Free A Brief Guide to Stephen King by Paul Simpson Page B

sent
Roadwork
to himalongside
’Salem’s Lot
for consideration, this was ‘a more honestly dealt novel, a novelist’s novel’. The tale about vampires was a more viable commercial proposition; as King wryly commented after
Roadwork
did get published, ‘I don’t think it ever made a cent’, noting that the ‘twelve people in bus stations’ who bought it as a Bachman novel probably only had that, the
Encyclopedia Britannica
or a bird book to choose between.
    Links are there to King’s work. An incident where Dawes recalls shooting a blue jay, but failing to kill it, turned up again in King’s writing: both Audrey Wyler in
Desperation
, and Todd Boden in
Apt Pupil
have similar encounters. Andy McGee experienced similar difficulties as a child with a squirrel, according to
Firestarter
. The Blue Ribbon Laundry is where Carrie White’s mother lives, and the home of ‘The Mangler’ from that short story.
    Roadwork
has yet to be adapted into any other medium.
    Cujo
(Viking Press, September 1981)
    Large St Bernard Cujo always wanted to be a good dog, and it wasn’t his fault that he became rabid when he did what dogs do and chased a rabbit, leading him to a nest of infected bats. Maybe the spirit of serial killer Frank Dodd possessed him when he terrorized Donna Trenton and her son Tad in their Ford Pinto on a hot summer’s day in Castle Rock, Maine. Donna has taken Tad with her to Joe Camber’s garage to try to get their car repaired; Donna’s affair with Steve Kemp has recently been discovered by her husband Vic, who has had to travel out of town to a business meeting in a desperate attempt to keep his advertising agency afloat. Camber can’t help Donna: Cujo has already killed him. Even Sheriff Bannerman is no longer in a position to assist: when he goes to visit the Cambers’ property, he too is killed by Cujo – and believes for a moment that he can see his former deputy, Dodd, looking at him fromCujo’s eyes as the dog savages him. Eventually, desperate after two days besieged in the car by Cujo, Donna battles the dog, killing it – but it’s too late to save Tad. The four-year-old boy fails to survive the ordeal.
    Stephen King barely remembers writing
Cujo
, thanks to his ever-growing addictions to alcohol and drugs, which, as he notes himself, is a loss, because it means he doesn’t remember ‘enjoying the good parts’ as he wrote them. It has been seen by some critics as a metaphor for King’s own struggles with addiction – like Cujo, the sufferer from addiction is ordinary and friendly on the outside, but when the alien substance is introduced, the nastier side, which was always there, comes to the surface. Whatever King’s state of mind, it enabled him to create a story that won the British Fantasy Society Award in 1982, and became part of modern pop culture – even those who haven’t read the book or seen the film know that the name Cujo belongs to a threatening canine.
    Cujo
was criticised by reviewers and readers for its downbeat ending, ‘perhaps the cruellest, most disturbing tale of horror he’s written yet’, according to the
New York Times’
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. King defended the bleak finale noting that it was what the story demanded. There aren’t happy endings all the time in life: ‘it has to be put into the equation: the possibility that there is no God and nothing works for the best’, he commented a couple of years later.
    It’s a story told on a much smaller scale than his more recent work, and in a far more realistic way. There aren’t any large government organizations trying to capture small children, just an infected canine on the loose. Bar the opening mention and Sheriff Bannerman’s hallucination as he dies, there are few suggestions of the supernatural. ‘I’d always wondered whether or not it would be possible to write a novel restricted to a very small space,’ King told
Starburst
magazine, explaining that he had considered anelevator before