Cujo - Let's Discuss! *SPOILERS*

[Odetta]

OK, so for August, let's discuss Cujo.

I really enjoyed this book. I loved the sections where SK speaks from the dog's point of view. I felt sorry for him.

[razz]

i remember reading (on writing?) somewhere that King didn't remember writing most of Cujo.

[Jean]

... and I don't remember reading most of it... although I vaguely remember that I rather liked it than not. I got to re-read it. I certainly pitied the dog a lot, those big Saint-Bernards are very much like bears... and I also remember a boy (not the main, the other) whose side-story I loved a lot

[B Rag]

I really liked Cujo! It was my first King book, and one of the few books to come close to making me cry.

[razz]

one of my first SK books too. the first time through i couldn't finish it.

[JQ The Gunslinger]

Too scary or not good?

[razz]

not really sure. i think it's because it first seemed to revolve only around the little kid, and i hate kids. then like the novelization of "I. Jones & the temple of doom" i forced myself to read it, and i liked it.

[jhanic]

I found the book to be very uncomfortable reading--mainly because there are no real supernatural elements in the book--it could all happen!

Regarding the reference about King's not remembering writing the book--that was in his On Writing.

John

[Darkthoughts]

I also found it an uncomfortable read, much like Pet Sematary, because I wanted to rescue Tad and felt quite upset anytime he was distressed.

I loved the asides in the story, about the advertising campaign...great stuff.

[Heather19]

I just picked up a copy in a used bookstore this past weekend. I'll have to give it a read soon.

[razz]

i have 2 copies

[B Rag]

i think it's because it first seemed to revolve only around the little kid, and i hate kids.

So you loved the ending, right? :P

[razz]

pretty much yeah
:evilrazz:

[Randall Flagg]

Cujo was the #3 fiction bestseller in 1981.

From The Art of Darkness, by Douglas Winter:

Like so much of King’s fiction, Cujo had its origin in a real incident in King’s life. In the spring of 1977, Kings’ motorcycle wasn’t running well and a friend told him about a mechanic who lived outside Bridgton, Maine. “In the middle of nowhere”



I took the bike out there, and I just barely made it. And this huge Saint Bernard came out of the barn, growling. Then this guy came out and, I mean, he was Joe Camber-he looked almost like one of those guys out of Deliverance. And I was retreating, and wishing that I was not on my motorcycle, when the guy said, "Don't worry. He don't bite." And so I reached out to pet him, and the dog started to go for me. And the guy
walked over and said, "Down Gonzo," or whatever the dog's name was, and gave him this huge whack on the rump, and the dog yelped and sat down.
The guy said, "Gonzo never done that before. I guess he don't like your face." And that became the central situation of the book, mixed with those old "Movies of the Week," the made-for-television movie; that they used to have on ABC. I thought to myself, what if you could have a situation that was an extension of one scene. It would be the ultimate TV movie. There would be one set, there would be one room. You'd never even have to change the camera angle. So there was one very small place, and it became Donna's Pinto-and everything just flowed from that situation ... the big dog and the Pinto.

From Stephen King A to Z by George Beahm:

Just prior to writing Cujo, King, "then living temporarily in England, was hoping to pick up the local color with which to 'paint' his new ghost novel, set in a haunted Victorian castle" (Beahm 47). King, however, never wrote that ghost novel, instead writing Cujo, which is set in New England. A few details of King's life during this period make themselves known in the novel. Just after the publication of his first novel Carrie, King purchased a new car, a Ford Pinto. In Cujo, the Trentons are trapped in a broken-down Pinto, drawing on King's own experience with that particular model of car. Also on a personal note, King's youngest son Owen was four years old at the time Cujo was published. This corresponds to the age of one of the novel's main characters, Tad. When asked in a 1981 interview where he gets his ideas, King responded "…For myself, the answer is simple enough. They come from my nightmares. Not the nighttime variety, as a rule, but the ones that hide just beyond the doorway that separates the conscious from the unconscious" (quoted in Beahm 103). This answer seems to correspond accurately to the horror portrayed in Cujo.

A social issue that King faced with the publication of Cujo was its banning from many school libraries across the nation. In Rankin County, Mississippi Cujo "was challenged because it was considered profane and sexually objectionable", while in Bradford, New York the novel was called "a bunch of garbage" (Beahm 36). King's books regularly face censorship, and as a result he has become active in the opposition of literary censorship.

The 1983 movie production of the novel Cujo was compared to The Shining and replicated that novel's claustrophobia. The film version of Cujo received praise from Stephen King, as it was an essentially faithful adaptation of the novel. King rewarded director Lewis Teague by calling on him again to direct 1985's "Cat's Eye". Although King makes cameo appearances in many of his novels' movie adaptations, in "Cujo" he is absent.


Contemporary Reception:By the time Cujo was published in 1981, Stephen King had already asserted himself as a prominent author in the horror genre. Cujo, like most of King's previous works, received mostly favorable reviews. An aspect of Cujo that many critics thought integral to the novel's horror was realism. Reviewers focused on King's use of realism to heighten the suspense in this terrifying novel. Dorothy Broderick stated that "while the usual aura of the supernatural, of which King is master, hangs over [Cujo], the real terror is its reality. Given the right circumstances, anyone of us could find ourselves held captive in a small automobile on a blazing hot day by a rabid dog, driven to rage by his pain…" (CLC 239). "Publishers Weekly" agreed by saying "with a master's sure feel for the power of the plausible to terrify as much or more than the uncanny, [in Cujo] King builds a riveting novel out of the lives of some very ordinary and believable people in a small Maine town, and an unfortunate 200 lb. St. Bernard…" (CLC 238).

Despite all of the favorable reviews that Cujo received, several critics saw problems with the novel. "Newsweek" gave Cujo a scathing review, chastising the quality of King's work: "Cujo…has been selling out before publication…Is it a good novel? Of course not…Whenever the camera turns to Tad, Donna and Cujo (King clearly has the movies in mind), you can't stop turning the pages. All the rest seems like filler-Tad's adman Daddy having trouble with his big cereal account, Donna and her dime-store feminism…You could choke on King's ponderous intrusions…Stick to terror, please" (98). Another criticism by Michael Bishop questions King's need to possess Cujo with the spirit of a psychotic killer: …[the possession] strikes me as obtrusive and phony. Why go mucking up a good, if somewhat overlong, dog story with such drivel?" (CLC 239).

In spite of the unfavorable comments, all of the criticisms located in research agreed that King is good at what he does-and that is storytelling. As critic Michael Bishop says, "deft characterization and rigorous plotting, a la Hitchcock, inform the best of King's bravura experiments in the horror genre…we identify with King's characters. He has made it impossible not to. This feat, accomplished with such apparent offhandedness, deserves notice and praise" (CLC 238-239). According many of the reviews, King's literary talents lend credibility to Cujo, regardless of some of the more bizarre and ordinarily unbelievable events and characters that appear in the novel: "Like no other current author, King can evoke the Middle American scene and yet maintain the credibility of some pretty bizarre characters. He knows just when and how to apply those deliciously horrifying twists that keep readers coming back for more" (Library Journal 106).



Link to full article:
20th-Century American Bestsellers (http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/courses/bestsellers/search.cgi?title=Cujo)

[Woofer]

i think it's because it first seemed to revolve only around the little kid, and i hate kids.

So you loved the ending, right? :P

I almost yelled at the movie screen about stupid Hollywood happy slappy crappy endings. Man, that braided my hair.

[AcidBumbler]

I agree about the bits where he described Cujo's POV. It really did create huge sympathy. I couldn't put the damn thing down; finished it within the space of 24hours. I honestly didn't think that

Tad would die

though! That really surprised me, and I think it made the book even better.
Awesome read.

[AcidBumbler]

Oh and also... I actually liked Tad, which was unusual as I don't like kids as a rule.
But his mother? (I forget her name; eep!)
I actually did want her to die... she made me really angry. >.<

[Odetta]

don't worry about spoilers in this thread... there are warnings in the title. you can freely post! :rose:

[AcidBumbler]

Okay thanks :)

[AcidBumbler]

Just for the sake of liberty... TAD DIES.
Couldn't help myself :ninja:

[JRSly]

Despite all of the favorable reviews that Cujo received, several critics saw problems with the novel. "Newsweek" gave Cujo a scathing review, chastising the quality of King's work: "Cujo…has been selling out before publication…Is it a good novel? Of course not…Whenever the camera turns to Tad, Donna and Cujo (King clearly has the movies in mind), you can't stop turning the pages. All the rest seems like filler-Tad's adman Daddy having trouble with his big cereal account, Donna and her dime-store feminism…You could choke on King's ponderous intrusions…Stick to terror, please" (98).
Just finished this today(had to finish so I can start Under the Dome tomorrow!) and while I liked the book a lot, I can't disagree with this, it was my major gripe with the book. The whole book is just about the proper conditions to create the situation to have Donna and Tad trapped in a car with Cujo prowling around them. And I felt all the pieces being moved into place to allow for this was too obvious and delving equally into the sideplots for the sake of fleshing them into something more than simple pieces on a chess board got a bit tedious.

I understand that most books are like this, but in a really good book this sliding around of pieces to create certain circumstances is invisible. In Cujo's case, I wasn't being fooled and I could see the chess player's hands and I had a hard time acting like I didn't. In the end, it does work remarkably well to create a terrifyingly perfect scenario where she would remain undetected long enough for the book's final outcome to occur and I didn't mind as much. But getting through some of the advertising stuff or Brett criticizing his aunt and uncle was a bit boring.

[BROWNINGS CHILDE]

It has been a long time since I read this one. I was very young, I remember it being a shock to me when Tad dies. I lived in my comfortable world where authors didnt committ such atrocities. Only King would have killed him off, and that is one of the way that King got his talons into me. The hollywood wusses ruined it, like they always do. Up until the ending of Darabont's version of The Mist that is.....:evil:

[Ben Mears]

Despite all of the favorable reviews that Cujo received, several critics saw problems with the novel. "Newsweek" gave Cujo a scathing review, chastising the quality of King's work: "Cujo…has been selling out before publication…Is it a good novel? Of course not…Whenever the camera turns to Tad, Donna and Cujo (King clearly has the movies in mind), you can't stop turning the pages. All the rest seems like filler-Tad's adman Daddy having trouble with his big cereal account, Donna and her dime-store feminism…You could choke on King's ponderous intrusions…Stick to terror, please" (98).
Just finished this today(had to finish so I can start Under the Dome tomorrow!) and while I liked the book a lot, I can't disagree with this, it was my major gripe with the book. The whole book is just about the proper conditions to create the situation to have Donna and Tad trapped in a car with Cujo prowling around them. And I felt all the pieces being moved into place to allow for this was too obvious and delving equally into the sideplots for the sake of fleshing them into something more than simple pieces on a chess board got a bit tedious.

I understand that most books are like this, but in a really good book this sliding around of pieces to create certain circumstances is invisible. In Cujo's case, I wasn't being fooled and I could see the chess player's hands and I had a hard time acting like I didn't. In the end, it does work remarkably well to create a terrifyingly perfect scenario where she would remain undetected long enough for the book's final outcome to occur and I didn't mind as much. But getting through some of the advertising stuff or Brett criticizing his aunt and uncle was a bit boring.

SK didn't try to fool you. The narration intentionally pointed out the confluence of events several times.

[JRSly]

SK didn't try to fool you. The narration intentionally pointed out the confluence of events several times.
'Fool' might be a harsh, insulting word for it, but having the obviousness of it pointed out to me doesn't really make me love it more. The book just could've been a heck of a lot shorter, and I think been better for it, if it accepted that there was only one real story here and you could have all the same setups happen but with less needless, tedious, frustrating detours into the world of advertising or whatever.

I guess for those who see the whole book in a more positive light, those sections were likely just as frustrating but in a good, tortuous way. Where to me, they seemed nearly as useless of a distraction as just moving cross country and following random people in Wyoming around for 15-20 pages would've felt.

[pathoftheturtle]

I wasn't frustrated at all... except perhaps by the fact that the AdWorx story was just solved so abruptly, that we didn't really get to see that part get played out.
Cujo is good because it shows a horrible event similar to actual events which sometimes happen in reality. It's really good because it challenges us to consider why reality is like that.
I do NOT agree that "the usual aura of the supernatural" is unimportant or unnecessary to this novel.
Near the end of Cujo, someone asks, "How could this have been allowed to happen?" That question is the real point of the whole novel.
The "confluence of events" was not just a necessary evil of plot construction that was poorly concealed. It's explict, as an early version of King themes such as the dark power of the Pet Semetary and "greedy, old ka."

[mae]

Here's the link to The Losers Club podcast discussion of the book:

https://consequenceofsound.net/podcast-episode/episode-31-cujo/