Cujo

Brett Camber's Saint Bernard chases a rabbit into a hole full of rabid bats, and the gentlest animal in Castle Rock stops being gentle. Stephen King takes an everyday dog and an ordinary Maine summer and lets both curdle. Cujo has never hurt anyone; the sickness that takes hold of him is slow, physical and entirely explainable, which is exactly why the dread accumulates. Around the animal, King tracks frayed marriages, money worries and small domestic cruelties among the people whose paths will eventually cross his, so the horror arrives through ordinary life rather than from outside it. For the shelf: • Set in Castle Rock, the Maine town that recurs across several King novels • Horror grounded in illness and bad timing instead of monsters or curses • Alternating domestic storylines converging on one long sustained sequence • Standalone reading, with no prior King titles required A strong pick for suspense readers and King collectors, stocked at Boipoka.