The Summer I Read Cujo
in an Abandoned Car

I was about twelve years old when I read my first Stephen King novel. It was Cujo, and I read the entire book sitting in an abandoned car behind a barn on my parents' weekend farm.

My parents had bought the place as a getaway from Toronto. We went up every weekend, summer and winter, and frankly, I hated it.

I would much rather have been back in the city with my friends. I missed the parties, the get-togethers, and whatever else twelve-year-old boys were getting up to in the early '80s.

There wasn't much to do at the farm. No TV, no VCR. So I started reading. A lot.

Behind one of the old barns were several rusting cars from the 1970s. I think they came with the property. They weren't going anywhere, and neither was I, so I made use of them.

I'd take a book out there and sit by myself, just to get away.

One summer afternoon, the book happened to be Cujo. I don't know how I got my hands on it, but I did.

It was an exceptionally hot, humid day. I remember the heat inside the car, the smell of the upholstery, and the flies bouncing lazily against the windscreen.

If you know Cujo, you'll appreciate the coincidence. Much of the novel's most terrifying action involves a mother and her young son trapped inside a car, baking in the summer heat, while a rabid Saint Bernard waits outside.

And there I was, sitting in a car, baking in the summer heat, on an isolated farm.

It was almost a multimedia experience.

I remember looking up from the book and glancing toward the corner of the barn, half expecting that enormous dog to come lumbering around it, foaming at the mouth, half-crazed with rabies.

I was probably a little young to be reading Stephen King. But a lot of us did in those days. I became a fan and continued reading his novels.

Almost forty years later, when I began writing Meeks at fifty, I found myself turning to King again. This time it was On Writing, which I treated almost like an instruction manual. I had never written a novel before, and I was trying to figure out how to do it.

Since Meeks was published, a few readers have been generous enough to draw comparisons between my writing and King's. I take that as a tremendous compliment.

I sometimes think about that twelve-year-old sitting in the old abandoned car behind the barn, half frightened out of his wits, reading his first Stephen King novel.

I wonder what he'd have thought if someone had told him that one day, people would be comparing his own writing to Stephen King's.