Bottom line up front: Christine was better than it had any right to be, while Cujo was not as good as it could have been. 

Christine is about a haunted car, purchased by a high school student in Pennsylvania, that transforms its new owner’s personality and also drives itself around at night killing people. I put off reading it for years because it sounded so ridiculous. So when I finally picked it up, I was surprised by how captivating I found it.

What makes Christine so good is that it is less about a haunted car than it is about how being a teenager can make you insane. This is what King has always done well – he remembers and relates the ordinary traumas of childhood and adolescence better, in my opinion, than any other writer in the English language. In Christine, 17 year-old Arnie Cunningham is scared because he can feel himself becoming a different person, and he can see that the people around him are beginning to view him differently. For Arnie, that’s because he’s being possessed by a haunted car. But the feelings King describes will be instantly recognizable to anyone who can remember being that age. These moments, rather than the scenes in which a driverless car cavorts around suburban Pennsylvania killing people, are the most powerful in the book. They are what keep you reading. When the narration is fixed on Arnie, describing events as he perceives them, Christine is un-put-downable. On the other hand, the novel occasionally falters when it turns to other characters (particularly in the rare instances when those characters are female, which have always been a weakness of King’s). Luckily, we get more than enough time with Arnie.

Cujo is also an enjoyable read, but it should have been much better. A reviewer on Goodreads described it (I’m paraphrasing) as a solid 90-page novella about a rabid dog terrorizing a small town, with about 320 pages of a boring soap opera tacked on. I fully agree with this criticism. This book contains three characters who are important to the action: the titular Saint Bernard, Donna Trenton, and Donna’s young son, Tad. It also contains somewhere around 10 characters who play no role in the central action whatsoever – not even to be early victims of the dog or something understandable like that. And yet somehow, bafflingly, the book spends far more time with these characters than it does with Cujo/Donna/Tad. Another woman and her son go on a bus trip to Connecticut, and we have to follow them the whole way there and hear all the details of their trip. Donna’s husband, Vic, leaves for Boston and then New York on a business trip, and again we are with him and his colleague for the whole trip. Nothing interesting happens in either case, and even the meaningless problems these characters are facing are finally resolved in such hand-waving ways that you can’t help but suspect they were there all along merely to pad the length of the book.

Despite these flaws, you keep reading Cujo because even with all this unnecessary padding, King remains a master of two things: pacing and scares. He always doles out another scene with the dog right as you’re starting to think that maybe you’ll put the book down for a while. It’s like he has some sort of authorial bullshit scale that tells him exactly how much readers will tolerate before giving up, and he always injects something exciting to reset the scale right before he goes over that weight limit. And those injections are just uniformly great. He really did have something here with this story. The occasional narrative scenes from the point of view of Cujo, the rabid dog, are a clever touch that at times have you sympathizing with the poor creature in spite of yourself.

So although I wouldn’t place either of these books in the top tier of Stephen King novels, I found them both to be enjoyable reads and I would happily recommend both to any fans of horror or thriller novels.