Cujo
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- This page is about the Stephen King novel Cujo and the subsequent film. For the NHL goalie "CuJo", see the article Curtis Joseph. For the musician Cujo, see Amon Tobin
Cujo is a horror novel by Stephen King, published by Viking in 1981. The book tells the story of the middle-class Trenton family and rural Camber clan in Castle Rock, Maine. Marital and financial difficulties of the mundane sort plague disgraced advertising man Vic Trenton and his adulterous wife Donna. Their domestic problems are dwarfed by the mortal danger when Donna and four-year-old son Tad are terrorized by a rabid St. Bernard named Cujo.
The novel was adapted into the 1983 film Cujo, directed by Lewis Teague from a screenplay by Don Carlos Dunaway and Lauren Currier.
Summary
The novel is set almost entirely in the fictitious town of Castle Rock, Maine. It begins with a reference to Frank Dodd, the Castle Rock deputy sheriff whose murder spree was the central episode in the first half of The Dead Zone. In fact, there is some hinting to the question of whether or not Cujo is possessed by Dodd and whether or not Dodd is haunting the Trenton house (Tad is scared by a monster in his closet and the words put up on the wall by his father is the only way he sleeps with ease). Except for these vague hints, there are no supernatural elements in the book and is mainly a thriller.The most unusual stylistic element of the narrative is that it occasionally switches to the perspective of the canine title character. Also noteworthy is that, atypically for King's early work, there is an exploration of how marriages work or don't; this is done through the parallelism of the middle-class Trentons and the blue-collar Cambers.
Cujo belongs to the Cambers, a family living outside of Castle Rock where Joe Camber does mechanic work. While hunting in the fields around the Cambers' house, Cujo is bitten by a bat infected with rabies. After he is infected, Cujo attacks and kills the Cambers neighbor, Gary Pervier. Joe goes to Gary's to pick him up and finds Gary dead. Before he is able to call the cops, Cujo kills him too. Joe's son and wife are spared as they had left on a trip to visit relatives.
The Trentons, Vic, Donna, and four-year-old Tad, are having problems of their own when Vic finds out that Donna, the typical bored housewife, has been cheating on him. In the midst of this household tension, Vic's business is failing, and he is forced to leave on a business trip to Massachusetts. Donna, home alone with Tad, takes their failing Ford Pinto to the Cambers'. However, the car breaks down when they reach the farm. With Joe dead, there is nobody on the farm except for Cujo, and thus begins a three day struggle to not only keep Donna herself alive, but also her son Tad. They are trapped in the car, with the murderous rabid dog outside, during the hottest summer in Castle Rock history. The sheriff of Castle Rock, George Bannerman, arrives and is murdered by the dog, but not before making a reference to Frank Dodd. In the end, Vic, worried that his wife has not answered the phone at home, returns to Castle Rock and figures out where they are, yet by the time he gets there, Donna has killed Cujo in a gory showdown and Tad has died of dehydration after being trapped in the car for three days. (In the movie, Tad survives as producers felt that the death of a child would be too horrifying.)
Trivia
- The dog that played Cujo in the movie was reported to be so friendly, they had trouble with him wagging his tail when he was supposed to be mauling someone to death. To overcome this, the crew had to tie his tail down. However, you can spot "Cujo" still happily wagging away when he corners one of the characters.
- When the dog playing Cujo is 'attacking' the car windows, he is actually trying to find his favorite ball.
- In his book On Writing, King has said he does not really remember writing the book as he was in a drug-induced stupor for the duration of its authorship.
Refrences
- On the Nickelodeon TV show Danny Phantom, Danny calls a ghost dog Cujo, due to the dog's continuous second-hand haunting of the Gray Family.
ISBN
- ISBN 0606028617 (prebound, 1981)
- ISBN 0670451932 (hardcover, 1981)
- ISBN 0451161351 (mass market paperback, 1982, reprint)
- ISBN 9700508889 (hardcover, 1983)
- ISBN 0816156670 (hardcover, 1993, Large Type Edition)
External link
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