Cujo’s Hidden Meaning Makes It One Of The Most Compelling Stephen King Books

Stephen King is the master of literary horror, but, even more than that, he is a virtuoso of hiding his own real-life experiences in his novels, including Cujo. While his other works have featured outright depictions of his struggles with alcoholism and drug abuse, like The Shining, none are as nuanced or compelling as the story about an innocent dog infected with rabies. Here’s why Cujo is Stephen King’s most compelling story about his own personal struggles.

The story seems fairly simple: a dog gets infested with rabies, goes on a killing spree, and traps a mother and her child in a car as they await their demise. King’s stories are rarely as simple as they appear. In fact, the author doesn’t even remember writing Cujo due to his use of drugs and alcohol at the time. He has been very vocal about how these substances impacted him, as well as his family. After he penned several stories in the 1980s, his family staged an intervention with the hopes that King would get clean, which he did and has been ever since. The author famously wrote Jack Torrance of The Shining about himself, with the inclusion of alcohol abuse. It is also fairly well-known that he directed his “so bad, it’s good” movie Maximum Overdrive while using cocaine. Regardless of how these substances impact his personal life, they always found a way into his writing in the form of human characters and, in the case of Cujo, a dog.

Cujo became a major success, and was adapted into a movie of the same name in 1983. It is one of his most cherished novels by fans and critics for its incredibly unsettling psychological horrors. As a mother and her son face the fact that they may meet their end in a car due to dehydration, starvation, or at the hands of the rabid dog, they suffer with no hopes of escape. This premise is actually reminiscent of how families who are impacted with addiction can be driven to feel and, perhaps, how King saw his own addiction impacting his family.

While readers may have interpreted Cujo as a sad story about man’s best friend gone bad, it can actually be viewed as a metaphor for addiction. Nearly ever novel King writes includes a hidden message that makes it far more compelling than the overt storyline. For instance, Carrie was actually inspired by two women he grew up with. These women were bullied as children, and didn’t live to see their thirties. The titular character is both of these women combined in order to give them the redemption story King wanted for them. Even Lisey’s Story is about the 1999 car accident that nearly took his life, and posits what may have happened to his family had he actually been killed.

In the context of the novel, a mother and her child are left to their own devices with no one to save them. This can be read two different ways. It could be a metaphor for a man who has lost himself to his addictions, and his family is paying the price, or it could be about the abusive behaviors of a domestically violent relationship. For King, it’s far more likely that the dog represents how he envisioned himself when he was using drugs and alcohol. Applying that same meaning, the woman and her child represent his wife and kids, who were fearful that they’d lose the person they love to the disease. When Cujo dies, it’s solely because someone intervened. The only way that King was able to be saved was through the intervention of his family.

While the story is heartbreaking on its own, the truth behind its pages is actually more so. With such deep nuance, it may be for the best that King doesn’t fully remember writing the novel. Cujo is truly one of Stephen King’s most compelling and heartbreaking novels that moves beyond the pain of a dog dying, and thematically explores a father losing his grip on himself and his surroundings just like the dog loses his good qualities to rabies, a disease that took control.

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