks" -- which I think is actually what makes so many of his books an emotional kick in the teeth, because most of his characters are good, likable people, who mostly do decent things and at worst tend to have ordinary human failings (aside from the characters who are awful and evil, obviously) ... AND THEY DIE ANYWAY. Or have basically horrible things happen to them. It wouldn't be nearly as difficult to get through some of his books if all of this were happening to people who weren't trying their best to be good people anyway.

I read Cujo during my big King phase in college, and I think it was one of the early ones I read. I had read ones like Salem's Lot first (i.e. a few of his more conventional horror novels), and I remember being surprised by the lack of any supernatural elements and finding the ordinary-world horror of the family trapped in the car EVEN MORE HORRIFYING than people being menaced by vampires or whatnot. It was definitely not what I was expecting. It was a good book; I think that was the book that made me start thinking King is highly underrated as a serious writer (and I still think that). But all these years later, I have no desire to ever read it again.

[rachelmanija]

King gets me in the "heroic last stand" place a lot even when it's not literally one. So many of his characters try so hard, and overall for good (even if not totally altruistic) reasons, and there's never any guarantee that it's going to work out for them. But they try. Even when they've done absolutely everything else weak and selfish and wrong, unless they're a complete sociopath, there's always a chance that they might change their mind at the last minute, and that it will matter in a wider sense, even if not in a material one, that they do.

One of my favorite examples of that is Whitney Horgan from The Stand. We never see him do anything bad of his own accord, but he's hanging with the Devil and helping him crucify people and prep for mass murder. He's the classic "just following orders" guy, but he volunteered to go with the person who was going to give him those orders. And at the very last moment, he stands up to Flagg and tries to rally people who he has to know are not going to rally, is horribly killed for his attempt... and that ball of lightning Flagg used to kill him comes down and blows Flagg's entire master plan to kingdom come. (It's funny, the Hand of God annoys a lot of people, but if all King had done was not call it that and just had it be that little ball of lightning, that entire sequence would have felt much more organic and composed of the sum of everyone's choices and less deus ex machina.)

But yeah, that car scene is horrifying. Cujo doesn't even kill the poor kid directly; he traps him in the car, and he dies of heat without ever being bitten, and that's even more awful because all he needed to do to live was get out of the car. It was so simple, yet so impossible. And unlike vampires, something that actually happens.

[cyphomandra]

Cujo and Pet Sematary are on my short-list of books I cannot deal with re-reading until the kids are quite a bit older, and maybe not even then (it's not King-exclusive - Dorothy Dunnett's Pawn in Frankincense is on as well, which is a pain as it's book 5 of a 6 book series that I would quite like to re-read).

Are you reading his short stories? You mention preferring his novels as being less horrific, which is definitely true, but he does have some less horrifying ones which I love (e.g. The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet)

[rachelmanija]

I'm not surprised. You might also want to watch out for Duma Key, if you haven't read it yet; not exactly the same issue, but in the same ballpark.

I would take recs for less horror-ish short stories! The problem is that I get really squicked by gross body horror (the cop and the lawnmower in Misery, the giant pimples in Dark Tower, the garbage disposal in Firestarter, etc.) I'm OK with skimming individual scenes in the context of an entire novel, but I'm scared to plunge into the short stories without some sort of advance "this one's OK," because the last time I did that I got that goddamn story with the surgeon on the desert island. So, rec me anything where the horror isn't the whole point and there's no gross mutilation stuff.

[vass]

Thank you for this review. You've satisfied my curiosity while confirming that I definitely don't want the book itself in my head.

It sounds like a really good book, though. Compelling and right and with a whole lot of moral force and humanity behind the horror. Which is exactly why it'd fuck me up if I read it.

Theodicy is a hell of a drug.

[orcofnewyork]

I will probably never read this book, but I really enjoyed your review of it. I appreciate how you highlighted the difference between the "everything sucks" and "life isn't fair" philosophies, because it is such a distinction in horror that gets overlooked by a lot of reviewers.

[kore]

Yeah, all this, plus for me Cujo is the big illustration of one of King's most horrific themes -- that parents can't really protect their children, not really from everything. Even moreso than Pete Semetary. I read it once when I was reading a lot of King as a teenager and never again.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Sometimes you need, “Maybe everything won’t be okay. But it’s not because you did something wrong. It has nothing to do with you at all. It’s just the way life is.”


I completely agree, and for both the reasons you say.

I also like the final message of the book (as you describe it), because sometimes bad things not only aren't your fault, but aren't due to Huge Evil Forces either. Rabies is a horrible disease (one of my childhood fears), and a dog suffering from it is (a) in terrible pain and misery (let's not forget) but also (b) totally terrifying, and deadly--but not evil. And a lot of bad things in life are like that.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a really harsh book and I don't rec it to you personally, but it says something very true and worthwhile.

(You might like The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, depending on how you are with the entire thing being about a little girl going through vividly described hell. However, she's extremely resourceful, the hell is being lost alone in the wilderness (so there's no child abuse or anything like that), and she not only survives but has a very satisfying final triumph. There's a lot of interesting stuff about God, life, and the meaning of things that's related to the Cujo themes, but seen through a way more hopeful lens.)

[bummble.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can read many of King's books for comfort, for exactly the reason you describe!
He is also very good at building up the story, introducing characters, describing bits of their lives, the place they live, etc. There is something about those unhurried first chapters (that can take up more than half of the book) that help me feel calmer.

Having said that, Cujo is not one of my comfort reads... too emotionally wrenching.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Ha ha no, Cujo is definitely not a comfort read, though I did appreciate its message. Once. Others of King's are for me, though. I think I've read The Stand every year or so for the last 30 years.

I totally agree about how good King is at character intros and bringing you into the story. It's gotten me to read so many of his books with premises that I would probably not enjoy from any other writer. There is indeed something oddly relaxing about how he does it - it's very readable and enjoyable, even when you know all hell is about to break loose. I also like that, as you say, he doesn't rush into the hell and in fact the horror or even plotty elements often don't get going for quite some time.

I'm also really impressed at how good he is at two diametrically opposed types of stories which are both very technically difficult for seemingly opposite reasons: stories with huge ensemble casts, and stories that mostly involve one character doing things alone. (For that matter, stories in tiny enclosed locations and stories with multiple locations.) It all comes down to character, story, and atmosphere. But when you look at his actual range, it's mind blowing.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Great analysis! Your choice of ending your essay with
No one’s fault: just a disease.

Just.

is where King started thinking about The Stand. There's a short story reprinted in his first collection Night Shift, which he must have written in the last weeks before he sold Carrie and became famous, 1973 or so. It's called "Night Surf," and it is clearly a first draft of The Stand. In the story, however, there's no battle between God and the Devil. Instead, "Captain Trips" (as the flu is called in both works) just happens. To quote him:
Here we were, with the whole human race wiped out,not by atomic weapons, or bio-warfare or pollution or anything grand like that. Just the flu. . . . JUST THE FLU.

So apparently the effect of becoming famous and rich quickly was to send his mind into thoughts of an interventionist God. I re-read The Stand very recently, in the "author's uncut" version issued in 1990, so I'm sure that the above words from the short story are not found in the novel.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, how interesting! I had no idea. I don't usually like King's short stories (too genre-horror for my taste) so I hadn't even heard of that, let alone read it. I definitely wasn't deliberately quoting anything, so if that line is in The Stand, I don't remember it either.

Have you read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon? It has a very different take on God that I thought was really interesting. (If you haven't read it, this is nine-year-old Trisha's father talking to her about whether he personally believes in God):

"It had electric heat, that house. Do you remember how the baseboard units would hum, even when they weren't heating? Even in the summer?"

Trisha had shaken her head.

"That's because you got used to it, but take my word, Trish, that sound was always there. Even in a house where there aren't any baseboard heaters, there are noises. The fridges goes on and off. The pipes thunk. The floors creak. The traffic goes by outside. We hear those things all the tim, so most of the time we don't hear them at all. They become... Subaudible.

I don't believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die--I don't want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created--but I believe there has to be something.

Yeah, something. Some kind of insensate force for the good.

I think there's a force that keeps drunken teenagers--most drunken teenagers--from crashing their cars when they're coming home from the senior prom or their first big rock concert. That keeps most planes from crashing even when something goes wrong. Not all, just most. Hey, the fact that no one's used a nuclear weapon on actual living people since 1945 suggests there has to be something on our side."

And then the entire book goes on to interrogate the idea of a Subaudible, particularly the question of just how insensate it is, if there's a less benevolent counterpart, and if we're our own Subaudible.

[lorata.livejournal.com]

This is super horrifying sounding yet I'm morbidly fascinated. I got introduced to King around 2001 through my high school best friend, who gave me (FOR REASONS UNKNOWN) 'From A Buick 8' and 'Dreamcatcher', which .......... I mostly found them weird and super gross. After that I read The Shining, which I thought was really good and chilling but distracted me with the weird asides (the furry party??), and then I didn't read anything else. Your posts on King are the first ones that have ever made me curious.

I'm the type of person who is very Hufflepuff in that I want to believe that if I do all the right things and try hard enough then things will work out, even though I know that's not how life works. That philosophy of King's, along with the Picard "it is possible to make mo mistakes and still lose", is probably the most terrifying thing I can conceive of -- but, thinking about it, I can also see the comforting side of it. (I wrestled with that at 21 when my mom died, and independently came to that kind of conclusion? Sometimes cancer is just cancer.)

Anyway, tl;dr now I kind of want to read this horrifying book about a rabid dog that will make me very upset, because your King posts are really fascinating.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Would you like some King recs? ;)

I know my own writing tends to be pretty far on the uplifting/hopeful side and I'm generally a cheerful person when I'm not being crushed by some apocalyptic calamity... but in terms of how I think life works, I think King is right.

It's not that the worst will happen. For any given person, probably it won't. But it always can. And there's at least a 50% chance that it had absolutely nothing to do with you. You just happened to be walking by exactly the wrong part of the road at the exact moment some bad driver got distracted by his dog.

IMO, this is a good worldview to have if you're going to do grief and trauma counseling. Because while the unfairness and randomness of life is an incredibly hard thing to grapple with, what absolutely destroys people is believing that there is a reason and that the reason was something they did. (In fact, if you can get people past the "It's all my fault" stage, most of them will grapple with "there's no reason, shit just happens" for a while, then find some sort of kinder, more livable reason like "dude should have been banned from driving, laws should be stricter" or "It taught me that I can survive anything," etc.)

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I should read some King some day. Probably not this, but something.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I vote for The Stand. There's two versions, both with flaws and virtues, but not really that different; if you want to try it, I could explain about the differences more.

It's a big sprawling apocalypse book that really showcases what's both good and bad about King's writing in general, so it will tell you if you like him. There's other books he wrote that are better in some ways (tighter, better-paced, better endings, female characters have more agency, etc) but I think The Stand is both one of his most typical books and also one of his best. You'll see how tolerant you are of his tendency to go on and on and on. Also, if his storytelling and characters don't grab you in this one, they probably won't in others either.

[a2zmom.livejournal.com]

I feel that a lot of King's novels could stand a good editor. I sometimes get the sense he's paid by the word. Not this one though. For me it all worked for exactly the reasons you stated. In fact, I don't even look at this as a horror novel, not in any traditional sense any way.

(One book of his that doesn't work for me at all is Pet Cemetery. The Monkey's Paw is the same basic idea told in 5 pages and it's a hell of a lot scarier.)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

This is a great review. I read Cujo when I was probably way too young for it (around 12 or 13), so I'm not sure I caught all of the greater themes you describe; I don't remember them. On the other hand, "life isn't fair" is a theme I often resonate with, so perhaps I did pick up on it and have just forgotten about it in the years since.

...It did leave me with an absolute terror of catching rabies, though!

I do remember that shortly after I read it, a friend borrowed my copy of the book for a book report we'd been assigned in school. However, she must have never actually read it but instead watched the movie, where the kid survives at the end. Unfortunately our teacher was familiar with both versions and recognized that she hadn't read the book, and so she failed the assignment.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Well played, teacher.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I read Cujo while in the NICU with my daughter and...that probably explains why I found it oddly comforting.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh my God, are you serious?

Well, I guess in that scenario it's either going to be comforting or cause a nervous breakdown.