The Curious Case of Cujo in Context

and its surprising similarities to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet which is not solely because I read the two in close proximity.

One of my attempts to both ignore the shitstorm called “out there” and keep my mind sharp enough to analyze the events occurring “out there” is through scheduled reading every day. Originally, I started the habit to get myself to stop reading the NYT/WaPo every morning and then moan about its revelations on Twitter (also NO ONE cares that you’re reading Melville on social media) until I had so internalized my certainty for the imminent collapse of American society that I was ready to face the day and it’s new challenges as I sold data to video game companies in order to inform them what aggrieved subset of their player base was active today.  

Honestly starting the day not reading about how fucking stupid the average American is through diner profiles (we’re talking about around 2018) had an immeasurably positive impact on my mental health, only to be brought down to earth by looking at data to gauge how the average, English-speaking gamer was spending their day bitching that their needs weren’t being met. I try to always rotate between a classic Author (Conrad, Milton, Woolf) a contemporary writer (Pynchon, Whithead, Shteyngart) and one genre writer. I started with detective stories by Chandler and Hammet; thinking at the time i was going to write a detective novel that’s been burning a hole in my brain for 30 years (please see this essay on why that’s not gonna happen) and then moved on to the inevitable; Stephen King. 

I read quite a bit of King in my pre-adolescence, which wasn’t unhappy but was spent with a significant amount of alone time (like many my age) and a determination not to be considered a child. King’s books were an interesting window into certain complications in the adult world; sex, booze, drugs and their general shittiness and unreliability. It helped me with conversations I was never going to have with my parents. Now, returning to those works as a grumpy, alienated adult is not some sad foray to recapture lost youth (or so I tell myself) but to see if what stood out to me at 12 years of age still maintains resonance or if anything has changed. Most everything changed; I can no longer relate to Danny Torrance but i sure as shit know what Jack feels like. There was one book, though, that played out just as it did when I was a kid to the point that I still remembered entire sentences and passages because they were so jarring; that book was Cujo.  

I can’t say it’s my favorite (that’s probably Christine) or the scariest (that’s probably The Mist) but it's the one that fascinates me the most because there’s something nasty and unrelenting in its depiction of complicated and unpleasant family realities and, after all those years, the raw shock of certain narrative sanctities getting violated remains. 

For those that need a refresher Cujo is about a St. Benard that contracts rabies and keeps a mother and her son trapped in a busted Ford Pinto over the course of two hot, summer days until the gravely injured mother beats it to death but not in enough time to save her son who dies from dehydration-induced seizures. Around this horrorshow the book depicts the chain of events, both small and large, that lead up to the tragedy; the mother’s affair with a degenerate, wannabe poet, the father’s stress and dedication to his job in advertising including the potential loss of his client as well as his wife. The family that owns Cujo is another trio but of significantly lesser means; the father is a controlling alcoholic car mechanic that berates and cows his wife to begin the process of secretly leaving him with their son. All of these characters, through their actions, unwittingly conspire to get the mother and child to the wrong place at the wrong time with a 250-pound dog with an insatiable anger at everything and ends with the death of a little boy who never had any agency in the proceedings and begins the novel terrified of an imagined creature in his closet.  

Like I said, it’s fucking burly. 

It’s also consistent with a theme I've noticed that threads through all of King’s novels from the 70’s and early 80’s: The adults have failed the children. Be it the family/school system in Carrie, the government with tests on college idiots in Firestarter, pretty much everything in The Stand, but in all of his other novels some adult or more pull through and get the endangered children to relative safety, not in Cujo and not for lack of trying either, the kid dies with only minutes before help arrives. The social Rube Goldberg machine that gets them into danger is the same arbitrary system that gets help to arrive moments too late. A similar technique is employed in Carrie, which charts the bad interrelated decisions leading up to a repressed adolescent psychic prom night inferno, but it’s told retrospectively and as a result, suffused with a merciful inevitability that Cujo lacks. 

Not too long after I re-read Cujo I read Romeo and Juliet; I’ve been methodically reading through all of Shakespeare’s plays. (Why you ask? Probably to feel better than other people). There are odd similarities between the two in that A) a series of interconnected and unforeseen actions propel the characters to an interminable tragedy and B) the adults sure as shit fail the children. R&J is an odd play to me among Shakespeare’s tragedies in that it isn’t structured like any of the others. It feels like a comedy and has many components of his comedies; crazy coincidences, people in disguise, stupid rules that must be undermined, not to mention that it has laugh-out-loud moments in its first three acts and one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic characters alongside Falstaff in Mercutio. It’s never struck me as a coincidence that the tragedy doesn’t unfold until that very comic character dies and sets in motion, like a farce without laughter, the cascading events that end with dead kids in the Capulets tomb.  

Similar to the events in Cujo and, once again, unlike any other Shakespearean tragedy there always seems to be the possibility that it won’t play out to the couple’s death upon another reading/watching. Just shift a couple of actions ever so slightly and they both run off to Padua in love forever. Macbeth, Lear and Hamlet from the first scene of the first act pretty much scream that things are not going to get any better at any point so just sit back and watch it play out. The moral flaws that govern events and make the tragedy seem reasonable and edifying to the audience is all but absent in R&J, the same is true of the adults in Cujo.    

While the adults do fail the child in R&J in Cujo it’s not a situation where any one adult can be removed from the equation to prevent the tragedy; It takes a village to kill this kid and even the very worst characters in the drama aren’t comfortable repositories of blame and this book has quite possibly the worst, ugliest characters King has ever drawn. Steve Kemp, the drifting tennis teacher-poet that the wife has an affair with has to be one of the most repugnant articulations of an untethered and badly bruised male ego ever conceived. Bitter over the wife breaking things off he sends an anonymous note to the husband not only informing him how much he enjoyed cuckolding him but describing intimate physical details to ensure he cannot dismiss the validity of his claim. As a kid I remember reading this sequence thinking, “fuck, this dude is a douchebag” and while re-reading it, knowing it was going to happen I was still struck by the smarmy viciousness described on the page (the dude is a fucking douchebag). That’s the whole experience of reading this brief novel, a deeply unsettling look at the human shit crawling under the stone King lifts up for our benefit and that’s without including the part involving the killer dog that ostensibly is the hook for picking up the book in the first place. 

Which leaves the reader with a palpable sense of “why” once the book concludes. Why compose such an exercise in hopeless human foibles? There’s no clear moral causality the book lays out. The Wife’s affair is handled with extraordinary sympathy; she quietly resents moving out of New York City to quiet, conservative Maine, abandoning the exciting social and professional opportunities to take on full-time mothering/housekeeping. The affair is her only outlet to prove she can transcend her circumstances. Even the abusive alcoholic owner of Cujo has his decision not to get the pet shots that would have prevented the whole mess explained away as misplaced compassion; vets are too expensive, but it would destroy his son to give up the dog). Any attempt to draw a simple allegorical reading for what, on the surface, seems to be a simple story keeps falling apart after even a short analysis. In the end Cujo is just godless chaos in vivid action and the slobbering St. Benard of Death is only the most obvious avatar. 

Which brings me to the one thing that is forever hidden inside this novel; how it was read once upon a time right after its publication. As popular and defining to American popular culture as Stephen King is nothing compares to the impact of Cujo as a term, a brand as synonymous with “killer dog” as Levi’s is to jeans and Guliani is to misshapen shitbags. Pennywise, Redrum, Carrie can only refer to themselves, Cujo signifies mean-ass dog even to those unfamiliar with the novel or movie existing. 

That wasn’t true when the book hit shelves in 1981. It wasn’t written with Cujo as a pre-existing name or term (apparently it was inspired by a code name of one of the Symbionese Liberation Army lunatics that kidnapped Patty Hearst). There was a time when one read the below paragraph very differently, sometime between 1981-1983, this moment takes place at the beginning of the novel, when the dog hasn’t lost its mind to the disease and no human is even suspicious: 

“Cuje, you old sonofawhore,” Gary said. He put his screwdriver down and began methodically digging through his pockets for dog biscuits. He always kept a few on hand for Cujo who was one of your old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool good dogs. 

At one point one could read that paragraph without it dripping in fatalistic irony. Yes, there’s some irony intended; it’s a King novel with a dog on the cover but not this much irony. The paragraph now reads like, “Buck Danford knew Trump was just kidding when he promised to outlaw vaccines.” There’s no chance to appreciate the randomness, like everything else in the book, of the dog chasing the wrong rabbit down the wrong hole, getting his head stuck just right and getting bitten just enough by just the right bat. Now when one reads it the passage feels smirky, the reader knows too much, the hand of the author is so present it’s slapping you in the face and you like it. 

I assume the “why” for the book is in that zero-level reading and lost to time like parents naming their kids Adolph because I can’t find the meaning for the cruel exercise of this novel otherwise. It’s The Sweet Hereafter but just the bus crash, 9/11 without heroes, Gaza without opportunists. It’s something horrible that you can only watch and yet feel complicit because it shouldn’t happen 

King has mentioned that he wrote the novel under the influence of a lot of cocaine and I’ve seen people use that context to dismiss the book from his oeuvre. While the misuse of substances isn’t a good idea, one of the reasons creative people use it is to break through inhibitions and the fact that this is the book where his theme of safety as an illusion is taken to its logical and horrible extreme is too to wave away as a stinking thinking. There’s something undeniably unpleasant about Cujo that never left me for 35 years and still resonates, it’s probably the honesty, the honesty that things don’t work out and the kid dies because you’re always gonna be you. The honesty that you can’t do anything to keep the bad thing from happening and you don’t get to blame the mythic poetry of fate and have it realized in some of the most beautiful couplets ever written. The honesty that shit happens on our watch merely because were alive, honesty that needs a pound of blow to get out onto the page because it’s not easy to say.  

Another word to the wiseguy. 

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So, those of you that actually followed me on social media, not the ones who popped in to demonstrate their lack of synaptic aptitude, knew I liked to ask questions, a lot. I still have questions which I will ask here. Please answer them along with any essay topic suggestions in the comments.

• I’m trying out Tik Tok because I’m thinking of reciting these essays on video for the narcissistic youth. Can anyone recommend some worthwhile non-gaming channels? Right now my feed is 95% angry jews (the other 5% seems to be titties).

• Is the new Dragon’s Dogma any good?

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THINGS OF THE WEEK

• Butcher Baker Nightmare Maker 4K from Severin

• 7-course Father’s Day Korean dinner at Ssal

• Yes, I’m well aware Junot Diaz wrote about Stephen King too

• Thank you, it never occurred to me I was completely wrong to see antisemitism.

• Donald Fucking Sutherland

REMEMBER TO SHARE MY WRITING FAR AND WIDE. IF THE TREE FALLS IN THE FOREST OF FUCKING COURSE NO ONE CAN HEAR IT.