Note: This is #52 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks Challenge for 2008. DING!
Up through about the first three quarters of Stephen King’s Cujo, I really didn’t care for it. This was mainly because it didn’t really feel like a Stephen King novel, much less one from early in his career when he still liked to really break out the supernatural elements. There’s no haunted hotels that turn people into murderous psychopaths. There’s no little girls who can burn your face off by looking at you. There’s no classic cars possessed by malevolent spirits. There’s no everyman who can tell your terrifying future by touching your hand, even though Cujo is more or less an indirect sequel to The Dead Zone. Instead, we get some dumb dog.
Granted, this isn’t an ordinary dog. It’s a huge St. Bernard weighing in at almost 200 pounds and it’s been driven completely feral by rabies. Through a cascade of unfortunate coincidences, housewife Donna Trenton and her four-year old son Tad end up isolated and trapped in their clunker of a car by Cujo, having to deal not only with the animal’s vicious attacks, but also the 100-degree summer heat. There’s also some more mundane drama in the form of two marriages on the rocks, including Cujo’s owners and the imperilled Trentons themselves. Husband Vic Trenton, in another one of those unfortunate coincidences, is out of town trying to salvage a business deal while his wife and child fight for their lives.
So, as I said, I didn’t care much for this setup for most of the novel. Having a 4-year old child myself I didn’t much care for the fulcrum King chose to leverage our fears this time around –parents’ promising a child that he or she is safe from imaginary monsters only to be seriously tested on their ability to protect him or her from a real one. This hits pretty close to home. I don’t begrudge King for this (I’m free to exit this joy ride any time I want), but it still made me uncomfortable and without any kind of horror schlock or pizaz to distract me, my opinion was one of vague dislike. Aside from some silly business with a maybe kinda sorta maybe haunted closet in Tad Trenton’s bedroom, Cujo has no supernatural elements at all –just a really big and really angry dog that wants to tear somebody’s guts out.
But in the last quarter of the book, things started coalesce and I started to see what King was up to. Not only did things get more exciting as the standoff with Cujo reached its tragic climax, but I began to appreciate that the book was actually an example of pretty clever plotting. Up until that point I had been annoyed with King for slinging around what I had taken for random and gratuitous plot threads. For example, there’s a jilted ex-lover who takes his revenge on Donna Trenton’s empty house, and at the time I considered the scene to be unnecessary padding. But that act leads to a new situation that led other characters to go where King needed them to be in order to advance the story, and it was done in a very believable way. Nobody was going from point A to point B at exactly time C just because that’s what King needed them to do to get to some climactic scene. It was all very organic and believable in a way that lesser authors (heck, even King himself at other points in his career) couldn’t pull off.
I also started to appreciate more about the contrasts that King set up between the sundering of the Trentons’ family and the dissolution of another family, the Bannermans, who are also affected by Cujo’s rampage. At the same time that Cujo is savaging one family and breaking it forever he’s allowing another one to escape a dead end and move into more hopeful territory. It’s subtle and the kind of thing that floats to the top of your thoughts some time after reading the book, which is a fair bit more than you might expect from horror pulp. Which, I’m always, saying, King’s stuff isn’t. Well, not often.
Others doing the 52-in-52 thing this week:
- Jeremy reviews The Dark Side by Jane Mayer
- Heliologue reviews More Information than You Require by John Hodgman
- Nick reviews Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama
Congrats on hitting 52, with more than 6 weeks left in the year. I am continued to be impressed by the feats you set out to conquer every couple of years. I remember back in the day when you wrote an entire novel in the month of November, and when in 2003 when you ran 50 marathons in 50 days. The last one I might be thinking of someone else, but still that is a lot of books. Most impressive though is that you wrote a book review for all of them. Come to think about it, I think I have read all 52 of your reviews which I will start writing haikus about and post them.
Hooray for reaching the canonical 52 books! I’m not sure how you manage it with a job and a family.
For what it’s worth, I think Cujo, like Soylent Green (to cite a movie), is one of those books that’s embedded itself into our culture even though it’s not very good. It’s more important that you know of it rather than actually consuming it.
Thanks, both! Though I’m actually at 59 right now. I’m holding 5 in reserve for a combined review and the rest as a buffer to make sure I can post one each Friday. I’ll probably end the year in the mid 60s and disgorge all my buffer of reviews in the last weeks of December.
Heliologue, the not-so-secret secret is audiobooks + 45 minute commute to work each day. Plus the occasional visit to the gym and listening during lawn/house work. Probably about 3/4 of the books I consume are in audio format. Always unabridged.