With Cujo, we see Stephen King, writing as himself, step away from the supernatural in a strange homage to Watership Down by trapping a woman and her son against a rabid dog. While The Dead Zone was by definition a ‘thriller’, it was not written in the tried and tested ‘suspense’ format we’re so familiar with now. The last of King’s ‘psychic’ stories, at least for a year or so, it is in Firestarter when we see the master perfecting his thriller genre abilities. Thirty years is a long time, but once I read those first pages again, I remembered why I liked it so much in the first place. Read only once, I returned to it somewhat soured by my memories of the lackluster film adaptation, and its wasteful sequel taking place with Charlie McGee as an adult. There were times where the story zipped along so swiftly, I feared the pages would catch fire in my hands. Fortunately, the book was an incredibly fast paced story, so it was returned to the library rather quickly with minimal damage. After discovering some of the other pages held inside with tape, I secured the pages back in place and never worried about it again. Upon opening the book for the first time, some of the pages at the front fell out of the book, and I thought about calling the library to explain what happened. Sometime around 1983 I finally secured a copy of Stephen King’s Firestarter in the form of a dog-eared paperback barely held together by the binding.
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