

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.Fairy Tale is a dark fantasy novel by American author Stephen King, published on Septemby Scribner. With such deep nuance, it may be for the best that King doesn't fully remember writing the novel. While the story is heartbreaking on its own, the truth behind its pages is actually more so. The only way that King was able to be saved was through the intervention of his family. When Cujo dies, it's solely because someone intervened. 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.

For King, it's far more likely that the dog represents how he envisioned himself when he was using drugs and alcohol. 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. In the context of the novel, a mother and her child are left to their own devices with no one to save them. Church: Which Evil Stephen King Animal Is a Better Villain 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. It is also fairly well-known that he directed his "so bad, it's good" movie Maximum Overdrive while using cocaine. The author famously wrote Jack Torrance of The Shiningabout himself, with the inclusion of alcohol abuse. 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. He has been very vocal about how these substances impacted him, as well as his family.

In fact, the author doesn't even remember writing Cujo due to his use of drugs and alcohol at the time. King's stories are rarely as simple as they appear. 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.
