What do You think about Cujo (2006)?
4.25 stars.Note of Caution: If dogs endear you, you will find such pain and sadness with this novel. Fair warning.The Richard Bachman novel writing appears to have affected, consciously or unconsciously, the Stephen King novel writing as King writes less “horror” story here and more social commentary. And, as Firestarter explored father-daughter relationships, Cujo marks a return, (The Dead Zone) to explore mother-son relationships.Shedding larger governmental plots and Machiavellian schemes, King, with Cujo, maintains a smaller, restricted focus. And so, Cujo, ultimately, is about family. And, like The Dead Zone, King explores the shift in American culture during the 1980s. Indeed, King seems to even make a metafictional statement here criticizing himself when he has a character say, “Nixon, Nixon, Nixon . . .” almost as if to say, “Move on! My God, look around you! Look at what is happening, now!"It was then, after all, that women seemed to “come into their own” fully “in a “man’s world”—overtly stepping out en masse from the traditional roles of wife, secretary, stewardess, etc.; and here, King puts forth two lead and central female characters as foils: Donna Trenton and Charity Camber.Stepping into “the man’s world” then means necessarily, it seems, stepping into a “dog’s” world. Enter Cujo, the otherwise faithful, family dog—gone “mad” from a rabies infection.Another wonderful change with this novel is the stripping away of literary allusions, a device King has used extensively. There are some; but here, he has replaced it with allegorical metaphor which, frankly, works far better.And, with both The Dead Zone and Cujo, I finally felt as though I was reading a full novel, novels without movie or film influence despite the fact that both were adapted for that medium.And the end! Wow! Somewhere, some vested reader has asked about whether King can write endings. As I replay and review the novels read thus far, the answer most certainly is “yes.” And with Cujo, “Very much so.”Some odd choices and convenient coincidences weaken rather than strengthen this otherwise taut and engaging novel: the “monster in the closet” recurring fairy tale element, while working on one level, never quite works on another, the metamorphosis of Cujo’s psyche, through Donna’s eyes, into an abstracted “Scarlet Letter” vengeance stretches believability, and a returning shift to a first person point-of-view on the closing page irritates rather than fulfills—this despite the wonderful “Once upon a time” introduction.There are more expected "King-isms," of course: the now expected images of birth, abortion, gore, and death; his seeming obsession with The Grateful Dead—in a novel of the 80s, why not allude to a band of the 80s—there was no shortage there; his numerous foreshadowing images of violence to the boy-child, etc.Lastly, King easily could have created a simplistic tale of terror about a rabid dog. He did not. This plot element serves only as an impetus for a deeper exploration of family, roles, male cruelty, and a shifting American culture.This, plus the GREAT ending, (yes, I was surprised), make Cujo well worth the read.
—R.a.
Cujo slept.He lay on the verge of grass by the porch, his mangled snout on his forepaws. His dreams were confused, lunatic things. It was dark, and the sky was dark with wheeling red-eyed bats. He leaped at them again and again, and each time he leaped he brought one down, teeth clamped on a leathery, twitching wing. But the bats kept biting his tender face with their sharp little rat-teeth. That was where the pain came from. That was where all the hurt came from. But he would kill them all. He would-Cujo is a two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard, the beloved family pet of the Joe Cambers of Castle Rock, Maine, and the best friend ten-year-old Brett Camber has ever had. One day Cujo pursues a rabbit into a bolt-hole - a cave inhabited by some very sick bats. What happens to Cujo, and to those unlucky enough to be near him, makes for the most heart-squeezing novel Stephen King has yet written.Vic Trenton, New York adman obsessed by the struggle to hang on to his one big account, his restive and not entirely faithful wife, Donna, and their four-year-old son, Tad, moved to Castle Rock seeking the peace of rural Maine. But life in this small town - evoked as vividly as a Winesburg or a Spoon River - is not what it seems. As Tad tries bravely to fend off the terror that comes to him at night from his bedroom closet, and as Vic and Donna face their own nightmare of a marriage suddenly on the rocks, there is no way they can know that a monster, infinatly sinister, waits in the daylight, and that the fateful currents of their lives will eddy closer and faster to the horrifying vortex that is Cujo.Stephen King has never written a book in which readers will turn the pages with such a combination of anticipation and dire apprehension. Doing so, they will experience an absolute master at work.
—Jessica Phillip
Even though I don't think it will spoil your reading experience, I have to warn you that there are mild spoilers ahead.I wrote in my review of The Shining that it was the scariest book that I ever read. Well, that may be, but there the horror ended when I closed the book.With Cujo, it started then...--------------------------------------------------------Every child is afraid of the monster that creeps upon him when the lights are out in the bedroom and mom and dad are safely ensconced in their room. They hide under the bed or in the closet. The moment the kid lets his guard down, it will creep out and slowly devour him, relishing every luscious bit of flesh. No amount of rationalising can take away the certainty of this fact, at least in the minds of the children.Cujo talks about this monster. And since it is the frightened child in each one of us that the ghost story talks to, we listen.--------------------------------------------------------Tad Trenton has a problem. There is a monster in his closet, biding its time to devour him; only the "Monster Words" his dad has written is preventing it from fulfilling his intent.Vic and Donna Trenton, Tad's parents, have their own monsters to fight - Vic's failing ad agency and Donna's recently concluded extra-marital affair. They move down to the town of Castle Rock, Maine to start a new life - unfortunately, the monsters also follow them.A monster of a different kind attacks Cujo, Brett Camber's huge good-natured St. Bernard, as he chases a rabbit down a hole and gets bitten by some very sick bats. The virus of rabies enters his bloodstream: his happy thoughts become tinged with red: and by the time Brett and his mother Charity leave home to visit her sister Holly, Cujo has fully transformed into a monster. He kills Brett's abusive father Joe and their neighbour Gary, and is awaiting an agonising death as Donna and Tad drive into Joe's garage to fix the car's starting problem.What happens next is what the novel is about - the stalled car, the woman and child trapped inside, the rabid dog outside - and the steadily mounting suspense culminating in a shattering climax.--------------------------------------------------------Cujo is much more disturbing than The Shining because of two things - one, the horror follows you after you leave the book and two, because the horror is very much in the real world. Here also, there is the dysfunctional family; however, Tad does not have the powers of Danny Torrance to see the horror out. He is very much a helpless child.Also, here the horror is random, incidental. As Steve says, Cujo was a "good" dog - the reason that he got bit by rabid bats while not having taken his anti-rabies shots was just coincidence. One feels, as one reads this novel, that monster in Tad's closet was not imaginary at all. It was the one which crawled out in the form of Cujo. Vic and Donna, being grownups, could not see it - Tad could.Read it only if you are such a fan of horror that you like to be seriously disturbed for a long period of time.
—Nandakishore Varma
