No nostalgia colors my view of Stephen King's novels. Though I grew up in the 80s and 90s and loved horror, I didn't grow up with Stephen King. I was a weird kid who loved 19th Century literature, and thought that no bestselling author of my own time could be weird enough to be frightening. I could not take this King fellow seriously. In my 30s I changed my mind.
If anybody who still doesn't take King seriously asks me to recommend something to change their mind, its always Cujo. It's not a fan favorite, but I tell you its his best and most artistically ambitious work, a brilliant exegesis of pain, of all the ways in which we all hurt ourselves and one other, a little or a lot, knowingly or otherwise.
Complaints that Frank Dodd contributes nothing to the story, that there are more domestic arguments than dog attacks, or that the ending just goes too far miss the whole damn point. Any other ending would have been a falsehood.