Sun Dog by Stephen King | Book Review

The Sun Dog
by Stephen King
Published on September, 1990 by Scribner
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
Genres: Adult, Horror

The dog is loose again. It is not sleeping. It is not lazy. It’s coming for you.

Kevin Delavan wants only one thing for his fifteenth birthday: a Polaroid Sun 660. There’s something wrong with his gift, though. No matter where Kevin Delevan aims the camera, it produces a photograph of an enormous, vicious dog. In each successive picture, the menacing creature draws nearer to the flat surface of the Polaroid film as if it intends to break through. When old Pop Merrill, the town’s sharpest trader, gets wind of this phenomenon, he envisions a way to profit from it. But the Sun Dog, a beast that shouldn’t exist at all, turns out to be a very dangerous investment.

The Sun Dog is the first of Stephen King’s shorter works that I’ve read. I’ve heard many times that his short fiction is where it’s at, and the premise of this one sounded exactly my kind of creepy. And it was good! Not exactly the exceptional that I was hoping for but good. One thing, though, set this small book apart from all of King’s massive novels that I’ve read. But how about we save that golden nugget for the end of this review?

So, as short horror novel. Was it scary? No, not particularly. Sure, it had a handful of creepy moments. Pair those with the general building sense of unease this book had and I’d say it accomplished what it set out to do in that respect.

Although The Sun Dog sits right around two hundred pages, there were whole sections that felt absurdly long. For instance, when one of the main characters goes on a bit of a side quest to sell the pivotal camera, I found myself bored. Each potential customer’s story felt like a rehashing of the same small tale. Moments like this, while doing maybe a small something for the world building, really just tugged me out of the story that I was reading for. This also slowed the overall pace for me, and a book that I really should have finished in two hours took almost twice as long.

I’ve decided that King is just really good at characters. That holds true in The Sun Dog. He has this great habit of showing characters, especially their bad sides, through the eyes of others. So instead of just flat out describing the makeshift villain, ‘Pop’ Merrill, we see through the eyes of everyone around him why he’s not wholly bad, but why he’s definitely no saint. The way King does this for all of his main characters words so well, and I thought it really stood out in this one.

Now, for what was easily my favorite thing about this book. I’ve been devouring King’s novels in the hopes of finding one that doesn’t have what I consider a happy ending. I want something open-ended when reading horror; something unsettling, that maybe tells me the nightmare isn’t quite over. And I finally got exactly that with The Sun Dog. King absolutely knocked it out of the park on the last two pages. I’m very much hoping this is a trend with his short fiction. Because of that fantastic ending, I really think The Sun Dog is a book I’ll revisit in the future. I may skip over the boring bits, sure, but the story and the ending are very much worth a re-read.

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About Katie

I'm a twenty-something aspiring writer who really, really needs to get back to revisions. I've been reviewing books since 2014, and am determined to somehow make stories my day job. I truly think that every book out there contains something good and is meant for somebody.