The Sun Dog

Bibliographic Information:

King, Stephen (1992) The Sun Dog (The Penguin Group, New York, New York).

Setting:

This story take place in the town of Castle Rock, Oregon. Most of the book takes place around the main characters neighborhood and the store in which the camera was bought. In the story it is the month of September. The story stars on September 15, of 1997. The way the time period is associated with the main character is that September 15th is his birthday. So the story begins in the setting of a 15 year old boys birthday party. The other main setting that changes the most is the setting of the pictures that the main character takes. This setting is important to the story because it is always changing, and the story revolves around those changes.

Character:

The main character of the story, which is the protagonist, is a boy by the name of Kevin Delevan. The antagonists in this story are the owner of the store where the camera was bought, and the dog that appears in the pictures taken by the main character. Some of the other characters that were in the story are, his father Mr. Delevan, his mother Mrs.. Delevan, his sister Meg Delevan, the owner of the store where the camera was bought Pop Merrill. That is about all of the important characters in the book.

Theme:

The story starts out with Kevins birthday party, at his birthday party kevin receives a camera from his family. A few days later Kevin learns that the camera doesn't work quite right. At first whenever he took a picture it came out as the same thing over and over. It was a big black dog running in front of a white picket fence. Then Kevin and his father have a discussion on wether or not to keep the camera, Kevin decides to keep it. The next day Kevin brings the camera into Pop Merrill the man who owns the shop where the camera was bought. Pop tells Kevin to bring the camera back in the morning and he will take a look at it. So Kevin goes home and has an idea he tries three other brands of film to see if that changed anything. He took five pictures a piece with each film, they all came out as the dog picture. The kevin got to examining the pictures he noticed that the pictures were slightly different. Kevin got all of the pictures that he had taken from when he received it and put them into order from start to finish. Kevin then noticed that each picture was not exactly the same, they would change very little each picture that was taken. The way that the pictures had changed had made it seem as if the dog was walking, so every next picture the background would change little by little and the dogs feet and paws were in a different position each time. So Kevin ends up taking back to Pop. Pop finds this very interesting and says that he will fix the camera for Kevin and wants to keep it over night. At first Pop tries to figure out what is wrong with the camera and gets intrigued with it and decides to switch Kevins camera with another camera. Pop then calls Kevin claiming that he had fixed Kevins camera and it took normal pictures now. So kevin takes the camera home. Pop plays with the camera for a while taking more pictures and soon can't turn the cameras off so he puts it in his work drawer and goes to sleep. Then he dreams that the dog in the picture broke into his home and attacked him. So he wakes up and realizes it is a dream. So he tries to go back to sleep and has the same dream every time he falls asleep. So he stays up all night and has Kevin bring his camera back in and switches it again, but doesn't warn kevin