The Cambers have more serious problems. Joe is an abusive alcoholic. Charity is weak-willed, more afraid of life without her man than she is of being beaten. Brett is content to hover below his parents’ radar.
Both families are unhappy in their own way, oblivious to each other’s pain. Their worlds are fated to collide, however. When the Cambers’ dog is transformed into a mindless killing machine by the bite of a rabid bat, both quickly come to know absolute terror.
Despite being characterized as a “horror” novel, there is only the faintest trace of the supernatural in Cujo. The “monster in the closet” that terrifies Tad is only a ruse to distract readers from the real danger. In some ways, it would almost be more comforting if a boogeyman or the ghost of Frank Dodd was lurking in the closet. Instead, the horror springs from something more mundane, a family pet infected by a pernicious virus.
In Cujo, King focuses intently on the horrors of everyday life. Killers, both human and animal, can dwell among us. A single mistake can trash an entire career. Marriages can be bent or ruined. Spousal abuse and alcoholism can destroy families from within. King’s point? Simply stated, misery, unhappiness, and shattered dreams know no age or social barriers. We live in a dangerous world, a world where even beloved pets can represent a threat to our well-being.
The novel can be seen as a sequel to The Dead Zone (1979) in that its opening pages remind readers of the tale of psychic Johnny Smith and serial killer Frank Dodd. Johnny, you will recall, used his paranormal talents to assist the Castle Rock police in tracking down the insane police officer, who ultimately escaped justice by committing suicide. In Cujo, however, neither the Trentons nor the Cambers have the ability to escape a series of unplanned and undesired events in their lives. Significantly, the Trentons have purchased Frank Dodd’s former residence. King hints that the boogeyman in Tad’s closet may in fact be the killer’s ghost, and later suggests that it might have somehow possessed Cujo.
By invoking the legend of Castle Rock Strangler, King reminds readers that even though life does go on, so, too, do the monsters. We needn’t be concerned with vampires or werewolves attacking us—the neighborhood wacko will suffice. And if the boogeyman need not be supernatural, it also need not be human. Before succumbing to madness, Cujo was one of the most likeable dogs in town. It took only an accidental encounter in a country field—a minor event in the endless progression of life—to turn the once-huggable animal into a vicious beast.
Tellingly, King begins the novel with the classic fairy tale opening, “Once upon a time …” as if encouraging readers to put their fears to rest at the very outset, reassuring them that nothing they are about to read is “true.” And yet the bitter irony is that the novel presents nothing that is remotely dismissible on the level of a pleasant fairy tale. With the exception of the rare circumstance of a rabid dog on the loose, all the unpleasant, unsavory, and ultimately tragic events presented within could happen anywhere.
The author’s repeated use of the catch phrase of one of Vic Trenton’s creations, the Sharp Cereal Professor—“Nope, nothing wrong here”—reveals another facet of the irony that permeates the narrative. Despite reassurances provided by loved ones and authority figures, there often is something wrong here. King seems to be warning readers that terror may indeed lurk around the next bend, that life’s ugly truths may be revealed to us at any moment. Cujo didn’t choose to become rabid. Vic never intended to become a workaholic. Donna never meant to hurt her husband or child by engaging in a disastrous affair. Brett Camber isn’t consciously growing into the crude and abusive mold of his father. Tad Trenton should never have died in such a violent and senseless manner.
But in the Stephen King Universe, fate often throws us a curve. The world is never as safe and peaceful as we wish. Forced to accept the cards that life has dealt us, we must play the game as best we can. Life isn’t fair, King repeatedly reminds us, but whoever promised us that it would be?
CUJO: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
TAD TRENTON: The four-year-old son of Victor and Donna Trenton, Tad believes that there is a monster in his closet, recalling the classic King short story “The Boogeyman.” Tad learns to fend off his invisible enemy by using a special chant his dad devises, but can’t fend off the terror that’s coming his way in the form of Cujo, a rabid St. Bernard. Sadly, Tad and his mother are trapped inside their stalled Ford Pinto by the dog, who seems hell-bent on attacking them. Suffering from heatstroke and dehydration, young Tad perishes after enduring a terrible two-day ordeal.
DONNA TRENTON: A good mother to her son, Tad, Donna is not quite as satisfactory a wife to her husband, Vic. Depressed and lonely, she feels empty whenever her husband or son are not around. Listless and bored, Donna drifts into an affair with a man named Steve Kemp, an action she quickly comes to regret. Donna is plagued by more mundane problems as well—for instance, her Pinto just isn’t running right. Taking her car to Joe Camber’s garage, Donna becomes involved in the fight of her life when Camber’s rabid St. Bernard, Cujo, imprisons her and Tad in the stalled vehicle. Donna and Tad are trapped inside for two days, battling Cujo, the heat, and dehydration. Realizing her boy is close to death, Donna summons the courage to confront the dog, eventually bludgeoning him to death with a baseball bat. But Donna’s heroics prove to be in vain—she’s acted too late to save her son, and must carry that guilt with her for the rest of her life. Donna Trenton’s present whereabouts are unknown.
VIC TRENTON: Tad’s father and Donna’s husband, Vic is a partner in the Ad Worx advertising agency. Vic finds his career in jeopardy when the firm’s largest account, the Sharp Cereal Company, almost goes under due to some defective products. Vic loves his wife and son, but effectively abandons them as he throws himself into the fight to save Ad Worx. Choosing to devote his free time to keeping the agency afloat, Vic is not present when his family needs him the most. Vic Trenton’s present whereabouts are unknown.
STEVE KEMP: A local furniture refinisher and self-described poet, he has a brief affair with Donna Trenton. When she breaks it off, he goes into a violent rage, and later breaks into her house when no one is home. Kemp trashes the Trentons’ home after posting a letter to Vic informing him of Donna’s extramarital activities. His current whereabouts are unknown.
JOE CAMBER: A lifelong Castle Rock resident, Joe operates the local garage. Joe is also the owner of Cujo. A thin yet surprisingly strong man, he regularly beats his wife and child. Joe is mauled, then killed by Cujo after the dog is infected with rabies.
CHARITY CAMBER: The oft-abused wife of Joe Camber, she believes she is doomed to a life of poverty and cruelty. But when she wins five thousand dollars in the state lottery, she finally sees a chance to escape. Charity tells Joe she’s taking their son Brett to visit her sister in Connecticut. In reality, she’s thinking about abandoning her husband and starting a new life. After Cujo killed her husband, Charity and Brett returned to Castle Rock, but it is not known whether they still reside there.
BRETT CAMBER: Joe and Charity Camber’s ten-year-old son. Despite his fear of his abusive father, Brett exhibits more and more of Joe’s worst personality traits with each passing year. After Cujo’s death, he is given a new puppy to ease the pain of the loss of the beloved family dog; it’s not clear if he is more upset at losing his father or his former pet.
SHERIFF BANNERMAN: The man who, with Johnny Smith, helped end the reign of terror of rapist-killer Frank Dodd (as told in 1979’s The Dead Zone). Uncharacteristically ignoring proper police procedure in investigating the situation with Cujo, Sheriff Bannerman is brutally slain by the rabid canine. As he is being savaged, Bannerman imagines for one crazy moment that he sees the evil presence of killer Frank Dodd staring at him through Cujo’s eyes.
FRANK DODD: The Castle Rock police officer responsible for a string of rape-murders several years before Cujo went rabid. His memory still haunts the town; for many, he has taken on the status of a mythical boogeyman.
CUJO: ADAPTATIONS
Released in the summer of 1983, the motion picture version of Cujo remains one of Stephen King’s favorite adaptations. King’s first choice to helm the picture was a young director named Lewis Teague, who had already made a few low-budget genre films (The Lady in Red, Alligator) that King greatly enjoyed. Although he did not receive screen credit, King supplied the initial draft of the screenplay, which was later heavily rewritten by the two credited screenwriters, Lauren Currier and Don Carlos Dunaway.
Regardless of who was responsible for the final script, the fact remains that Cujo was a fairly simple novel to adapt to the screen, a plus considering King had sold the screen rights to Taft Entertainment, a small, independent firm that couldn’t afford a large-scale production or big-name stars. Luckily, there were few locations and a very compact cast of characters. In fact, the most challenging aspect of the entire production proved to be making audiences believe that a lovable St. Bernard could become a vicious killer. But the filmmakers succeeded on all accounts, and the last half of the ninety-one-minute feature—which primarily consists of an enormous dog attacking two people in a small car—contains some of the most suspenseful and harrowing moments ever put on screen.
Dee Wallace (best known as the mother in Steven Spielberg’s E.T.—The Extra-Terrestrial) is the only name star, and she does a remarkable job of portraying Donna Trenton. King later stated that she should have been nominated for an Academy Award for her stirring performance.
Perhaps the primary reason King liked the production so much is because, like the adaptation of The Dead Zone that was released later that same year, the filmmakers captured the spirit and tone of his original novel, despite one crucial change from the original ending. Director Teague felt that it would be too much of a letdown for the audience for the boy to die after everything he and his mother had endured, and wished to alter King’s ending. Realizing that most movies work on a much simpler and often far more direct emotional level than novels, King agreed to Teague’s change. Thus, at least in the movie version, Tad Trenton was spared. Certainly an unusual instance in which, in their respective mediums, the radically different endings of Cujo both work.
CUJO: TRIVIA
• Cujo attacks Tad and Donna Trenton while they are in a Ford Pinto. At one time, Stephen King also was the owner of a Ford Pinto.
• Due to its mainstream sensibility and bleak ending, Cujo at one point was to be published as a Richard Bachman novel.
• In 1981, Mysterious Press released a signed limited edition of only 750 copies for $65.
• 250 custom-made guitars, dubbed “Cujo Guitars,” were manufactured by Taylor Guitars using wood taken from a tree from the movie location. King signed each guitar; the initial price was $3,498.
• Cujo’s ghost may have appeared in 1991’s Needful Things. Burying a jar outside Joe Camber’s old garage, Polly Chambers looks up and sees two red eyes peering at her from the dark recesses of the building. Needless to say, she leaves the vicinity as quickly as possible.
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THE DARK HALF
(1989)
Like ’Salem’s Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), Misery (1987), and The Tommyknockers (1987), The Dark Half features a writer as one of the main protagonists. The plot of this novel revolves around a permutation of a question that King himself had to answer when his Richard Bachman persona was revealed to the world: What if you kill off your pseudonym—and he refuses to stay dead?
To hear him talk, you might think that King thinks of Richard Bachman as a real person, separate and distinct from himself (see the chapters on Desperation and The Regulators for more on this). As noted in the section on Richard Bachman, the author has often stated that “Richard Bachman is Stephen King on a cloudy day.” In The Dark Half, King plays with this notion, examining it through the lens of his fiction. Thus, he asks, what if a pseudonym—essentially another part of an author’s persona—came to life? How would he feel if his “creator” had tried to lay him to rest, to end his existence? King’s answer to that question, played out in this novel, is that he’d probably become quite enraged and decide to turn the tables on his soulmate, to kill his creator before he, the creation, fades into nothingness.
This is the basic conceit behind The Dark Half: Thad Beaumont is a successful novelist—but only under the pseudonym of ultraviolent crime writer George Stark. Tiring of the charade, and hoping to devote himself to more serious work, Beaumont decides to publicly reveal his hidden identity and at the same time “kill” him off. The vehicle he chooses is a feature article in People magazine, replete with pictures of Beaumont standing over the “grave” of George Stark.
Although it’s all done in a spirit of harmless fun, something goes seriously awry. Someone begins ruthlessly liquidating people in a manner eerily similar to that of Alexis Machine, a fictional hit man created by George Stark.
Incredibly, fingerprints lifted at the murder scenes seem to indicate that Beaumont is the killer, even though he has airtight alibis. Although it defies all logic, what has apparently occurred is that Beaumont’s “dark half,” a doppelganger of sorts, has somehow sprung into being, adopting the identity of Beaumont’s cold-blooded alter ego, George Stark. And Stark, who writes so well about sadism and cruelty and death because they are at the core of his essential nature, is now hunting down Thad Beaumont, his wife, and his two infant children. He also hunts, then brutally dispatches, anyone remotely related to the People article, the one that so glibly “buried” him.
In the end, Thad Beaumont must literally face his “dark half” in a spectacular confrontation from which only one of them—Beaumont’s Dr. Jekyll or Stark’s Mr. Hyde—can emerge alive.
It is obvious that this novel was inspired by the real-life events in which King’s Richard Bachman pseudonym was discovered and made public, ending many years of speculation. Indeed, in a droll author’s note at the beginning of the book, King notes, “I’m indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help and inspiration. This novel could not have been written without him.”
The book allows King to comment on the trials and tribulations of being a bestselling author in the twentieth century. Like Ben Mears in ’Salem’s Lot and Paul Sheldon in Misery, Thad Beaumont is not struggling to find success in his chosen profession—he is more concerned with how to deal with his considerable fame. Like Sheldon with his romance saga of Misery Chastain, Beaumont is a writer who has attained the good life by giving the public what it wants—not necessarily what he truly desires to write. And, as he had done so wonderfully in Misery, King explores the fascinating mechanics of the creative process, most notably the idea that for horror and suspense writers to be truly successful, they must often look into the abyss of their creative “dark half”—knowing full well that the abyss is staring back at them.
One might be tempted to conclude that after completing The Dark Half, King had said all he had to say about the writing profession. Indeed, at the time of the publication of Four Past Midnight (1990), King stated that the novella Secret Window, Secret Garden would be his last word on the profession of writers. In 1998, however, he would produce Bag of Bones, a novel whose main character is an acclaimed and successful … writer. Without a doubt, writing is an endlessly fascinating profession that remains very dear to some of the most intriguing inhabitants of the Stephen King Universe.
THE DARK HALF: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
THAD BEAUMONT: As a young boy, Thaddeus Beaumont suffered from unusually severe headaches during which he would hear the ghostly sound of thousands of sparrows in flight. An operation reveals that he has a benign brain tumor that was caused by a most unusual ailment—an unformed twin. At age eleven, he has the tumor removed and more or less forgets about the entire episode. A born writer, he continues writing all through his adolescence, and eventually becomes a published novelist.
Only moderately successful writing under his own name, Thad has published two novels which, while critically received, do not support him financially. He also teaches college courses
, but his real financial success comes when he creates the pseudonym of “George Stark.” It is Stark who writes the grisly crime novels that become international bestsellers, allowing Beaumont and his family to live comfortably.
Thad, who wants to be remembered for his serious work, decides to publicly retire his pseudonym, in effect killing George Stark. But the Stark persona takes on a life of its own, rising from the grave. Enraged, Stark stalks Beaumont, seeking revenge. Facing Stark man to man, Thad emerges the victor, having conquered his “dark half.” For Beaumont’s ultimate fate, please refer to the chapters on Needful Things and Bag of Bones.
GEORGE STARK: The homicidal “dark half” of Thad Beaumont, he is a pseudonym—a fictional alter ego—who literally springs to life. Born in New Hampshire, he grew up in Oxford, Mississippi. Also a writer, he would compose his fiction in longhand, using a particular brand of pencil (in “stark” contrast to Thad Beaumont, who prefers a typewriter or computer). When Stark is “buried” as part of an elaborate gag for People magazine, he rises from his grave and embarks on a blood-drenched journey in his black Toronado to find and slay anyone remotely connected to the publication of that article. His weapon of choice is a straight razor, as he enjoys inflicting pain on his victims.
The Complete Stephen King Universe Page 18