The reverse, however, does not hold true. Usually if I see a movie before I’ve read the book, I don’t bother with the latter. Or perhaps it was the movie adaptation, which despite winning performances by the actors (including the dog) and some effective moments, doesn’t hold a candle to the book. And if memory serves, the cover of Cujo was just an illustration of a drooling muzzle, which resembled a cross section of a corned beef sandwich. Back in those days, the European covers-British, specifically-of King’s paperbacks tended to run from gruesomely effective to just plain silly.
But perhaps it was the cover itself that put me off.
His name on the cover alone was enough to draw me in. To this day I can’t explain why I skipped that one title in King’s oeuvre. I was barely into double-digit age when I first snuck my mother’s copy of Pet Sematary into my room and read it under the covers (a book that is largely responsible/to blame for the path my life and career took in later years), and after devouring it over the course of a few nights, I promptly took my library card and, using the excuse that I was getting the books for my mother, read almost everything King had released to that point. By demonstrating the full range of the monstrous, King uses Cujo to show what monsters are, what roles they play in society (both fictional and real), and what they can tell us about ourselves.Unlike most rabid King fans and purists, I came to Cujo rather late. However, in plotlines like Charity’s struggle to live under the unbearable control of her husband, King emphasizes that monsters exist in our everyday lives as well. King never definitively describes the link between Frank Dodd, Tadd’s haunted closet, and Cujo but suggests that a supernatural force is at work in the plotline. Monsters straddle naturality and supernaturality throughout the novel. The monstrous in Cujo thus inhabits many forms and occupies many spaces. While the dog Cujo becomes the central monster in the book (because he has contracted rabies), various monsters exist within its pages: Frank Dodd, abusive men like Joe Camber and Steve Kemp, the monster in Tad’s closet, and even Donna when she brutally kills Cujo. A major function of King’s novel is to interrogate what a monster truly is.
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