Keeping Your Cool in the Cruel Summer Blues (Cujo, 1981)

Cujo (1981)

Good dog gone bad.

Scary cover alluding to a monster you
cannot see. It matches the disquieting fog
from which Cujo emerges, growling at his
beloved boy, Brett Camber. Before Cujo
attacks, he remembers who he is one last
time, and retreats into the mist. It is the
last time Cujo is his true self, and it is the
last time Brett sees him.

If anyone asked me what we studied in 9th grade Honors Physical Science, I'd plead mercy for my decrepit old brain cells since it was more than thirty years ago and who could remember with such a broadly-named subject, anyway . . . but the truth of the matter is that I'd be hard pressed to recall much even a year after its conclusion, let alone five years, ten years, or old-ass thirty years. There were likely assignments of some sort, and I do remember tests because we all cheated on at least one en masse (more on that in a sec), but what I remember most of all was our Very Notorious Teacher. She was small, vociferous, and nutty as a Peanut Buster Parfait. To protect her reputation (which she took no measures to protect on her own), we'll call her Professor Zee.

Professor Zee probably taught us things, but I'd be willing to bet that most of us remember her tangents more than any scrap of "physical" science, because they were generally off-topic, long-winded, highly personal, largely inappropriate, and relentlessly zany. Relating any details would be a dead giveaway, but I will say there were plenty of "husband" stories and almost none of them were chaste, Dagwood-variety antics with the two separate beds and innocent kisses on the cheek goodnight. Professor Zee was wildly entertaining, certainly unhinged, and very popular with all of her students. It should not shock you in the least that it was Professor Zee herself who urged us to cheat on that test.

The absolute bedlam of the early King praise
pages cannot be undersold. First, these
screaming, writhing, orgasmic blurbs
could be about any King title, so just cut and
paste with each new publication, who would
notice?? The most delightful part by far is
the publisher's helpful guide to turning
pages. I just want to kiss it on the mouth,
it's so stupid.

I had the half-baked maturity to know we were getting away with physical science (honors!) murder, and knew enough to be vaguely ashamed of it, but I still took my varnished A's home with a big, faux-proud grin and presented them to my mother as genuine and earned. Professor Zee was a chaotic, messy, reckless force that no one bothered to reckon with (or snitch out) and I was still recovering from the educational joke that was my middle school experience. My grasp of basic ethics was shaky at best. Yet, I knew it was wrong. Not gonna lie now, especially when it was thirty years ago.

Sometime around Halloween, we were revving up another cacophonous class of semi-learning, but Professor Zee was either out of gas or feeling magnanimous and offered the stage to someone else for a rare change. The question was posed, "Does anyone know any scary stories?" By ninth grade, who didn't? But one of my friends (which I could not tell you, my merciful memory spares both of us the chagrin) decides to pipe up, "Ooo Erin knows! Erin knows lots of scary stories." This was no doubt because I was known as a rabid (natch) Stephen King fan. While I cajoled some friends into reading most of my own short stories, I kept the darker stuff pretty close to the vest since those stories were, without question, thinly veiled murder fantasies about my real-life bullies. I don't think I even changed the names, for God's sake. So, I'm pretty sure I got "elected" to tell a scary story to the honors physical science class that afternoon for no other reason than my well-known obsession with all things Stephen King.

A little more specificity here, but what I truly love this time around is how
they're actually right, if not, in some cases, just a little coked up on the hype.
Minneapolis Tribune is about to pop a vein.

Mildly panicked and surely sweating, I scrambled to remember the most recent read, Cujo, to retell to the class. Professor Zee even turned off the overhead fluorescents to properly gloom the mood. In the silence, I took a breath, all eyes on me, and unfurled a scene of ball-constricting fear and gut-punching horror. I watched their expressions darken, my classmates, all middle-school survivors, as their faces drained, their eyes went dead with shock, their skin no doubt crawling . . . because I was so fucking BAD at storytelling it was criminal, y'all. The word "um" was uttered no less than one hundred million times on this planet that afternoon, and ninety-nine million were mine all mine. UMM, like, it was a disaster, a discombobulated, stuttering mess. Ugh. The humiliation. It was a wet and slithering thing and it was all over me. When you see that many faces looking at you with unmistakable pity . . . hoo boy, let me tell you. I cratered. I think I apologized at the end. I think I stopped my own heart. I remember feeling floaty and full of brimming vomit. Did Professor Zee sigh and make me take a bow or did I hallucinate that? We'll never know.

What I do know is that virtually no horror story is truly scary unless it's told by the right storyteller. Stephen King is a phenomenal storyteller. Ninth grade me was decidedly not.

New American Library is not messing around with the revenue. They jam
these paperbacks with as many ad/order pages as they can get away with,
and probably wished they could have done more. Note the title typeface
does not match the cover type, so this is likely just a reprint directly from
the hardcover edition with the prelim and end pages updated accordingly.

Whether it was the old memory or the recent Firestarter debacle, I was dreading rereading Cujo. I remembered enjoying every previous reading, but it had been maybe decades since I'd last dug in, so who knew what cringing horrors awaited me. On a whim I listened to the first few sentences of the audiobook only to slam that stop button before the voice stuck and ruined the book forever. I couldn't tell you if Lorna Raver did a good job, any better or worse than Dennis Boutsikaris did on the audiobook for Firestarter, but I do know now that I'm extremely unlikely to try audiobook fiction ever again. There are likely benefits to experiencing nonfiction in audio form, but the single voice is far too limiting in fiction where worlds are created and populated by so many different beings. I need a blank space, my own headvoice, entirely neutral and open to interpret and create those voices in my mind.

I am delighted to say that I still love Cujo. Sure, the horror tropes are a bit thin by now (1981!), but I still felt the anxiety, the terror, and the decompressing emotion that packs such and visceral, hateful, anguishing punch at the climax of the life-or-death showdown between a terrified, injured mom and a sick, mad dog. I finished it in a few big gulps of time, racing through the story as any good horror/thriller writer can only hope for, and left it by with my eyes still shining with tears and satisfaction. Good book, great storytelling. King's ability to herd the reader from one harrowing plot point to another, the threat ever building, the fear percolating until it explodes in a scorching shot of confrontation, is a finely tuned, 200-pound-machine of charging death from start to finish.

The numbering is a bit weird, but this is probably a scan of the fifth reprint
of the 1982 movie-tie-in paperback. See NAL hustling at the top? 

My first knowledge of Cujo was via the movie trailer shown on television, a teaser trailer that does not show the dog at all, but a series of tense moments and the title running spookily together in blood. I literally did not know what Cujo was, thinking it might be some sort of monster or alien, until someone at school told me it was a Saint Bernard, an idea so ludicrous it was impossible to take seriously. I mean, that ominous movie poster (the same as the original paperback, see above), the trailer never showing the dog, no explanations and just flashes of terror . . . what a fantastic marketing ploy, right? But once you find out it's a Saint Bernard it all falls apart. When I was a kid, Saint Bernards were the adorable lumps with the first aid casks around their necks (a fiction, by the way), saving people in the snow. Saint Bernards were slobbery, dopey, and fluffy. Who would make a horror movie about a dumb Saint Bernard?

The movie came out a couple of years before I ever read King, but I saw Cujo on cable eventually (well before I read it) and man oh man was that ever Gross. They were just like, okay, let's train these dogs to snarl and lunge, drown em in fake blood and puss, and have em attack the ever-lovin shit out of this little car, smearing the muddy, bloody, sick slime all over everything in the height of summer while pretty Dee Wallace and adorable Danny Pintauro sweat in terror and the greenhouse effect until everyone cries because it's seriously so awful to watch. It is gruesome, frightening, and just . . . rough. They did manage to make a Saint Bernard scary. And they created an effective public service announcement for vaccinating animals against rabies.

Dedication page (vii)

Perhaps the filmmakers knew they could only pile so much punishment on an American audience since (spoiler alert) the movie ends differently from the book. It stays fairly faithful to King's story until then, with the infidelity and career derailment subplots largely intact, but it seems the filmmakers simply could not stomach the idea of killing the kid. When I first read the book at age thirteen or fourteen, I recall bounding around the room in a frenzy because it really is a thriller, the woman and boy trapped and in peril, the cops and husband knowing something is terribly wrong but chasing all the wrong leads. But I was particularly struck by the ending, shocked that 4-year-old Tad Trenton not only dies, but dies of something so preventable and mundane: dehydration and heat exhaustion. The monster from his bedroom closet, something he's feared incessantly while snugged in his bed every night and something Cujo becomes in Tad's mind the first time he charges their car, never sets a nail or tooth to Tad. Instead, he dies from fear and shock; the fear of the monster, the fear of being hurt, the fear of being killed, his mother's fear of taking a risk to try for the house (and a phone) only to possibly fail and lose everything. It's absolutely devastating.

Only King, who reportedly does not recall writing Cujo due to a cocaine binge, could explain why there is such a marked difference between Firestarter's two-dimensional Charlie and Cujo's fully realized human child, Tad Trenton. Both books were written around the same time, so the disconnect is perplexing. There is such a tender care to Tad's creation, with beautiful, strange, funny, beguiling details about his thinking, his habits, his world and the ways he moves within it, that make Tad as real as anyone who's walked this earth. His death, and Donna's completely feral reaction to it, packs a significant, lingering punch.

I love Stephen King's compulsion to
always add epigraphs, sometimes a whole
bouquet of pertinent quotes, almost as
much as I love his twisted sense of humor.
I don't delve into the Sharp Cereal fiasco
that complicates the Trentons' lives, but
it starts with a very Stand By Me (The
Body) pie eating contest kind of gruesome
scene of hilarity which leads to an
engaging side story of its own.

I think Cujo was the first King book that worked on me in ways beyond the often clever but sometimes cheap thrills of horror. The genre is compelling for the most simple of reasons: Being chased by someone or thing to be maimed and/or eaten is the cornerstone to our entire existence from the beginning of complex life on earth. Fight or flight, all the way down into our slugfish DNA. If humans have nothing else in common with one another, this fundamental evolutionary survival instinct is it. But with Cujo, King delved deeper, into the sly horrors of domesticity, stagnancy, forgetting who we are and what we are meant to be or do.

The world-building part of the story is just as engaging as the jump scares and swooning terror of Donna and Tad trapped in that Pinto by a rabid-mad, massive dog. Donna's infidelity, and the plain but piercing reasoning behind it, were especially eye-opening. None of the reasons were good enough, yet they were all valid in their own way. Reading Cujo at that particular age, the dead-end housewife life Donna Trenton was leading certainly seemed like a version of a horror story. Even at thirteen, I knew intellectually that things were rarely black and white, but there was something about the way Donna comes to understand her inner conflict, how lucidly she brings together the fragments of reasoning that led her down this path, even as she condemns herself for allowing it to happen, and how much harder it is to convey those feelings in any truly effective way during that first confrontation, with her husband deeply hurt and betrayed, and Donna supplicant but still suffering under the weight of her worries, not one of which benefited from the betrayal, even if they were the cause.

"It's knowing you can't wait any longer to be a grownup, or wait any longer to make your peace with what you have. It's knowing that your choices are being narrowed almost daily. For a woman--no, for me--that's a brutal thing to have to face. . . . Men . . . they know what they are. They have an image of what they are . . . They don't hear that wind, or if they do, they find a lance and tilt at it, thinking it must be a windmill or some fucking thing that needs knocking down. And what a woman does--what I did--was to run from becoming. I got scared of the way the house sounded when Tad was gone." (King, 91)

I felt that last part in my chest, always remembered it, and it bookmarks the place in my own history where I first read Cujo, even more than the embarrassing retelling of the tale in Professor Zee's Honors Physical Science Fiasco. My little family had gone through a particularly rough patch of years--a job loss, moving from a relatively happy home to a series of elsewheres, two years of wretched middle school, the humiliation of food stamps, begging off bill collectors, selling off irreplaceable heirlooms--to come out the other side shaky but still together, mom and me against the world, her in a new job, me in the mercifully anonymous halls of high school, both of us living in a better place with fewer worries and less stress. As much as the previous two years hurt, they taught me a great deal of perspective. I was still a brat, mind you, but a more empathetic brat. I knew what Donna meant when she said she got scared of the way the house sounded, for her when Tad was gone, for me the echoing clang or the grinding creak of another strange smelling old rental, temporary, dimly lit, each one farther from comfort, pushing us back into the proverbial washout, deep in the weeds with a broken compass, lost and keening for Home. Even though the concept of "home" was already overexposed and sun bleached from too much obsessing and not enough cohesion. Having moved around all my life, what was home, anyway? A rumor. A fiction. Home is where the boxes sit half unpacked.

King in full KING mode, one whole page
to set up a fairy tale introduction...

I remember the novelty of a new kind of perception, how I expected to feel nothing but judgement for Donna Trenton's infidelity at the first mention of it, but instead found myself relating to her, understanding her, empathizing with her. For once King had created a female character with agency, a woman motivated by complex emotions and experiences. Donna is a wife and mother, and she focuses on her husband and her child, but they are not the sum total of her. King's wisdom in setting the scene with Donna in conflict with her husband, heartsick with worry over the future and the consequences of her betrayal, all while mothering sweet Tad and still going about the grueling tedium of life--the simple act of getting her car fixed by a local mechanic--prime the reader to inhabit the world beside her, trundling down that dusty road in the failing Pinto. Donna is a real person, finally and praise Jaysus hallelujah, a three dimensional human woman. It makes every harrowing experience in the Cambers' dooryard all the more gripping and brutal. She is real, Tad is real, and the stakes are excruciatingly high.

...only to start the book off reminding
everyone of The Dead Zone's side-
creep and Castle Rock's very own
deputy dawg and serial killer,
Frank Dodd.

Still, what was more striking this read around was the narrative that follows Donna's lover after the ugly break between them (he considers raping her) and his subsequent retaliation over her rejection. Steve Kemp is a traveling jack of all trades, with a side business refinishing antiques and a side hustle as a sore loser tennis pro, whose part-time ambitions of laying married women and beating their husbands on the court pale next to his delusions of distinction as a writer. He even has a van with a mural painting on the side. While Steve the Choad is a bit of a stale toad as a character, there is a spark of genuine relevance to him, aside from being a terrible life lesson for Donna and a clear plot device for King.

After his scrap with Donna and subsequent mailing of a very authentic, hard to refute revelatory letter to Donna's husband, Steve Kemp decides to blow town for the next gig, somewhere west and away, to keep on truckin, as it were, and live his rolling-stone life just as any real writer should aspire to do. His temper, and his appalling lack of character, get the better of him, so he decides to turn around and head back to Castle Rock to serve out some more punishment for Donna's impudence. He drops in on the Trentons' home, let's himself in, and finds the house empty (Donna and Tad are already in the midst of their fated encounter with Cujo). In a frenzy best described as childishly terrifying, Kemp trashes the house, smashing, breaking, crashing, destroying . . . then concludes his tantrum by jacking off on the Trentons' bed and leaving a snide note on the refrigerator "Left something upstairs for you, baby."

As Steve Kemp puts distance between himself and what he's done, something remarkable and grotesque happens. It's so common, so familiar, and yet it never struck me so hard as it did this time around:

Had the retribution been too heavy for the offense? So what if she didn't want to make it with him any more, so what? He had trashed most of the goddam house. Did that, maybe, say something unpleasant about where his head was at? 

He began to work on these questions a little at a time, the way most people do, running an objective set of facts through a bath of various chemicals which, when taken together, make up the complex human perceptual mechanism known as subjectivity. . . . [H]e tore down what had happened and then carefully rebuilt it . . . until the facts and his perception of the facts jibed in a way he could live with. (King, 201)

As Kemp settles into the revised perception of what he's done, literally leaving it in the rear-view mirror as he drives toward Idaho, he revels in the familiar grift of his lifecycle, his belief that rolling on will keep him honest, enrich his writing, make him the man we wants to be perceived as.

He would have been unable to understand the significance if someone had pointed out the fact that, whether in Maine or in Idaho, he would still be apt to throw his racket down in angry frustration if he lost a game of tennis; that he would refuse to shake the hand of his opponent over the net, as he always had when he lost. He only shook over the net when he won. (King, 202)

By the end of the first day's drive, Kemp has not only absolved himself from his monstrous acts, he has canonized himself a modern day Che Guevara.

His sleep was easy. He had convinced himself that trashing the Trentons' house had not been an act of half-mad jealous pique but a piece of revolutionary anarchy--offing a couple of fat middle-class pigs, the sort who made it easy for the fascist overlords to remain in power by blindly paying their taxes and their telephone bills. It had been an act of courage and of clean, justified fury. It had been his way of saying "power to the people," an idea he tried to incorporate in all his poems. (King, 202)

The reason why this particular human failing struck me so hard at this time around should be abundantly clear when framed in the events of the world as I write this (June 2020). After months of Covid-19 quarantine, the world watched a nine minute murder via Twitter and an enormous number of society took a deep, shaking breath and said, "Stop." There have been protests, marches, looting, lynchings, and widespread police brutality, recorded, documented, and put on blast for anyone with an internet connection to see. It seems the answer to an unforgivable act of police brutality has been . . . more police brutality. In so many of these cases, mirroring countless police-involved shootings and deaths that came before, there is a flashfire, emotional reaction to a situation where minimal professionalism requires there should be none. The person with the badge and gun gets called something he doesn't like, or isn't obeyed immediately even as a suspect is asking why he's been pulled over while the officer refuses to answer, or perhaps someone just runs . . . and that is all it takes for that officer to lose all composure and attack, far too often with deadly force. Sometimes it is a baton, sometimes it is a shove, sometimes it is a rubber bullet. And sometimes it is a real bullet. It has been a sickening though not surprising display.

A fundamental fact of the human condition is hating to admit when we're wrong . . . or weak, or flawed. Some people go their entire lives in a constant state of self-absolution. "I would never do that," "I'm a good person," "how dare you question me." And on. It's an incredible feat of denial and one hundred percent excrement.

Gloss stock, black and white, movie
still inserts. Dee Wallace and Danny
Pintauro were perfectly cast in the roles
of Donna and Tad Trenton. 

I am very flawed. Lots of flaws. Beautiful flaws. Most flawed. I've got lots of shiny feathers, too, glorious, iridescent coloring, and empathy to the moon and back. But with a mean streak, and a permanent wall between me and pretty much anyone. There are doors, but they are hidden, require keys, sometimes passwords. And they move around. A lot. My temper is a living, sharp-toothed thing, springloaded in the dark corner. My love is true. I've had successes and failures. I've been a good listener and a bad friend. In all things, I'm Working On It.

The first time I heard the contrarian phrase "All Lives Matter" my first thought was, "okay, understandable." It was easy to be flippant since, as a white woman, I literally had no skin in the game. Upon further reading, I was made to understand the full meaning of the phrase "Black Lives Matter" . . . and the thoughtless insensitivity of the All Lives Matter response. When shouted in public, meme, or blog post today, at best, it is just ignorant. Worse, it is deliberately ignorant. The very worst, it is toxic narcissism. I'm starting to believe that most people still countering with the All Lives mantra are the latter. The phrase "Black Lives Matter" and every conceivable, patient explanation of the meaning, the history, and the importance of the movement have all been around long enough for everyone to understand what it means if they really wanted to.

Let's face facts, some people don't give a shit and never will. Others are steaming in that subjectivity bath and are positively sodden in wrinkly denial.

King, epigraphing even at the close. 

The juxtaposition of Donna Trenton's striving toward emotional maturity--coming to terms with her weaknesses and attempting to understand her motivations--and Steve Kemp's stubborn, stunted self absorption that leaves him in an endless cycle of reactionary immaturity and vain self delusion is a microcosmic diorama of America today. It's hard as hell to see your own failings, harder yet to own up to them. But if you can do it, you can come out the other side better educated and stronger than you were before.

The first time I saw someone write "I hate white people" on social media, I reacted as though they were attacking me personally. How could I not take it personally? I'm a good person! I am a white people! I shall clutch my pearls and squawk indignantly! First of all, not everything is about me. Second of all, even though whoever said it (and liked it, and shared it . . . ) probably meant "White People (TM)" there have undoubtedly been times in my life where I was acting like white people (TM). Third of all, I am generally a good person, but I do take things personally even when they are not directed at me and also are you mad at me you seem mad at me if you are mad at me that is not fair so I am now mad at you also fuk u and your entire ancestry and we are at WAR.

Denial is so much easier, and defensive anger stands point to beat those ugly truths into the ground. It poisons you, though, pickles your heart, turns your brain into a rancorous tumor of reactive rage. There is no peace in that. One of the longest, most harrowing breaches to traverse is coming to terms with white privilege and the simple truth that you have benefited from it even if you never asked for it. You can't hot potato privilege to someone else and scream "not mine." It just is. And there is no WAR in acceptance.

See? NAL is selling all its wares -- blanks are not allowed!

I had to go to a lot of therapy to work on My Shit (TM) and I'm still a work in progress. After the stress of quarantine and the collective trauma of seeing a man murdered by an officer of the law, we are all due for some therapy. The toxic narcissists who believe others should die to maintain their aggressively uninspired, frosted tip, latte laden, supershopper, Applebee's happyhour status quo while screechily cricketing All Lives Matter with no sense of irony at all should get in the front of the Extreme Therapy line. Every American should get a primary care physician and mandatory psychological analysis as part of standard, baseline healthcare. Therapists should be as commonplace and necessary as dentists. One EMDR session with every cleaning!

All the introspection and emotional maturity in the world isn't going to save Donna Trenton from the shattering Hell that she must face, first by stepping out of her car for the last time, desperate to save her failing child, committed to battle the beast that has already laid her open and infected her with the rabies virus. She faces off with him, beats him with a bat, her rage and terror pushing her on even as he refuses to die, keeps at her, gnashing, biting her. Even when he is finally dead, she's crossed into some haze of delirium, beating his dead body to a pulp as her husband finally pulls into the Cambers' dooryard to find her there, a wretched, wasted figure in an ecstasy of annihilation. Despite everything, it is too late for Tad Trenton. Donna tries desperately to revive him, hissing and biting at her husband, later the paramedics, but he is gone.

Not! One! Blank! Page! Dammit!

But that is not the end of Cujo, as the much sunnier movie version leaves off with Donna holding a living Tad, instead we see the aftermath for the Cambers, the Trentons, Cujo, and even the hole he jammed his head in at the beginning of the story only to find it full of buzzing squealing flapping batwings with razor teeth. Cujo's remains go to the dump, no one ever finds the hole, the Cambers get a new dog (with all his shots), and the Trentons begin the excruciating work of creating a new life without the light that was once at the center of it, Tad. The healing for the Trentons is slow and painful, but it progresses. The future is not certain, but there is an undeniable hope cast over the epilogue, despite going through something so singularly horrible and losing someone so deeply loved, they manage to stick together, deliberately and thoughtfully. It doesn't break them.

What of Steve Kemp? The book never says. He is of no true consequence other than the fleeting destruction and bad karma he leaves in his wake. This is where stunted fools who refuse to learn and grow belong, dead-end footnotes in the ten cent bin.

To my recollection, this was a metallic
silver back cover, similar to Crayola silver,
pretty but not critical. Metallic inks are
generally more expensive than flat colors,
though it can depend on the type of
printing. Since this is old school, I can
assure you it was offset, and definitely
more costly. However! When you're
running thousands of copies in each
printing, the costs drop dramatically.
Whenever I see this particular shade of
metallic silver, I remember how one
almost exactly like it was our imprint's
"signature color," which means it appeared
on all promo material, logos and logotypes,
etc. Unfortunately, most of our books
could not use it since the print runs were
tiny (academic!) and the ink was too costly.

Imagine the strength true emotional maturity requires. The resolve to stand back and assess instead of lashing out defensively at the slightest hint of antagonism. The perspective needed to stay calm, listen, and at least try to empathize. The character it takes to stay cool under pressure, not allow the emotional outbursts of others get the best of you, and manage tense situations with sensible authority. Imagine aspiring to that, something to emulate and admire, instead of allowing oneself to go low, weasel-like, reactionary, thin-skinned, terrified, permanently aggrieved, badly behaved like chest beating teenagers with weapons of war and a licence to harm and hospitalize instead of serve and protect. It seems reasonable to expect the very best of the people armed to do the most harm, some semblance of emotional maturity being the least of it. "Not All Cops" is still one bad cop too many.

This, of course, is but one aspect of an enormous problem. But each individual can start by being personally accountable and reverent to the awesome responsibility of policing.

Anyway, aspire to be a mighty Donna Trenton. Don't be a mini-balled Steve Kemp. Black lives matter.

Grade: B+
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 8. Lots of building dread leading up to calamitous jump scares and shots of sheer terror. A solid work of unapologetic horror.
Warnings: Yes, n-word. Spoken by the turdy, mean country folk, of course. I want to say the usage is not as flippant as previous novels, but I'm probably reaching. Just a warning that it's there, an ugly, festering little sore of a word. Otherwise, the biggest warning is Tad. Even with the spoilers, it's hard to read. The kid gets under your skin and the blast circumference of the pain is miles wide.

Artifact: The Internet Archive wins the day yet again! I did notice that things come and go from these collections, so that's something to keep in mind. I've been able to find everything I've needed so far (in chronological order), but upon searching for Firestarter to look something up, I found all the print scans were suddenly gone. Not sure why that was, but it seemed important to mention. For Cujo, I downloaded the same paperback edition I had as a kid: same cover, same interior, same browning around the edges. I'd never read a novel via the laptop before, but once I got into a rhythm with the scrolling, it was mostly fine. Books still rule, though. I'm probably never going to sway from that belief no matter what technology they come up with . . . unless they make a hologram Stephen King that sits on my couch and reads to me, I guess.

Nah. Books rule, the rest drools.