No ghosts, only the vaguest hint of any supernatural aspects (see the Connections section below), no secret government institutes: Cujo is simply a lovable St Bernard. Then, in case all this passed you by, along comes Cujo: and in the giant, slobbering, seemingly unstoppable dog, we find the bluntest metaphor for addiction yet presented in King's oeuvre (a title it would hold until Misery and The Tommyknockers). You can see it through his fiction: in Jack Torrance's alcoholic self-pity, desperately scared of becoming what he's destined to be, trying to hold his family together even as he shakes it apart in Larry Underwood throwing his life (and money, and 15 minutes of fame) away on drink and drugs at the start of The Stand in his short stories, tales of addiction and internal collapse and death. How could they not? He needed to hit deadlines, and he liked the taste of what he was addicted to.

As he became more popular, wrote more, earned more, took more time away from his family to work, his addictions escalated. It manifested in his writing, as part of what he was doing hidden from everybody else, it was in him, and on the page. Stephen King knew he was an addict in 1975, when he was writing The Shining.

I wish I could remember enjoying the good parts as I put them down on the page. I don't say that with pride or shame, only with a vague sense of sorrow and loss. There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all.

Stephen king book dog