King Country: Cujo
or, a good boy; or, a mechanized evil
More of King Country:
Despite what the title and book cover may tell you, the dog is not the villain here. If anything, the dog is the greatest victim of the novel.
No, the villain here is apathy and disinterest and neglect.
Which is an interesting approach for a novel ostensibly about a killer dog killing people, but the dog isn’t much of a killer here. Not really. At least not compared to Salem’s Lot or the Overlook Hotel. Comparatively, Cujo barely gets started.
But, man, what a bizarre book!
Even structurally, this is a strange book, though it seems to be somewhat standard fare for King. I say that with the authority of someone who has now read three (3) of his dozens (∞) of novels.
The novel begins with what I’d call a wide lens. We fan over a community and pop in on several families and groups of people in Castle Rock, Maine. We get a glimpse into these lives and come to know of these different situations and dysfunctions, from marital infidelity to abuse and so on. We have drinkers and losers, reachers and graspers, and several people just trying to get along, to get on by.
This makes up most of the first half of the novel.
The second half of the novel mostly takes place over 12ish hours.
This is could be any literary novel of the 20th century set in a small town. King keenly focuses on humans. This is who he’s interested in and who he wants us to care about. He wants us to know their petty grievances, the choices that have set their lives in the ruts they can’t escape, and he wants us to buy into their dreams. But most importantly, he allows us to see the world through the eyes of children.
It may seem like a cheap trick or some simple bit of trickery, but I think it’s the glue tying this novel together.
Because the children are innocent. They don’t deserve the horror of reality or the horror threatening to collapse upon them. The adults?
Well, fuck em, honestly. That’s not to say they’re bad people—though some are—or that they deserve to have their lives ruined, but this is fiction and we’re paying the cover price to watch some people experience the worst days of their lives.
But when you bring children into all this—well, that’s a whole new category of horror.
But I really can’t get over how strange some of this novel is. Like, it begins with the threat seeming supernatural. We’re given all kinds of clues that maybe the spirit of a rapist cop who may be haunting the closet of a child.
And after reading Salem’s Lot and The Shining, I was fully expecting the supernatural to be the enemy here. Our big boy Cujo got possessed by some malevolent spirit and went on a killing spree.
But, no. This supernatural angle appears to be a red herring, though we’re pointed often in that direction. And the real villain here is simply a disease caught from a wild animal due to the innate curiosity of a dog.
And so we have all these human squabbles and issues that force a very specific situation wherein a mother and her young son are stuck in a car on a hot day because if they try to get out, they’ll be mauled by a 200 pound Saint Bernard.
That’s the second half of the book in a nutshell.
It’s a daring structure. To force claustrophobia for so long, but also fanning out to give us increasingly more detail about how fucked this mother and son are. Often, we’re given a taste of hope. Like when the mailman will arrive.
But, of course, he doesn’t.
And even when a cop finally shows up, he gets his throat ripped out by Cujo before he can call for backup because that’s just Cujo, yeah? A dog everybody recognizes and knows.
Strangely, when my mother was growing up, she had a Saint Bernard. It was a big kind dog. This breed used to be known as a nanny dog, as seen in Peter Pan. But her big kind dog went senile in its old age and ended up attacking some little boy.
Everything worked out all right, though that little boy may have grown up with a permanent fear of dogs. My grandfather put the elderly Saint Bernard down, but no one died or was hurt to badly.
But this is the other villain here. The true evil is one of life. Obligation, relationships, responsibilities, mundane circumstances twisted wrong. It’s what makes this very strange structure become a mechanized universe controlled by a vile demiurge waiting to rip the world apart.
And this novel really is one of abuse and the ways we become trapped in our lives. Charity attempts to escape her life, at least a little, by having an affair behind her husband’s back. We witness how she ends the affair and how the jilted lover tells her husband, Vic, how the two confront the issue and keep the tension away from their son.
There’s a promise of healing here. That these two who have loved each other will find love again. Will find forgiveness. Will find a way through what seems to be the worst months of their lives.
But while Vic is in New York trying to keep his business afloat, Charity and their son Brett end up stuck in a car, the ravaged corpse of a policeman in plain view, and that big dog staring with dull rabid eyes.
And then Brett dies. Not through violence, but through captivity and the simple, cruel heat of the sun.
Can Charity and Vic survive this? Can their marriage survive it?
We’re given a bit of hope as Charity recovers in the hospital. For she did try to save Brett and had her stomach ripped open by Cujo for the effort.
She will live, yes, but her son is dead. He will forever be dead.
And all because a dog wandered into a bat cave.
There’s something intolerably cruel in this. That the most simple and mundane events can lead to unspeakable tragedies. That the obligations that pull at our time, at our lives, can cause us to be somewhere else when we should be with those we love.
And perhaps I’m feeling sensitive to this particular theme because my son will begin kindergarten next week and I’ll be in a different state doing my real life job, missing the moment, the excitement, unable to be there for him.
It’s something so simple. As simple as Vic heading to New York to try to save his company. He would only be gone for a few days. Yet even leaving early and returning hope as fast as he can, he’s too late to save his son.
And Cujo’s owner?
A violent drunk. A man whose life is a misery to all who must be near him. He beats his wife, rapes her, and threatens her. She tries to escape, even though her son recognized that their dog, Cujo was unwell.
Had she not been so desperate to leave, had the boy’s father not been such a piece of shit, perhaps someone would have taken Cujo to the vet, got him cured of rabies before it stole his life, before he turned rabid and killed his owner, before he trapped a boy and his mother in a car for hours.
And so when we come to the end and ask ourselves why King spends hundreds of pages showing us these people, inviting us into their lives, it’s because that’s what got us here. Yes, it allows us to care about the tragedy and the horror, but it’s also an explanation.
Cujo was a good dog.
Neglect, disinterest, and desperation are the engine of horror here.
And that, honestly, is quite a bit more frightening than vampires or an evil hotel.
Many people have recommended other King novels to me while I begin this journey. I’ll probably include most of them, unless I end up abandoning this whole project early due to disinterest or disgust, but the ones listed below are the only ones I’ll promise on writing about.
Here’s the order I’ll be tackling King’s novels. I’d like to give you a reason why this is the order and not some other order or why only these books and not a bunch of other ones, but I’m trusting to Jayson Young as my guide.
Cujo
It
11/22/63
From a Buick 8
Revival
Firestarter
The Eyes of the Dragon
Misery
Pet Sematary
The Long Walk
The Stand
The Dark Tower I-VII
Free books
I think this is one of King’s hardest hitting novels. It’s a gut punch in so many ways. But maybe my favourite thing about it is that King claims to have zero recollection of writing any of it, because he was at peak alcoholism and drug addiction. That’s a flex, maybe, but it also makes the cruel irony of the book hit even harder, to me, because it feels as though he may have simply been channeling it, no filter.
One of King's strengths is that he reminds his audience that the greatest horrors in real life are not supernatural things but the innately flawed and misguided activities of the human race.