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. 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. (I will provide a caveat that I read this in the middle of reading Middlemarch which is incredibly well written.) It felt like he was writing down to his readers, almost dumbing things down for them and this bothered me. 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. 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. It was really distracting and felt more like a galley than an actual published book. I read this book through Overdrive from my local library and somewhere during the conversion process a lot of mistakes were processed. I did have major issues with the formatting of this book. So my disparaging review is totally legit. I didn’t choose to read this novel on my own, it was the selection for our April Books into Movies library book group. I am glad I can now say I’ve read a Stephen King novel but overall it was lack-luster and disappointing. If you haven’t figured it out yet I didn’t enjoy this book.

The major plus side was that it felt like a short novel.

I just was not impressed and couldn’t get into the novel. 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.

Cujo goodreads