Cujo

Cujo was published in 1981 and won the British Fantasy Award in 1982. The novel is one of the books that made Stephen King's name in the paperback market of that period, and it has the structure his readers recognise: an ordinary town, a small set of families, a supernatural or medical threat that arrives without explanation, and a plot that narrows over three hundred pages to a single place where the characters cannot leave.

The horror in this book is biological rather than supernatural. King wrote the dog as an ordinary animal who becomes ill, which means the reader is given the animal's own experience in flashes and the human characters' view of him at the same time. The surrounding story is about a marriage: the wife has a secret, the husband has a temper, and the marriage's worst day is not caused by the dog. King has said the novel's working conditions were difficult, and it is one of the books he has discussed in his own writing about craft as an example of a story that got away from its author.

The dog's name has an odd origin. King took it from an alias used by one of the people involved in the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, which is the kind of detail that has followed the novel around in interviews. It was filmed in 1983, and the image of a car that will not start with an animal outside it has become one of the most recognisable set pieces in American horror.

What makes the book work is the timetable. King gives the disease weeks rather than hours, and the reader is made to watch the ordinary business of a small town continue while the countdown runs underneath it.