Cujo

The horror in this section of Cujo is twofold. King develops his domestic plotlines (Charity and Brett; Vic and Kemp) and his thriller plotline (Donna, Tad, and Cujo) with equal weight, raising all to new dramatic heights. All are horrific in their own ways. While not all the action is as adrenaline-pumping as Donna’s combat with Cujo, this is precisely the point. In addition to building his genre-heavy horror, King focuses on domestic, everyday events, such as Donna’s crushing realization that she can’t rely on the mail delivery (a routine event she was hoping would be her lifeline) or Charity’s realization that her son is falling prey to her husband’s bitter ideas. These tragedies are significant in their intimate, human ramifications. In this respect, King transforms Cujo from a mere genre work to one of realism.

One of the most dramatically significant moments is how King reveals that Donna can’t rely on mail delivery to the Cambers. This revelation hits especially hard because of how King unveils it. Instead of telling it purely through Donna’s perspective, as in most of Cujo, King dedicates entire paragraphs to the thoughts of George Meara as he goes about his work delivering mail. Meara is a marginal character—one who never appears after this point in the novel. While deviating from the course of action to devote lengthy, unrelated description to the thoughts of a minor character nearly 200 pages into a novel could be risky, King uses Meara’s remote point of view to misdirect expectations, build tension, and create shock when he unveils why Meara is key to the plot: He doesn’t have to deliver mail to the Cambers that week because of the mail hold—so he won’t be arriving to save the Trentons, as Donna hopes. The sidetrack into Meara’s routine emphasizes Donna’s isolation and the passage of precious time during which no one is aware of her situation. This short section is nearly as important to the novel as the explicitly horrific scenes, like Cujo’s biting Donna, as it encapsulates how King adds dramatic tension.

Similarly, the pages devoted to Charity in this section are essential to the novel even though they’re not directly horrific. Charity’s storyline may at first appear entirely unrelated to Donna and Tad’s ordeal, but the two strongly interrelate. One reason concerns the role of fate, given that Charity is unaware of the events (involving Donna and others) at her home unfolding while she’s out of town—and how different things might have been had she not gone away. In addition, both Charity and Donna are mothers fighting for their sons’ futures. Though they have two different missions, their primary goal is to protect their sons; while Charity fights to save Brett from ideological harm, Donna fights to save Tad from mortal harm. Charity’s disagreements with Brett at Holly’s house appear tame next to Donna’s combat with Cujo, but both moments enforce the work’s thematic effect. Both women are fighting to maintain their sons’ innocence, a fight that King casts as ultimately futile given that both will lose this battle by the end of the novel. Nevertheless, King’s placing the stories of Charity and Donna next to each other in Cujo emphasizes that the war Donna wages against Cujo isn’t too different from the ideological war that Charity wages against Joe. The women are battling their own respective monsters, which connects to the novel’s interrogation of the monster figure. By interweaving both storylines, King shows that the monster can occupy both supernatural and domestic spaces. This not only carries thematic resonance but also heightens the novel’s impact. If the monster were limited to a supernatural realm, the work might seem merely a “scary story.” By including Charity’s struggle for her son’s soul against her abusive husband, King creates a horror novel whose lingering frights lie in mundane, domestic, and real spaces.