Cujo, by Stephen King, is a horror story. It is named after the antagonist of the story, a 200-pound St. Bernard who is friendly and loveable until he is bitten by a bat that has rabies. The story begins with Tad Trenton, age four, waking up in the middle of the night and seeing a monster in his closet. "Low to the ground it was, with huge shoulders bulking above its cocked head, its eyes glowing amber-pits- a thing that could have been half man, half wolf." Miles away, in a country area of Maine, Charity Camber begs her husband to let her and their son Brett go to visit her sister out of town. The two stories are connected eventually when Tad and Donna Trenton, (Tad's mom), go to the Camber's house so the husband can repair her car. That is when they see Cujo, and are stuck there for three days. Cujo has killed its owner, and will kill Donna if she gets out of the car. In Cujo, Stephen King uses many elements of figurative language and effective writing. There are many similes, such as "She swung the bat like Mickey Mantle going after a high fastball." "Like a great tawny projectile, Cujo leaped onto the hood of the Pinto and charged at the windshield, barking." "Scenes of her past zipped through the foreground of her mind like a film of a parade which had been speeded up until the marching bands and horseback riders and baton twirlers seem to be fleeing the scene of some weird crime." They, along with imagery, help to create a very suspenseful story. "The sun sat on the horizon, round and scarlet-orange. It looked like a basketball that had been dipped in blood." The structure is also affective. Though it is told in the third person, view points switch from character to character, so the reader knows what the characters are feeling. Thus, each character is well developed. For example, "He [Brett] hugged his father tightly and kissed his stubbly cheek, smelling sour sweat, and a phantom of last night's vodka. He was surprised and overwhelmed about his love for his father, a feeling that sometimes still came, always when it was least expected (but less and less often over the past two years, something his mother did not know and would not have believed if told). It was a love that had nothing to do with Joe Camber's day-to-day behavior toward him or his mother' it was a brute, biological thing that he would never be free of, a phenomenon with many illusory referents of the sort which haunt for a lifetime…" It is also interesting how Cujo relates to the monster in Tad's closet. When Tad sees Cujo in his rabid stage he refers to it as the monster from his closet, and he notes "…there was something in his mother's lap, some terrible, hairy thing with red eyes, and he knew what is was, oh yes, it was the thing from his closet, the thing that promised to come a little closer and a little closer! The book is very readable and scary in a realistic way. King takes an everyday family pet and makes it deadly. He portrays the development of Cujo's rabies, and the pain, anguish, and desire to kill it causes. "He hurt, he hurt so miserably, and the world was such a crazyquilt of sense and impression. To his hellishly alert ears, the sound of the approaching car was dreadful, insupportable' it was the sound of some great stinging insect coming to fill him with poison." You can feel Donna's fear as she sits in her car, in the hot sun, waiting for a time to get out. Her son is dying of dehydration, her car won't start, and if she tries to get out of the car, Cujo tries to attack her. The reader is pulled into the story as they try to imagine what they would do in such a situation.
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