Cruelty in fiction

What's the point of killing the children?

Last month, I revealed in our very gentle book/reading club that I was taking to two Stephen King titles—Cujo and The Running Man. Both are nihilistic, frightening thrillers. They are also unbelievably cruel to their characters. Even though they were published in the same year by King, The Running Man is one of his earliest novels, written a decade prior and published under a pseudonym, Ricard Bachman.

I was spellbound and loved The Running Man, and it wasn’t until I shut it, complete, that I realised it was quite bad. It’s filled with plot holes and wafer-thin characters, not to mention the poverty porn, an exploitation-style depiction of African-Americans, and it is staggeringly unkind to female characters. It reads as though it’s been written by a furious, young white guy. Which it was. Even though King would grow into a progressive in the Regean 80s, many of his earlier novels celebrate a small-town conservatism and brutality that jars.

But it’s a non-stop plot, baby. Would I reread it? Bet your ass. I can think of almost no greater pleasure on a warm afternoon with a cold beer. It appeals to a baser part of me.

In a dystopian world where the media and the state are one, a working-class hero, Ben Richards (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the film, of course), is forced to join a murderous reality show to secure funds for his dying baby. He joins The Running Man, a show where he is given a 48-hour head start before everyone in the country hunts for him, including a group of ‘highly-trained’ (but conveniently idiotic at times) special task force.

He runs! Things blow up! He gets hurt! He recovers!

King predicting the rise of reality TV, which is not particularly outside the zone of speculative fiction writers of the time, but the novel’s climax is, erm…oddly prescient. Richards hijacks a plane and slams into the offices of the executive producers of The Running Man. There is no epilogue. Just blackness.

Not hard to believe that the book went unpublished for a decade. Cujo is better written in every regard. King says he was too deep into alcoholism and cocaine to remember any moment of writing the novel that would become a cultural phenomenon.

Cujo is mainly a story about a rabid Saint Bernard who traps a woman and her son inside their car for several baking hot days. It’s also a novel that is deeply cynical of heterosexuality. Two working-class families are trapped in misery. One by a husband who is outrightly abusive and controlling. The other is cuckolded by his wayward wife. He flees on a business trip…but his wife and son end up in a broken car and a rabid dog. King moves these chess pieces to pull at the threads of the everyday ‘horror’ of family life. The child is terrified of a monster in the closet, an on-the-nose foreshadowing of the beast to come in gigantic Cujo.

But here’s the thing about Cujo…spoilers ahead. You’re in this car, with this woman and this kid, for a few hundred pages. They are dehydrated. The mother’s failed escape attempt has left her partly mauled. Every potential avenue for rescue has been systematically shut off. The boy has had a seizure. He has been unresponsive for some time. She finally decides she can’t take it anymore and faces off against the dog one-on-one. She defeats him in a Tarantino-like blood bath only a second before her husband finally shows up, but it's too late. It is revealed: the boy has been dead for some time.

No cut to blackness. We stay in the torturous scene for a while. We’re there when the emergency services sort through the mess and pick up the body and calm the mother. We’re there some time after, as King offers us a fleeting sense of hope…the marriage may survive. But that’s it.

I’m devising two separate bits of theatre with two different uni groups. And this question comes up a lot: how dark is too dark? How cruel is too cruel? How bad an ending can you get away with?

Answers after the paywall.