Canines, Cujo, & Coke

Titles

I finished Cujo this past weekend.  I’ve got quite a bit to say about it, so be prepared for a somewhat longer post today.

The first thing I’d like to say is that Cujo is probably pretty high up on the list of books people know about or think about when you mention the name Stephen King (the others I’m sure are high on the list would be Carrie and The Shining).  It’s another one of those stories that people know even if they haven’t read it.  Or at least, they know part of it, but I’ll get into that in a bit.

First off, for the few of you out there who might not know anything about Cujo, allow me to fill you in on the very basics of the story.  Cujo is a St. Bernard who during the course of the story contracts rabies and winds up trapping a woman and her son in their car for several days.  That’s the spoiler free synopsis that most people already know about Cujo, so nothing should be spoiled for you (although, later there will be spoilers, but don’t worry, I’ll give you a heads up before they come).  There is a LOT more to this story than just that though.  A LOT.  But we’ll get to that later.  I’ve got a lot to talk about with this book, and I’m thinking I’ll just cover story points and plot and stuff along the way as I go.  So, let’s go.

What better place to start than at the beginning, right?  This book actually starts out with the phrase “Once upon a time”.  Yup, that’s right.  I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a book that starts out like that before (other than the fact that I’ve read Cujo before).  What’s interesting is that this phrase is on its own separate page, in larger print.  It almost looks like it’s not part of the story, however, when you turn the page to start “the book” the first line is clearly a continuation of the “Once upon a time” phrase, as it’s not capitalized and is clearly the middle of a sentence.  This really has no bearing on anything at all with the story, I just find it interesting because in movies, books and fairy tales always start with “Once upon a time”, and yet until now (or until the first time I read Cujo, which I suppose counts, but doesn’t really count since I don’t remember noticing it then) I’ve never actually seen that phrase in a book as the actual beginning of the book.

The next interesting thing about Cujo is that it has no chapters whatsoever.  The book starts with “Once upon a time”, things start going, and it never stops until the end.  Fortunately, there is an extra return space between paragraphs when the scene changes, so it at least gives a nice breaking point to leave and come back to.  But, not having chapters, or any other mark indicating a break, is pretty rare.  Especially for Stephen King.  Most of his books not only have chapters, but have numbered sections within the chapter to even further break things up.  I’m not sure what the reasoning for going chapterless was, but it does make the whole story kind of flow a little differently.  It’s like one big long narrative of what happened “Once upon a time”.  I know of only one other book that King wrote without chapters, but I won’t say which one it is until I get to it (but if you want to take a guess, feel free in the comments.  If someone gets it right, I’ll give them 5 bonus points).

When I posted about The Dead Zone, I mentioned that it was the first book to introduce the town of Castle Rock, and that all of the books that King writes about Castle Rock take place in the same “universe”.  Cujo is the second book to feature Castle Rock (the main events of the story occur in Castle Rock this time, rather than just a side story).  King establishes the “universe sharing” right off the bat too.  The first paragraph of Cujo is actually a recap of the Castle Rock events from The Dead Zone (as in “Once upon a time there was a bad man in Castle Rock named Frank Dodd” – those aren’t the exact words, but I don’t have the book on me at the moment, but you should get the idea).  The recap reminds us of Frank Dodd and gives us a rundown of all the girls he murdered.  We are then reminded that Johnny Smith came to town and stopped him.  We then find out that the story of Frank Dodd has stuck around and Frank has become a sort of boogeyman to the local children (as in, be a good little boy/girl or Frank Dodd will come and murder you in your sleep).  Many, many times throughout the book the characters either make reference to or have remembrances about Frank Dodd.

The main events in Cujo center around the Trenton family: Vic, his wife Donna, and their son Tad.  The events that everyone knows about involve Donna and Tad.  But there is a lot more that happens in the book.  Some of the other story lines include Donna having an affair, Vic having problems at his job and story lines looking into Cujo’s owner’s (the Cambers) lives and what is going on with them.  When all is said and done, I would say that the “known” story of Cujo actually takes up the least amount of time in the book.  Which I suppose make sense when you consider that not a lot is going to “develop” with a 200 pound St. Bernard trapping a woman and her 4 year old son in a car for two days.  It’s just interesting how the “main” story actually takes up less story time than all of the side stories.  Of course, all of the side stories are almost necessary to allow the events to “line up” just right for the main events to even happen.

This was the second time I’ve read Cujo.  The first was in high school (almost 10 years ago now, yikes), so I don’t really remember much of what my first impressions were then, or what I thought about the book, or how I felt while reading it.  However, I remembered most of the story, so there wasn’t much that surprised me this go around.  One thing I had forgotten about though was just how much time was spent talking about Cujo before he turned rabid.  King made a conscious effort to let us see just how nice of a dog Cujo was.  How he was friendly, and only wanted to be a “good dog”.  Obviously the intention is to let you get attached to Cujo, so that later on there is conflict created in your mind as he “turns bad”.  I can’t say I remember how I felt reading it the first time, but I don’t think I got as emotionally attached to Cujo then as I did this time.  Knowing what is going to happen and how it is going to turn out makes the nice descriptions of Cujo early on even worse.  Here King is telling you all about this great dog, and how awesome and friendly he his, but the only thing I could think about was how he was going to turn into a 200 pound monster…. Through no fault of his own.  Maybe it’s because I’m older.  Maybe it’s because I actually own a dog of my own now.  But I felt really, really bad for Cujo.  Just thinking about it now makes me a little sad (and if that doesn’t tell you just how good King is at establishing his characters, I don’t know what else will).  The book made it even worse at the end, when King is wrapping things up, he once again reminds us how Cujo was a great dog and he was just unfortunately a victim of a terrible disease.  Being left with that as the book ended was not only a major downer, but it made me want to roll over and hug my own dog, Toby, really tight.  This made me feel a little better, but I’m pretty sure it only pissed Toby off because he was trying to sleep 🙂

Ok, before I get into the next topic, which is mostly just an expansion of the previous topic, I have to issue a warning.  I’m going to give away a pretty major spoiler here.  I went back and forth on whether I should or not, but I decided that to fully be able to articulate my feelings on this subject, I have to.  So, here is your chance, if you don’t want something major revealed, skip to the next paragraph now.  Ok, those of you who are still here have either read Cujo before, or don’t care about knowing the end.  After the whole ordeal comes to a close, Tad winds up dying of dehydration.  I wanted (had) to tell you this, because I want to expand on the idea that knowing the ending makes reading the book much more emotional.  When reading it for the first time, you can have whatever suspicions you want about how things will turn out, but without knowing for sure, you can’t get as emotionally involved.  Also, when you read the book the first time and you find out that Tad dies, you are of course sad.  But, then the book is over and you move on.  However, when you know that Tad is going to die before you start reading, all of the detail that King goes into to develop him as a character become overshadowed by what you know will eventually happen.  I found myself getting emotionally invested in the character, then remembering what would happen, and getting sad for him as I was getting to know him.  The other thing that knowing the ending does is it lets you see just how all of the “little” things that happen lead to the “big” thing later on.  And each time one of those little events happened, I found myself almost wanting to scream into the book “NO!  Don’t do that!!  You’re going to be so sorry!  Please, just don’t!”  When I was younger, I use to like to imagine what it would be like if I had a device that would let you insert yourself into a movie as any character and live in that world.  You could follow along with how the movie was supposed to play out, or you could make any changes you wanted to.  Then you could pull yourself back out of the movie and watch it to see what would be different.  For example, in Aladdin, you could put yourself in to the place of Abu and not grab a hold of that giant gem.  Then you could pull back out and see just how things would have played out if that hadn’t happened.  As I was reading Cujo, I was reminded of that as I really wanted to be able to just jump into the book and keep Donna from doing the things that I knew would eventually lead her out to the Camber farm and the nightmare waiting for her.

If you’re just coming here from the beginning of the previous paragraph, welcome, you should be free and clear on the major spoilers.  There might be one or two more depending on just how this post ends up going, but I’ll give you fair warning, and it won’t be anything as majorly important as the previous one.  The last thing I made a note about wanting to talk about was the inclusion of a phrase I found interesting.  At one point while trapped in the car, Donna starts to wonder why no one at all has come around to help.  She then thinks to herself that, “If this was a book, someone would have shown up by now to rescue us”.  I’m hoping that, if you’re reading this, you’ve read most of my others posts too and have gotten to know me enough to see just why I found that quote interesting.  If you’re not quite sure, take a look back at my review of The Dead Zone, specifically the part where I talk about Carrie.  When I read this comment, my mind immediately focused on the subtle joke that, of course, this is a book (haha).  But then I got to thinking, that’s not the first time I’ve heard a phrase like that before.  I realized that I’ve heard people say lots of times “oh, if this was a movie then….”, or “if this were a TV sitcom then….” Or any other variation you want (“if this were a soap opera then….”).  And then I started to think about it a little deeper and I realized that I’m pretty sure the only time I’ve ever heard anyone say anything like that is……….. In a movie, TV show, or a book.  I don’t know that I’ve ever really seen or heard the phrase used much in real life (except for the fact that maybe we all sometimes fantasize about how our own lives might be different if…. But I don’t know that it’s ever in a serious train of thought).  But apparently one of the best ways to try to make it seem like your particular piece of fiction is “real” is to have the characters fantasize about what would be happening if they were in a movie/book/show.  I find this pretty funny to think about.  The funniest part, ironically, is that I just so happened to have been thinking lately about how some events in my life would be proceeding if it were a movie…. It’s actually related to my blog, but I won’t go into it now, I’m saving it for a time when I don’t have a lot to say about something but still want to write a big long post 🙂

Or another phrase that I’ve heard a lot in movies is “That only happens in the movies”, which is, again, a little funny considering you are watching a movie.  Seems like you only hear the phrase “that only happens in the movies” in the movies.

Well, that finishes up everything that I wrote myself notes to make sure I talked about.  I’ve still got one more thing to discuss, I just didn’t need to write myself a note because I knew I wouldn’t forget about it.

This interesting little tidbit just so happens to be that, during the point in his life when he wrote Cujo, Stephen King was immersed pretty heavily into drugs and alcohol.  In fact, he was so high on cocaine at the time when he wrote Cujo, that he has stated he can’t actually remember doing it.  I’ll probably go into more of the details of all this when I get to On Writing, since that is where I think I first learned about it.  That way the information will be a little fresher in my mind and I’ll get the details right.  But just think about that for a moment, he was so drugged out that he doesn’t remember writing the book.  With that in mind when I started to read Cujo this time, I immediately became aware that there was something “different” about this book.  Now, obviously he had editors and stuff to read over everything, so it’s not like the story is incoherent, or anything like that.  But somehow there is an under lying “tone” that is different in this book than any of the others I’ve read so far.  The book seems a little more “raw” and a little more “blunt” in some of the descriptions of certain events (almost as if the author just didn’t care about being subtle with certain topics).  It’s not something you would necessarily think twice about if you were just reading it on your own, but with the knowledge of the mental state the author was in while writing, it definitely makes you think twice about some of the undertones going on.

For instance, there is a lot mentioned about the presence of evil in Castle Rock.  The idea is presented by some characters that perhaps Frank Dodd’s spirit never really left and that he just moved on and inhabited the body of Cujo, and that is why he really went as crazy as he did.  This isn’t stated directly at all, but some of the characters have thoughts of Frank Dodd when they look at Cujo, and they have that fleeting thought that Frank is still around.  If you wanted to analyze things, you could make the argument that perhaps the “evil” that King is really alluding to is the evils of addiction and how they can do all kinds of damage.  Now, I know I’m normally the first person to get all huffy when people try to “analyze” an author’s hidden meaning in a book.  I like to enjoy a story for the story that it is.  So don’t think I’m all of a sudden trying to say that we should analyze everything anyone has ever written and discover what they are really trying to say.  All I’m saying here is that, if ever there could be hidden meaning behind the writing, Cujo could be a prime candidate.

The other undertone I thought could possibly be there is that King on several occasions makes references to the fact that Cujo is a good dog.  He didn’t want to do the things he wound up doing.  He simply became the victim of a terrible disease that turned him into something completely different than what he is.  Kind of sounds like something someone might think about themselves while in the deep pit of drug addiction.  They might not want to be doing the things to their friends and family that they are, but the addiction takes over and turns them into something completely different. (Now, before you jump on my case here, I do recognize there is a subtle difference.  Drugs addicts are responsible for their situation in that they chose to get involved, and they can choose to quit – as difficult as it might be for them.  Cujo did not choose to get rabies, and once he got it there was nothing he could do about it.  Though, it’s not hard to see how someone in the grip of addiction might try to take the argument of being a victim).

Well, I think that’s enough soapboxing and analyzing for one post.

All in all, I really enjoyed Cujo.  It’s not the most elaborate story ever, however, if you’ve never read it but only know about it, you might be surprised just how much there really is to this story.  I’d definitely recommend this book to anyone who hasn’t read it.  Hopefully my post hasn’t given away too much of the story that you’ll still be able to enjoy it with fresh eyes.

Blockbuster cooperated much better this time, so the movie version of Cujo will be here on Thursday and I’ll probably get around to watching it this weekend.  So I should be back sometime early next week with my thoughts on that.

In the meantime, I’ve gone ahead and started Danse Macabre.  As of right now, it’s probably the book I’ve been least looking forward to reading, simply because it’s non-fiction.  Also, since I’ve read it before, it’s not anything new.  I am hoping that I won’t get bogged down with it though and that I should be able to move through it pretty quickly.  I’d really like to at least be reading a real novel when we go to the hospital next month 🙂

As always, thank you very much for reading.