[In Cujo, victims of the mad dog's] violence are two families—that of his owner, backwoods auto mechanic Joe Camber, and of Vic Trenton, an ad man struggling to keep an important account while "dealing" with his wife's infidelity and his four year old's fears. Counterpoint to the ad campaign's folksy slogan and the writer's lush reveries are nightmarish vigils in stalled Pintos where one awaits deadly assault and relentless visions of heat and horror. Beyond the façades of modern life, the ordinary world of creaky closets and baseball bats, coloring books and toy trucks, Slim Jims and shabby affairs, lies the potential for savagery unwitting and otherwise …, the menace that Aldous Huxley has termed "the imminent maniac." It is King's style of "bringing it all back home" that leads one effortlessly, if gratuitously, to the bloody denouement.

Sylvia Pascal, in her review of "Cujo," in School...