Stephen King's Cujo is a beach read find in 1982

A good book serves as a vacation, a portal to another world. But what do you do when you are already on vacation and the weather turns? The sky over Ocean City, Maryland, in August 1982, is a bruised purple, the color of a bad cut. You can feel the storm coming, a low thrumming in your bones, a promise of broken skies and a good old-fashioned electrical show. The air smells of salt and fried clams, and the gulls are screaming like they know something I don’t. I’m holed up at the Sea Scape Motel, room 204, with its peeling wallpaper and view of the angry Atlantic, which suits me fine. I'm staring down a long, wet afternoon with nothing but the television’s blurry offerings for company. Not good. Not good at all. 

So, I pull on my sneakers, the ones with the perpetually untied laces, and head out into that heavy, humid air. The Phillips Square shopping center isn’t far, and I figure Welsh Drugs might have reading materials to keep the brain busy. I zip up my windbreaker and hoof it up Baltimore Avenue to Phillips Square. Welsh Drugs isn't a big place, but it has everything you need: snacks, sunblock, light sticks, postcards, those little plastic buckets with the shovels, and - most importantly - a magazine rack.

The bell above the door jingles as I step inside, smacked upside the sinuses by the aroma of suntan lotion, and the deep, rich smell of linoleum and thin carpet. There's The Man himself, Bob "Doc" Welsh, best pharmacist in the whole damn Mid-Atlantic, manning the counter as we tourists see every summer, but the locals see every day of the year. Overdid it on the Boardwalk food tour, or just took one too many rides on the Tidal Wave at Trimper's? Doc is the man you see to get you back in business, no time flat.

There's the drone of the air conditioning that's always working just a little too hard. And there’s the magazine rack, creaking under the weight of paperbacks and pulps. I’m not looking for Field & Stream or People. I want something that’ll grab me by the throat and not let go. My fingers trail over the spines—Ludlum, Clancy, some dog-eared Harlequins—until they stop on a thick mass market paperback with a snarling dog on the cover, eyes like burning coals. Cujo. The name on it is Stephen King, in big white letters. Maybe the top writer of the decade so far, right?

The hardcover had come out on September 8, 1981, and sold like funnel cakes, but this was different. This is the one that will end up in suitcases and beach bags, with covers bent back, spines broken. The edition where the common man and a Great Work of Fiction collide, and the Literary Singularity is achieved.

I grab the book, its cover slick under my fingers, and head to the counter. It's got that solid brick feel of a fresh-from-the-presses mass market paperback that hasn't been paged through yet. 

The clerk rings me up. I add a Coke—cold, sweating in its glass bottle—and a bag of Utz Crab Chips, because you can’t be in Maryland and not eat something dusted with Old Bay. I pay with a crumpled five and pocket the change, the book tucked under my arm like a secret. The door tinkles again, and the blackening sky convinces me to slip the book into the bag with the Coke and chips, in the hope of keeping it dry until I get back to shelter at the Sea Scape.

It doesn't look good, but somehow I've made it in time. My lucky sneakers, or just divine intervention. Back in the motel room, the first fat drops of rain are starting to spatter against the glass sliding doors to the balcony. Perfect. I pop the top on the Coke, crinkle open the chip bag, and settle onto the bed, propped up with pillows that have seen some things. 

I pull my mint literary treasure out of the bag, and crack it open to Page One. That first page pulls me out to Castle Rock, Maine like a riptide. There’s something raw about it, something that claws at the back of your skull. It’s not just the dog—poor old Cujo, who starts out as a good boy before rabies turns him into a monster. It’s the people. The Trentons, the Cambers, all of them caught in their own little traps of guilt and fear and bad choices.

The storm is finally breaking, and it's a real gully-washer. The kind that shakes the windows and makes you wonder if the motel roof’s going to hold. But by now, I'm deep in the story, oblivious to the thunder. The book’s got teeth, no pun intended. It’s not about a dog gone bad; it’s about how thin the line is between normal and nightmare. Donna and her kid, Tad, stuck in that Pinto, the sun baking them alive while Cujo circles like death on four legs—it’s suffocating. I’m sitting here in this air-conditioned motel room, munching chips, guzzling an ice-cold Coke, and I’m sweating.

I’m halfway through when I realize the rain’s stopped. The clock says it’s pushing 4 PM, and my stomach’s growling despite the chips. I mark my place with a motel matchbook and head out. The air is as fresh and clean as the prose I've been lost in for hours.  

I've decided to take the van up Coastal Highway to Gold Coast Mall at 115th Street. The heavenly aroma of Candy Kitchen there is the only sensory match for a poster ad hanging in the nearby RadioShack for another delightful scare in my future: the Poltergeist game, coming this holiday season for the TRS-80 Color Computer. After blowing a few quarters playing TRON at the mall arcade, I'm perusing the TRON collection at the toy store.

Kids are running around, hyped up on cotton candy, while their parents clutch shopping bags and look like they’re rethinking their life choices. Me, I'm thinking about my dinner choices. The Family Fish House? I settle on Flakey Jake's, which promises "the world's best hamburgers." I order one slathered with ketchup and onions, and sit by a window, watching the world go by. The neon signs are buzzing to life outside the mall, as the sun dips low.

I’m thinking about Cujo as I eat. About how it’s not just a horror story, but a story about people breaking under pressure, about how love can be a cage as much as a comfort. I’m thinking about Donna, fighting for her kid, and Joe Camber, who never foresaw his fate would be the opposite of what he imagined. King's words aren't printed so much as they are bled onto the page, and now there it is, on a drugstore rack, ready to scare the hell out of anyone who picks it up.

I finish my burger, and drive back south toward the Sea Scape. It looks like I'll have to postpone my boardwalk crawl and thrill ride adventures for 24 hours, if that fresh batch of lightning on the horizon means business. But I’ve got Cujo waiting, two fully-stocked snack vending machines, and that’s enough. I climb the stairs to my room, a rising gust - the breath of Poseidon himself - rippling through my windbreaker, and I’m already itching to dive back in. To see if Donna makes it, if Tad does, if there’s any kind of light at the end of this tunnel, the tunnel that begins in Room 204.