‘Cujo’ by Stephen King – A rabid dog goes on a killing spree

Until Cujo, I have never read anything written by Stephen King. Of course that I’ve heard and read stuff about him, but I’ve never actually got down to reading any of his books. The funny thing is that I have quite a few of his novels and collection of short stories on the bookshelves of my apartment in Bangkok, but I’ve always seemed to want (or have) to read something else. Things changed last weekend when I had to go out of town to an archery tournament and needed something entertaining to keep me busy during and while waiting for my flight.

Cujo (1981) is a psychological horror novel in which Stephen King’s characters feed on their fears, guilt, and beliefs of monsters hidden in closets to make the reader stay glued to the pages of the book. To be honest, at first I felt disappointed with the way the book started, going into a lot of details about the lives of various Castel Rock inhabitants. But, little by little, one gets used to King’s style and, more importantly, a bigger picture soon comes before the readers’ eyes.

Cujo is a novel of both hope and despair, of love and revenge, of fate against man. When Cujo, the Saint Bernard raised by the town’s mechanic is bitten by a rabid-infected bat, things start to take an awful turn. By the end of the novel, the dog kills four people and terrorizes for more than two days a woman and her child who find themselves trapped in an old Ford Pinto.

I liked King’s simple writing style and, while reading the book, I thought a lot about his famous On Writing and the advice he gives to writers. Definitely, not many adverbs in Cujo… Apart from the story line that in the end wrapped up neatly, I also found interesting the writer’s (and publisher’s) decision of ending the novel not with the traditional THE END, but with the period of time King took in writing the book: September 1977 – March 1981.

In 1983, Cujo was made into a film with the same name. I haven’t seen the movie, but online reviews gave it poor ratings. Here’s the movie trailer: