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”But time passed. Five years of time.
The monster was gone, the monster was dead. Frank Dodd moldered inside his coffin.
Except the monster never dies. Werewolf, vampire, ghoul, unnameable creature from the wastes. The monster never dies.
It came to Castle Rock again in the summer of 1980.��

It was '82, when I first opened the pages of Cujo to read those lines. The book's cover jacket had depicted those unforgettable snarling fangs of an angry dog, but inside is where the magic lie. I didn't know who Frank Dodd was. He meant nothing to me at the time because I hadn't read the Dead Zone. This was my first experience reading Stephen King, and I was transfixed by the imaginings of this place in Maine. I was 14, so I would have told the 4 year old Tad not to worry. Monsters do not exist in the back of a young boy's closet. But at the same time, I believed it did. King made it so. Tad's dad read “The Monster Words�� for his son: ”Nothing will touch Tad, or hurt Tad, all this night. You have no business here!�� With those words, the monster had been vanquished. Until the lights were turned off, and the latch on Tad's closet door popped free from its base.

I wasn't afraid of dogs. It was the opposite for me, and so it's no coincidence after seeing a classmate hold that book in his hands that I begged my mom for a ride into town. Soon after those monster words, Cujo chased a rabbit through the back fields of the Cambers, and down into that cave. The story had more than begun its journey into a place I did not know a book could take me. I experienced fear for the dog, and then fear for people.

You could say that villain of this story is Cujo, but it is not as simple as that, and I know my mind wrestled with that thought at 14. The true villain here are rabies and coincidence. In fact, many coincidences, a conviction that crosses more than one character's reasoning. I also remember being struck by adult themes that I had not run into in a book before this. It wasn't about sex, although there is some of that. To build the story, King deposits more than one type of family, and situation in life. Different backgrounds, and different futures. In the years to come, I'd come to be accustomed to these and other situations in his books, but for the time the way things were described were wholly new to me. I know the ending is what I thought of most back then, as I do once again. Pain on all sides. Near that end, trapped in the car with Tad, the character Donna's thoughts are prescient and moving, "Surely everything that had gone before had been a dream, little more than a short wait in the wings."