Cujo (1981)

Who’s a bad boy?

So majestic.

Werewolf, vampire, ghoul, unnameable creature from the wastes. The monster never dies.

It came to Castle Rock again in the summer of 1980.

Stephen King, Cujo

This book is full of werewolves.

Famously, this written during one of King’s absolute peaks of drug abuse. He was an alcoholic already by this point, but now was deep into cocaine use. Such was his usage that he reportedly wrote the majority of the book’s first draft in a single night, and can barely recall writing it. In fact, similar to David Bowie’s memory of the album Station to Station, King has said that this is one of the few books of his he can approach as a new reader, though would like to recall writing at least part of it.

This means that to an extent, there is a chance that King did write this under a full moon. Likely, no – but not impossible. Like Dr Jekyll and his author before him (and as discussed in Danse Macabre), King takes his magic drugs that allows him to plumb the deaths of his subconscious and pull a book out of nowhere. This is a book written in that manic state (there are no chapters in this, just scene breaks over a continuous narrative) that shows us what King was like under the influence, and maybe it’s better that he can’t remember it all.

This is also one helluva a mean book, only supplanted by Pet Sematary later. The kills in this are brutal and painful, and the ending bitter. In fact, had it not hewed too closely to The Dead Zone as a sort of semi-sequel (which we’ll get to), this reads more like a Bachman book than King. There is not the customary hope we expect even in King’s darkest moments, nor his delicious glee by giving out punishments to the deserving. The cynical tone that has characterised the Bachman books so far is more present, like the inner darkness of King is being let loose into his own books unhinged by the werewolf on drugs.

But enough with the armchair psychoanalysis – we’re here more to talk about Cujo, not the circumstances from which it arose.

This book is full of werewolves. In Danse Macabre, King discussed The Werewolf as part of his terror tarot deck werewolves representing the interior monsters, the ones lurking below the surface. Every character, barring Tad and perhaps Bannerman, has their dark secrets rotting away at their cores.

Even the location of the novel, King’s first outré continuity welding return to Castle Rock, sees the dark underbelly. In The Dead Zone, we saw the town, but mostly from Johnny’s perspective. It seemed a nice place, small and middle class. Frank Dodd is the dark part of the town, but it’s dismissed relatively as quickly as it is introduced in that novel. Here though, the effects of it are seen more clearly. Dodd’s legacy of murder haunts the town like the boogeyman; children are told tales to keep them safe, and the murders are not so distant in the past that they don’t still play on people’s minds. It’s even heavily implied that much of what drives Cujo, aside from the rabies, is the dark spirit of Dodd back to claim another victim or three.

In comparison to The Dead Zone, we get to know the character of Castle Rock more. Fundamentally, the previously unacknowledged poverty that runs through it. It’s a one taxi town, maybe because the second one crashed ten years before, maybe because the local economy can’t support it. The poverty is yet another dark part of the book, that inadvertently gives Cujo the sad opportunity to catch rabies in the first place, all for the sake of nine dollars at the vet. I don’t suppose for a moment that King is criticising the poor – he’s only a few years away from working a summer job in an industrial laundry as well as teaching high school students to do that. But poverty does expose a failure of society, and leads to problems and stresses that King describes.

But there are other darknesses in Castle Rock. Cujo’s transformation begins underground with the scratch of a bat (gosh, imagine a disease caused by a bat). A limestone cave, a trap for unwary prey that devours those who enter. The cave is never discovered again, and so the interior monster of Castle Rock remains to be discovered again one day. But it speaks to part of the larger metaphor of the book of everything having an unspoken inner darkness waiting to burst out. It’s just in the case of Castle Rock, the darkness literally lies just below the surface.

These are not the only dark halves, to borrow a phrase. All our characters are werewolves: Donna Trenton, loving wife and doting mother had an affair; Vic Trenton, successful businessman who hides the truth of his potentially failing business and marriage; Joe Camber, local mechanic and domestic abuser; Charity Camber, beaten wife who wants to escape; Brett Camber, sweet young kid who becomes more like his dad everyday; Steve Kemp, poet, tennis instructor, sex criminal, violent thug… The list could even go so far as to include even minor characters, but I think I’ve made my point. Arguably the only really innocent character, Tad Trenton, dies. A sacrifice to clear mummy and daddy of their past transgressions.

Cujo is our most tragic werewolf though. All throughout, King manages to pull off the rather deft trick of letting us into the inner mind of Cujo himself. King’s books work best when we read our characters inner most thoughts, intrusive ones included. It’s what makes his books so hard to adapt. Try imagining a film version of Cujo where we get voiceover to let us know that Cujo doesn’t want to be ABADBOY. But in the book, it works. Tad’s death is tragedy, but so is Cujo’s. His sin isn’t a human one. He had no malice or thought, much like Tad too. He just is. Then he is corrupted, befouled by the dark underbelly of Castle Rock. He is turned into a 200 pound werewolf, except he doesn’t go away when the sun rises.

Cujo’s reign of terror is the first time in a while I think King has been scary. Though there are plenty of moments in The Stand that are surely horrifying, I wouldn’t say King has been actually scary since The Shining. With all those drugs in his system, his inner id was let off its leash, pardon the phrase, and he indulges in true horror sensibilities. The scene where Cujo tears into Joe Camber had me gripping the pages of my book very tightly, and le mot juste that closes that particular scene is haunting. The rotting Cujo stalking the car, becoming in some ways a ghoul, keeps the tension high, even during the cutaways to Vic or Charity studiously carrying their own subplots rather than the terror in the car.

Cujo was in part King trying to write much more focused story. He will be the first to admit his stories tend to bloat (see Christine), and the challenge of writing a story set in a single location is a tough one (and one he would revisit). His success is tempered by those cutaways to Vic and Charity, but like Carrie, the story has a primal sort of power that sustains it. Having never read it before, I was surprised to have finished it over a weekend. A more sober King might have trimmed those, but a sober King might have also stepped back from the death scenes, or even saved Tad (he approved of the film’s ending which did just that). But here, King gets to indulge his inner werewolf. What a bad boy he’s been.

Observations and Connections

This is one of those stories that would struggle to exist in a modern time without having to write mobile phones out of the story. Even more telling of its period, there’s a scene where a character looks up the local police phone number in the phone book, because 911 had not been rolled out nationwide yet. The first call had happened 1968, but by 1979 when the book was written, only 26% of the USA could dial 911 in an emergency. Which from a modern perspective, is mental.

King often uses writers as his main characters, but we’ve actually not had as many as you might think. By this point, schools and teachers (and laundries) have had more regular appearances, but with Steve Kemp we have our first writer of any kind since Larry Underwood in The Stand and first writer of literature since Jack Torrence in The Shining.

As already mentioned, Cujo is a semi-sequel to The Dead Zone. It’s set in the same town of Castle Rock, sees the return of Sheriff Bannerman and to an extent deals with the legacy of Frank Dodd, the serial killer and secondary antagonist of that novel. The legacy of Cujo the dog will stretch forward into other books as well.

One last thing. It is absolutely worth your time to look up pictures of the dog suit used in the film adaptation,

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