Cujo

“But time passed. Five years of time. The monster was gone, the monster was dead. Frank Dodd moldered inside his coffin. Except that the monster never dies. Werewolf, vampire, ghoul, unnameable creature from the wastes. The monster never dies. It came to Castle Rock again in the summer of 1980.”

King opens Cujo by recounting the tale of serial killer Frank Dodd, who terrorized Castle Rock for years before killing himself in 1975. The beginning of the novel forewarns that this small town in Maine has not rid itself of that evil, introducing one of Cujo’s core themes: that the monstrous exists in many locations and in many forms. King’s tone in his opening is reminiscent of an old myth or fable, lending Cujo an air of further mystique.

“[S]he could not speak of the heat she sensed somewhere just over the horizon, crouched like a scrawny yet powerful beast with mangy fur and red, smoldering eyes; she could not speak of her dreams, which were hot and shadowless and thirsty […] She smelled lunacy in a wind that had not arrived.”

In this passage, from the point of view of Aunt Evvie, Castle Rock’s oldest resident, King foreshadows Cujo’s reign of terror. Aunt Evvie often disturbs the town’s residents with her eerie, prescient comments, as when she warns mail deliverer George Meara that this summer (the summer of 1980) will be hot and deadly. Evvie is consumed with an overwhelming dread going into the summer months. In her mind, the summer is like a raging beast.

“Cujo trotted away. He shook himself again. He pawed helplessly at his muzzle. The blood was already clotting, drying to a cake, but it hurt. Dogs have a sense of self-consciousness that is far out of proportion to their intelligence, and Cujo was disgusted with himself. He didn’t want to go home. If he went home, one of his trinity—THE MAN, THE WOMAN, or THE BOY- would see that he had done something to himself. It was possible that one of them might call him BADDOG. And at this particular moment he certainly considered himself to be a BADDOG.”

Cujo contracts rabies after chasing a rabbit into a bat den. The narrative uses Cujo’s point of view, allowing a glimpse into the mind of the title character.