Cujo was King’s 11th book, and was published in September of 1981 (I was a month old, if you were wondering, our timelines are finally overlapping.) At this time Stephen was only 33 years old and he had six bestsellers under his belt, he had made the leap from struggling teacher to one of the biggest names in publishing. Cujo won The British Fantasy Award in 1982 and was made into a movie in 1983. The lore is that King brought his motorcycle to a mechanic in Bridgton, Maine and had an encounter with a Saint Bernard in the dooryard of the shop, which inspired the character of Cujo; and that King does not remember writing most of this book, due to his heavy alcohol use at the time.

Two families loom large in this story, the Trentons and the Cambers, both live in Castle Rock, Maine (which was the setting for The Dead Zone, and the shadow of the murders committed by Frank Dodd still hang over the town five years later, as they are referenced throughout the book.) The Trentons are a middle class family, Vic Trenton is in advertising, his wife Donna is a stay at home mom, and their son Tad is four. They have recently moved from NYC to the little town of Castle Rock. Vic has a business partner Roger, who is fat. The Cambers are from the Rock, and working class; Joe Cambers, a mechanic with a mean streak, his wife Charity, shaped by Joe’s nastiness, and their son Brett, who is ten. The Cambers live out on the edge of town, run a mechanic shop out of their barn, and have a Saint Bernard, named Cujo, who is over 200 pounds. Which is staggering to think about, as my 70lb dog was plenty big, and my friend’s “giant” black lab weights about a hundred pounds. It’s been a minute since I’ve seen a Saint Bernard in real life, but they are certainly huge.

One of the things I love about this book (and there are many) is the convergence of so many events that create this nightmare. Sometimes kismet is the orchestrater of tragedy. Donna Trenton, who is struggling to adjust to life in a small rural town and to loosing herself to motherhood and isolation, has an affair with a bounder named Steve Kemp. Steve is a tennis bum, a poet, and a furniture refinisher. I know this man, do I ever. When Donna ends the affair Steve gets his ego lightly dinged and decides to lash out repeatedly like a child, unable to process even one small difficult emotion. He threatens to rape Donna, and then writes and sends a letter to Vic, telling him of the affair, and rubbing the husband’s face in it. This creates a rift in the marriage, as it would. Steve then packs up his stuff, including his cat named Bernie Carbo, and leaves town. But he’ll be back. Vic then has a disaster at work, a client who makes cereal has a huge PR issue when one of their cereal’s red dye causes children to shit red, sending tons of kids to the ER. The ads Vic and Roger made for this specific cereal are now a liability and they are worried they will loose this, their biggest client, so they have to run to Boston to do some clean-up and try to save the account. His marriage is in big trouble and he has to leave town. Not good. Donna’s car, a Pinto, has been having issues, and she is worried that it will die while Vic is gone, leaving her with no transportation in rural Maine. Not good. Vic tells her to bring it out to Camber’s garage, where he brought his car (an old Jaguar, which Donna can’t drive because it is a stick shift. Which I got hung up on this. As a child of the 80’s every adult that drove a car that I knew could drive a standard. But maybe Donna grew up in Manhattan or something? I feel like Vic not wanting her to drive his precious Jag would have been more believable.) but she is nervous to go out there alone so they just hope the car will get her through. Foreshadowing.

On the Cambers side we also have a whole series of unprecedented occurrences. Charity wins the lottery, $5,000 (which would be about 18 grand today). It’s not enough for her to flee her unhappy life, but it is enough for her to get herself and her son down to Connecticut to visit her sister who she has not seen in over a decade. She will both pay for the trip (bus tickets) and bribe her husband Joe to let them go by buying him a winch for his shop. She surprises him with the winch, which makes him furious, then she lays out her deal – let us go, you get the winch and I’ll let you take Brett hunting next fall (which she had previously refused to do). Joe rages and beats her with a belt, but then he goes down to get drunk with their neighbor Gary Pervier (shoutout to my friend Aubrey!! iykyk). Gary only has one ball, and he drinks and farts in a lawn chair in front of his ramshackle house which is being eaten alive by honeysuckle. Joe invites Gary to go to Boston to drink and get laid while Charity is in Connecticut, a boys trip, and the old coot agrees, so Joe then “allows” his wife to go visit her sister. Cripes, can you imagine this being your life? Charity, get out of there, girl! So now the entire Camber family will be gone, a thing that never happens, and Vic will be gone, and the Pinto is dying.

Cujo has his own plot here as well, and I adore how Steve writes for the dog, his interior monologues are perfect. Cujo is a good boy. He loves his family, especially THE BOY, as he refers to Brett. Cujo is chasing a bunny who dives into a hole and Cujo jams his head in the hole. There’s a little cave in there full of bats (side-note, there is also a dead cat in there, the Camber’s missing cat from awhile back, Mr. Clean). A sick bat bites Cujo on the nose. Boom. Rabies. Due to all the commotion in the family Cujo’s illness, which is slow to start, is not noticed, except by Brett right when they’re leaving for the bus. Brett will worry but even in his worst imaginings he will be far afield from what is actually happening with his beloved dog back home. So now we throw a rabid 200 pound dog and a sweltering heat wave into this cake mix.

The writing in this book is back to beautiful; luscious, moving, complex feelings on the page, and the elegant way Steve weaves all the inner worlds of the people together into one story in one place is incredibly heartrending. We dip into the interior lives of many side characters in Castle Rock, and that is one of my favorite things in a book, the pull back to see a town deeply. I listed all the bad lines from Firestarter last blog, so let me share some of my favorite good lines here as a balance. Before Vic even knows about the affair he feels something is off in his marriage, “When he looked at her face lately he saw a stranger lurking just below its planes and angles and curves.” At another point Tad, who is scared of a monster in his closet (and again is four, much like with Danny Torrance I keep reminding myself of what a little guy he is to be going through all this, so many tiny children in danger in these early books) looks out his window and sees “A rind of white spring moon rising in the sky.” Breathtaking! Roger, Vic’s business partner who is older than Vic, and scared of their business going belly up because of this cereal nonsense says, “They kick a lot of the guts out of you between 32 and 41.” Felt that! And then this gorgeous passage, expressing how Brett loves his father Joe:

“It was a love that had nothing to do with Joe Camber’s day-to-day behavior toward him or his mother; it was a brute, biological thing that he would never be free of, a phenomenon with many illusory referents of the sort which haunt for a lifetime: the smell of cigarette smoke, the look of a double edged razor reflected in a mirror, pants hung over a chair, certain curse words.”

And a few paragraphs later, the simple sentence: He never saw his father alive again. Much of the descriptions from inside Cujo’s mind as he succumbs to the disease feel ancient and profound, “Like some old engine of destruction, now gradually beating itself to death but still terribly dangerous, he kept his watch.” and “For the last time the dying ruin that had been Brett Camber’s good dog leapt at THE WOMAN…” When Steve writes that Cujo had always tried to be a good dog and that he had never wanted to hurt anyone I was sobbing, having lost my dog recently, the goodness and the sweetness of Cujo before he got sick was tremendously moving to me. They are all good dogs.

The writing is beautiful and the story/plot is tremendous. Donna’s car is not going to make it, so she decides to drive out to Camber’s after all. She tries to get Tad a babysitter but he throws a fit and she decides to just bring him, last time they were there he played with and fell in love with Cujo, so why not, too damn hot to argue. By now Cujo is fully rabid and has already killed Gary Pervier (the first to go in a harrowing scene) and Joe Camber. The car dies right in the dooryard and Cujo is there and he tries to attack Donna repeatedly. They are now stranded in the car. She hopes the mailman will come, but Joe put the mail on hold ( so many things went wrong here!) Meanwhile Steve lurks back to town, going into the Trenton’s house (ostensibly to carry through with raping Donna) but no one is home and he vandalizes the house (again like an angry child) and leaves the state. Vic tries to get ahold of Donna and can’t, Brett is trying to get ahold of his dad to ask about the dog, but can’t, and finally Vic calls the cops to do a welfare check and the cops see the tore up house. They all sort of assume Steve kidnapped Donna and Tad. Vic races home. The local sherif George Bannerman (also in the Dead Zone) goes out to the Camber’s to see if Donna did bring the car out there and gets killed by Cujo immediately. The State Police shrug their shoulders when they don’t hear from him and go after Steve who they arrest out of state. Finally, finally, Vic decides to take a drive out to Camber’s, assuming it’s a fools errand, and the gruesome hellscape he encounters there is beyond imagination (not beyond King’s imagination though.) Donna, a warrior if ever there was one, kills Cujo with a baseball bat, setting his poor, tortured soul free. She has been bit, repeatedly, by the rabid dog. Not everybody makes it, but I’ll leave who exactly is left standing to the book; you should read it.

And there we have it folks, another one down. Up next we have Christine, which I have read twice before and am eager to revisit. Steve and cars, it’s a thing. If you want to check out all of the reread project you can do that here: Reread Project. Thanks for joining me, looking forward to whatever worlds we find ourselves in next.