Scan barcode
heathergrayyy's review
3.0
This book was my first brush with King, I was hooked immediately. The book was infinitely better than the movie (as usual) so don't be discouraged if you've seen the film. The book is a bit of a slow burn but in a wonderful way. The back and forth between Donna and Cujo builds until it comes to a head. An easy read with just the right amount of drama and action.
trainisloud's review
5.0
Geez, oh man. As with all of King's work this is about much more thana monstrous dog terrorizing a community. This is about marriage, parenthood, physical impact of dehydration, the desire for more (hope). Plus this book is scary, it is a scary concept, it plays out scary, it makes me scared. I will ALWAYS be sure my dogs have their rabies shot, I have to believe this book and movie helped improve the US rabies compliance.
cattytrona's review against another edition
4.0
i think king’s such a good judge of when to escalate things, and to switch between scenes, in order to create but also manage tension. it feels textbook, but i can’t imagine it can actually be taught: it’s the sort of instinct you can only hone from practicing writing, and reading really good examples. like cujo!
obviously deeply grim, and the kind of scary that certainly made me reflect on the dominos arranged around my own life. but it’s able to be those things because it’s empathetic, and carefully observed. i thought king was particularly good (knowing?) at writing the folk who got out, who have no real impact on the story, but make the world feel realer. almost everyone, including cujo, is recognisable and understandable. even as their choices spell doom. and especially towards the book’s end you feel the horror of the specifics of what they go through, but also the horror that the simple fact of their loss represents. i cried.
obviously deeply grim, and the kind of scary that certainly made me reflect on the dominos arranged around my own life. but it’s able to be those things because it’s empathetic, and carefully observed. i thought king was particularly good (knowing?) at writing the folk who got out, who have no real impact on the story, but make the world feel realer. almost everyone, including cujo, is recognisable and understandable. even as their choices spell doom. and especially towards the book’s end you feel the horror of the specifics of what they go through, but also the horror that the simple fact of their loss represents. i cried.
batrock's review against another edition
4.0
In the early 1980s, Stephen King had death on the mind. Moreso than usual. Cujo is the second in what is at least a loose trilogy of meditations on grief and mortality and, given that it is famously the novel that King does not remember writing at all, it speaks to something in his subconscious. It is a pity on all counts, because this killer dog story is one of King’s harder hitting works, emphasising his skill with the mundane. With no supernatural elements in play, and without the deep-seated nihilism that infected Roadwork, Cujo is a dark work with a sparkling undercurrent.
In Castle Rock, a town still haunted by a serial killer (whose exploits were covered, briefly, in The Dead Zone), lives a giant Saint Bernard called Cujo. One day Cujo gets bitten by a bat, and rabies sets in. As the humans in Cujo’s life deal with their own issues — job woes, dissatisfying marriages — the madness sets in, and the dog begins to foam.
More than a work of terror, Cujo is a profoundly sad novel. Cujo is, as King never fails to tell the reader, a good dog. Nothing that happens after Cujo is bitten by the bat is the fault of the beast himself and, thanks to carefully placed passages from the dog’s perspective, we can see the disintegration of his mindset. It is some of King’s more sympathetic work, and we come to know Cujo as intimately as any character in the book.
The Trentons and Cambers, whose own dramas inform the forward motion around which Cujo revolves, are families from opposite ends of the Castle Rock hierarchy. When people think of Cujo, they don’t think “it’s the one about the advertising exec who has to quash a scandal,” or “it’s the one about a woman working up the courage to liberate herself and her son from under the thumb of her abusive husband”, but both of these are accurate descriptors.
The Trenton advertising storyline is the one that would drive a more straightforward family drama, while the Camber domestic cycle is the literary element of the novel. They each have their own recommendable elements, although the advertising accoutrements seem that they were more interesting to King than they would have been to any Constant Reader — this isn’t exactly a proto-Mad Men. The Camber family are exquisitely drawn, with Charity being one of the archetypal empathetic wife character that King is so good at bringing to life. You may not be able to have a Trenton novel without the intervention of a rabid dog, but very little would need to be done to make a dog free novel about the Cambers.
King’s most tense works are those where the reader is frustrated by their own passivity; there is no way to help these people who are in so desperately in need of assistance. Cujo is about what happens when you put off something because if you do anything about it then it might get in the way of what you really want. Cujo is a cyclone of easily preventable misfortunes that coalesce around the rampage of an otherwise blameless creature. It may seem frustrating at times, but Cujo never collapses under the weight of its own coincidence. When a novel reads like a series of credibly bad events rather than an author playing havoc with their characters’ lives, it seems not cruel so much as inevitable.
Of course, Cujo is a product of 1981, the sort of novel that would take a lot of effort to make credible in a 21st century setting. If any of these characters had mobile phones, ninety percent of the situations described herein would not occur at all; if they weren’t pre-emptively thwarted, a simple phone call would quash them as soon as they arrived.
By the time that Cujo finishes, it is difficult not to be moved by the grace and delicacy with which King handles his conclusion. It is easy to get sentimental about an animal, true, but we know Cujo almost as if he were our own dog, so cruelly brought down by blameless bats. The Saint Bernard may be the star of the show — and it would be a disservice to fear him rather than mourn what he has become — but King works enough magic that we care about the final destinations of the Trentons and Cambers. Bad things happen, and not everyone survives, but King at last allows a glimmer of hope for the future. Cujo is many things, but it is not pessimistic.
Featuring some of King’s finest character work laced with quiet tragedy, Cujo is so much more than the “evil dog” book its reputation suggests. An interlocking family drama, a perfect cascade of failures, and a book about what has to come after everything else has failed, King may not be able to remember writing Cujo, but it is a deeply felt piece that deserves to endure.
In Castle Rock, a town still haunted by a serial killer (whose exploits were covered, briefly, in The Dead Zone), lives a giant Saint Bernard called Cujo. One day Cujo gets bitten by a bat, and rabies sets in. As the humans in Cujo’s life deal with their own issues — job woes, dissatisfying marriages — the madness sets in, and the dog begins to foam.
More than a work of terror, Cujo is a profoundly sad novel. Cujo is, as King never fails to tell the reader, a good dog. Nothing that happens after Cujo is bitten by the bat is the fault of the beast himself and, thanks to carefully placed passages from the dog’s perspective, we can see the disintegration of his mindset. It is some of King’s more sympathetic work, and we come to know Cujo as intimately as any character in the book.
The Trentons and Cambers, whose own dramas inform the forward motion around which Cujo revolves, are families from opposite ends of the Castle Rock hierarchy. When people think of Cujo, they don’t think “it’s the one about the advertising exec who has to quash a scandal,” or “it’s the one about a woman working up the courage to liberate herself and her son from under the thumb of her abusive husband”, but both of these are accurate descriptors.
The Trenton advertising storyline is the one that would drive a more straightforward family drama, while the Camber domestic cycle is the literary element of the novel. They each have their own recommendable elements, although the advertising accoutrements seem that they were more interesting to King than they would have been to any Constant Reader — this isn’t exactly a proto-Mad Men. The Camber family are exquisitely drawn, with Charity being one of the archetypal empathetic wife character that King is so good at bringing to life. You may not be able to have a Trenton novel without the intervention of a rabid dog, but very little would need to be done to make a dog free novel about the Cambers.
King’s most tense works are those where the reader is frustrated by their own passivity; there is no way to help these people who are in so desperately in need of assistance. Cujo is about what happens when you put off something because if you do anything about it then it might get in the way of what you really want. Cujo is a cyclone of easily preventable misfortunes that coalesce around the rampage of an otherwise blameless creature. It may seem frustrating at times, but Cujo never collapses under the weight of its own coincidence. When a novel reads like a series of credibly bad events rather than an author playing havoc with their characters’ lives, it seems not cruel so much as inevitable.
Of course, Cujo is a product of 1981, the sort of novel that would take a lot of effort to make credible in a 21st century setting. If any of these characters had mobile phones, ninety percent of the situations described herein would not occur at all; if they weren’t pre-emptively thwarted, a simple phone call would quash them as soon as they arrived.
By the time that Cujo finishes, it is difficult not to be moved by the grace and delicacy with which King handles his conclusion. It is easy to get sentimental about an animal, true, but we know Cujo almost as if he were our own dog, so cruelly brought down by blameless bats. The Saint Bernard may be the star of the show — and it would be a disservice to fear him rather than mourn what he has become — but King works enough magic that we care about the final destinations of the Trentons and Cambers. Bad things happen, and not everyone survives, but King at last allows a glimmer of hope for the future. Cujo is many things, but it is not pessimistic.
Featuring some of King’s finest character work laced with quiet tragedy, Cujo is so much more than the “evil dog” book its reputation suggests. An interlocking family drama, a perfect cascade of failures, and a book about what has to come after everything else has failed, King may not be able to remember writing Cujo, but it is a deeply felt piece that deserves to endure.
ctellier's review against another edition
4.0
Algo sobre a escrita de King que eu já havia reparado ao ler Sob a redoma é que ele é prolixo. Porém não num sentido pejorativo já que, diferente da maioria dos textos prolixos, o de King é agradável de ler. Parece supérfluo. Pode até ser supérfluo em alguns casos. Mas é interessante. Sempre. Neste livro, principalmente no início, há várias páginas discorrendo sobre assuntos que pouco agregam à história, mas que ainda assim se apresentam atraentes ao leitor, que dificilmente fica com vontade de saltar parágrafos. E, apesar desses trechos ou, aproveitando-se desses trechos, King vai inserindo uma tensão na narrativa que prende o leitor.
Resenha completa:
http://www.cafeinaliteraria.com.br/2017/01/20/cujo-stephen-king/
Resenha completa:
http://www.cafeinaliteraria.com.br/2017/01/20/cujo-stephen-king/
gbweeks's review
3.0
This is an uneven book. The first half is essentially a well-written soap opera about two struggling marriages. In one of them, Vic works to keep his ad agency afloat, and for unknown reasons King spends a great deal of time talking about breakfast cereal. Not only does King write ads for us, but he also writes jokes for people like George Carlin to tell about the ads. It creates verisimilitude, I guess, while serving as an avenue for leaving Donna alone, and he's good at this, but there is really a lot of it.
The pace picks up in the second half, and then the last 30ish pages is thriller writing with some serious King gross-out material. Some of it is just weird: "Her kidneys were heavy but not unpleasantly so" (p. 226). Say what?
On the spoiler side: I think the vaguely supernatural references to Cujo's eyes in the closet and monsters are clunky. This book is very much of this world. I wasn't a big fan of hearing Cujo's thoughts, either, but that was minimal.
The pace picks up in the second half, and then the last 30ish pages is thriller writing with some serious King gross-out material. Some of it is just weird: "Her kidneys were heavy but not unpleasantly so" (p. 226). Say what?
On the spoiler side: I think the vaguely supernatural references to Cujo's eyes in the closet and monsters are clunky. This book is very much of this world. I wasn't a big fan of hearing Cujo's thoughts, either, but that was minimal.
likethehotsauce's review
4.0
I’ve never felt as distraught over the death of a character before this book. King knows how to trigger seemingly every human instinct and fear.
whatamidoing_rn's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
obelomiaz's review
5.0
This was another phenomenal Stephen King book. This is only my second and I loved this one probably just as much as Misery. There was never a slow part in the entire book and I always was intrigued with what will happen next. It definitely had me on the edge of my seat especially when anyone was directly interacting with Cujo. There was a perfect amount of characters that they were all developed well without there being so many that it was hard to keep track of who is who. Cujo’s storyline and the dramatics with him, Donna, and Tad was obviously the highlight, but the Vic and Roger cereal storyline as well as the affair storyline was very intriguing as well as being vital to the story actually happening. The only plot line that wasn’t too interesting was with Charity and Brett, but it always excited me to see if they would send someone to check on Cujo to save the victims. The only clarity I didn’t get that I wished that I had gotten is what happens to Steve Kemp, but I suppose it doesn’t matter that much and it seems to be assumed he will just be charged with what he actually did. It was also fun realizing how this book could never be written today because of mobile phones. Overall, though the book was fantastic from beginning to end and I hope to continue to read more Stephen King novels
kimabill's review
4.0
Every so often I get the itch to re-read a Stephen King classic. Usually it ends up being The Stand or Carrie, but this time I went with Cujo. Two things I love about this book -- one, the "monster" is nothing supernatural, and two, King does such a good job getting the characters isolated in a totally believable way. So scary on such a primal level. This is why I don't want to get a dog...