Here’s a multiple choice question for ya: What does “Woof!” mean?
- A. It’s what my toddler calls all doggies.
- B. It’s the only exclamation that can capture my feelings of returning from a stressful holiday season to write a review!
- C. It’s how I feel about Stephen King’s Cujo.
- D. All of the above.
Ding ding ding! If you answered “D,” I ring the celebratory Stephen King bell for you, folks. It’s 2026, and rather than feeling refreshed and relaxed, I’m as stressed as ever thanks to a period of ever-evolving family illness (I suspect daycare-itis) and exhausting holiday bebopping. But I’m at my desk now. My routine is slowly reassembling itself into a semblance of normalcy. And I’m not trapped in a hot car with a rabid dog waiting outside to eat me (as of this writing). So let’s review Cujo, shall we? We shall!
Castle Rock, Maine, is doing okay, all things considered. That is, unless you’re in a terribly wrong place at a horribly wrong time. Such is what happens in Cujo to unwitting victims Donna Trenton and her four-year-old son, Tad. Donna’s marriage to Vic Trenton is fraying at the edges, and she’s dealing with the guilt of her ongoing affair. Vic goes away on business in an effort to save his dying advertising firm. While he’s away, the Trenton family’s Pinto breaks down. Donna and Tad manage to get it to Joe Camber’s place. He’s a mechanic and owner of the friendly Saint Bernard, Cujo. Friendly, of course, until he is bitten by a rabid bat and holds Donna and Tad hostage in their hot, broken-down car. Parallel to this thread, Charity Camber and her son Brett are fleeing the abusive household of mechanic Joe in search of freedom from his tyrannical tendencies.
In my last Stephen King review (Billy Summers), I remembered a friend’s characterization of the author’s work as “rambling.” Cujo, for better or worse, lives up to the description. This book is a portrait of a small town and its dark secrets. Rather than couching those secrets in a larger supernatural mystery, a la IT or Under The Dome, it lies low. The goings-on of Castle Rock are firmly rooted in humanity. Donna Trenton’s affair and decomposing marriage. Joe Camber’s abusive ways. Brett Camber’s generational trauma. It’s all underscored by the tense and brutal standoff between the titular rabid canine and a mother-son duo rotting in a hot, broken car.
The most prevalent theme here is decay, and how it quietly but relentlessly wreaks havoc on normalcy. Cujo decays into a feral thing. His crimes are not intentional, but biological. He cannot fight what ails him. He is as much a victim of the story as he is its engine of horror.
This rot is mirrored everywhere in Cujo. The humans of Castle Rock aren’t hunted by a horrific or supernatural beast. They are chased by the consequences of their own lives—and in some cases, by circumstances that are not entirely of their making. Donna Trenton is already collapsing under the guilty weight of her affair, emotionally caged long before she is physically trapped in a hot car with a rabid dog waiting just outside.
Tad succumbs to the sweltering heat first, far faster than his mother. There is no solace in this. Sometimes the vulnerable and innocent are the first to crumble under forces they cannot understand or resist, let alone control.
Even the surrounding lives can’t escape the rot. The Camber family has been decaying from the inside out for years. Joe’s cruelty—less a single inciting act than a mounting accumulation of harm—drives Charity and Brett to flee. Cujo’s monstrous transformation becomes a perfect parallel to the family’s slow collapse: different causes, same end.
It’s all interesting on some level, and often compelling in the way most King novels are for me. But Cujo is also weighed down by long side threads and extended in-character digressions that tend to hit or miss, with very little middle ground. One such aside follows Vic Trenton’s advertising mishap for a cereal company whose product caused consumers to poop red dye, which is disastrously mistaken for blood. It’s the kind of hyper-specific, King-coded detail you know you’re signing up for. If you’re not already bought in, Cujo can grind on you with its constant meanderings.
By the end of Cujo, I was glad to put the old dog to rest. It wasn’t bad. It was a run-of-the-mill King book designed for a specific palate. I think the author is at his best when he’s sharply focused and has a supernatural bent. Cujo checks neither of these boxes, so it was a middling journey from start to finish for me.
Rating: Cujo – 7.0/10
