Cujo

A major function of King’s novel is to interrogate what a monster truly is. 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. The monstrous in Cujo thus inhabits many forms and occupies many spaces. Monsters straddle naturality and supernaturality throughout the novel. 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. 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. 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.

In interrogating what constitutes a monster, King allows multiple manifestations of the monstrous throughout the novel. His opening pages on Frank Dodd’s murders and death by suicide immediately establish the mutable form of the monster as an important element in the story: “The monster was gone, the monster was dead. Frank Dodd moldered inside his coffin. Except that the monster never dies. […] It came to Castle Rock again in the summer of 1980” (4). The eerie effect of these words lies in their conception of the monstrous: They convey the monster as something that can inhabit multiple forms, moving within our reality as it pleases. While the human Frank Dodd has died, the monstrous spirit lives on, raising the question of whether the monster can ever be defeated. However, this quote also indicates that the very concept of the monstrous—what constitutes a monster, where the origins of the monstrous reside, etc.—is beyond human understanding. Here, the monster and its arrival links with another theme in Cujo concerning fate. Fate, like the monstrous, operates in ways beyond human comprehension. In Cujo, both fate and the monstrous cruelly arrive in unsuspecting individuals’ lives at the worst times. As the quote about Frank Dodd suggests, the arrival of the monster is in itself an arm of fate. The monstrous form can be killed, but the monstrous itself will never die; it will arrive again and again, as fate dictates. Cujo himself represents this aspect of the novel’s theme.

Of the various monstrous forms that appear in Cujo, the most transgressive is Donna Trenton. While Cujo represents the intersections of the monstrous and fate, and abusive men like Steve Kemp and Joe Camber represent the human, “everyday” monsters we live with, Donna represents a particularly radical idea: the monstrous feminine entity. The monster inhabits Donna through a specifically gendered lens, different from the novel’s other male monsters. She becomes so monstrous during her killing of Cujo that her husband almost doesn’t recognize her: When Vic witnesses Donna’s bloody beating of Cujo, he feels “an impulse to throw the Jag in reverse and drive away […] to drive forever” because “[w]hat was going on in this still and sunny dooryard was monstrous” (289). King’s articulation of the monster through Donna is transgressive (and even progressive) because female characters are rarely afforded the agency in fiction to express rage and uncontrollable grief or (most important to the horror genre) to kill. Donna’s transformation is especially unusual given that the novel was published in 1981, a time of limited female representation in media. Donna’s brutality toward Cujo and her wild, untamed physicality during the killing are characteristics typically reserved for male monsters. In imbuing a female with these classically masculine acts and emotions, King challenges predominant notions of what monsters are and what function they serve in society. Through Donna’s killing of Cujo for survival, King asks whether a monster can serve a just end. In incorporating humanized monsters alongside the darker forces that control Frank Dodd and Cujo, King emphasizes the parallels between supernatural beasts and the “routinely” monstrous. As such, this theme proposes that the monstrous is an element of the universe.