Cujo King, Stephen. Cujo. New

Cujo

King, Stephen. Cujo. New York: Signet, 2004.

Cujo by Stephen King is set in an ordinary, fairly isolated suburban community and features man's best friend as its primary villain. Its familiar and comforting setting becomes transformed into a scene of horror and destruction over the course of King's taunt narrative. Specifically, the story is set in the state of Maine and it would seem that this location is necessary to the plot, or at very least the story could only have taken place in a wooded American suburb. Only in a fairly rural, remote suburb would a family have a St. Bernard like Cujo, a dog large enough to terrorize human beings when he grows rabid. Only in a fairly isolated area like Maine would Cujo be allowed to romp around on a family expedition, only in Maine would a dog never have had a rabies vaccine because of apparently lax enforcement by local authorities, and only in America where rabies is common amongst wildlife creatures could Cujo accidentally get bit by a rabid bat. The Maine setting also allows for a sharp juxtaposition of the different classes that are part of the novel's human, less horrific plot. Some of the residents are relatively wealthy like the Trentons live in Maine because of its beauty, while there are many blue-collar families as well like the Cambers who resent the more well-to-do residents.

The Trentons are ordinary people neither bad nor good. Frustrated wife Donna Trenton is having an affair, but she shows impressive courage when defending herself and her young son against Cujo when the two of them are trapped in the family car, after its battery goes dead. Donna undergoes the most profound change in the novel, finding inner resources of courage that she never knew she possessed. Vic Trenton, upset about his wife's infidelity, which he discovers over the course of the novel, and his flagging advertising firm, discovers what is truly important over the course of the book -- not money, but family, as he must struggle with the effects of the natural world and what they do to his family as Cujo, along with his marriage, slowly disintegrates. Both parents must cope with the death of their child, Tad at the end of the book after Tad dies of heat exhaustion in the car where he and his mother are trapped.

Cujo operates on both the ordinary and the extraordinary, in terms of its levels of horror. On one hand, unlike most of Stephen King's novels, Cujo is not dependant upon the supernatural to inspire terror in its reader. In the real world, people are attacked and are killed by dogs. Rabies is a real illness. The horrific thing is that once Cujo was a beloved family pet, but because of the fact he has contracted rabies, it as if he has become possessed by a demon and he becomes a killer. The ordinary, beautiful setting of a quiet suburb that seems ideal to raise one's children makes the horrific contrast between Cujo's actions and the setting particularly effective. The beginning of the novel is also horrific for any animal lover to read, as it is told partly from the point-of-view of Cujo himself. Cujo's thinking becomes increasingly frightening as the disease begins to eat away at his central nervous system, and the reader is forced to see the human characters through his distorted perspective.