Cujo

Cujo

Stephen King

THE VIKING PRESS

NEW YORK

This book is for my brother, David,

who held my hand crossing West Broad Street,

and who taught me how to make skyhooks

out of old coathangers. The trick was so

damned good I just never stopped.

I love you, David.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or

Mt walking dully along ...

-W. H. AUDEN, "Musee des Beaux Arts"

Old Blue died and he died so hard

He shook the ground in my back yard.

I dug his grave with a silver spade

And I lowered him down with a golden chain.

Every link you know I did call his name,

I called, "Here, Blue, you good dog, you.

-FOLK SONG

"Nope, nothing wrong here.

-THE SHARP CEREAL PROFESSOR

ONCE UPON A TIME,

not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. He killed. a waitress named Alma Frechette in 1970; a woman named Pauline Toothaker and a junior high school student named Cheryl Moody in 1971; a pretty girl named Carol Dunbarger in 1974; a teacher named Etta Ringgold in the fall of 1975; finally, a grade-schooler named Mary Kate Hendrasen in the early winter of that same year.

He was not werewolf, vampire, ghoul, or unnameable creature from the enchanted forest or from the snowy wastes; he was only a cop named Frank Dodd with mental and sexual problems. A good man named John Smith uncovered his name by a kind of magic, but before he could be captured - perhaps it was just as well - Frank Dodd killed himself.