The Problem of Theodore

 

I haven't posted yet about the most famous deceased youngster in King's fiction (perhaps in all modern literature) before, but I made the following post on the official Stephen King forum in the wake of reading The Institute. The post pretty much says it all: 

I've been thinking lately: maybe I should just regard Cujo like it never existed. And maybe some other King works like Pet Semetary, even though they're canon of course. I think it really might be time.

Let me just tell you:

Cujo was my first real intro to Stephen King all those years ago. I'd heard about and read a little, about the kid's vivid terror of a monster in his closet. It's really gripping. But when I forced myself to read the end, it put me off reading SK for years.

Yes, I'm talking about Tad's death. I couldn't understand why an author would want to do that, so I read much of what was then written about SK, including Douglas Winter's Art of Darkness. I found out why in an interview with King in a book called Masters of Fear, or something like that.

Back then, I sort of a King anti-fan, while other kids were talking about how great he was. But just as others discovered reading SK, one thing was for certain: I'd never encountered any writer who wrote more compellingly, who brought his character to three dimensional life. He profoundly affected me. And of course, I'd never read anyone who could write so heart-wrenchingly gut-wrenchingly realistic about a child's death, and his grieving parents. Like so my others, I was blown away with King's writing, but in a negative sense. I actually believed King was given mostly false advertising, because it wasn't fear that he was best at. It was heart break. If King doesn't understand why he received angry letters regarding Tad's death, well, some people just don't like having their hearts broken while reading a novel. I'll also say that king sacrificed one of --heck THE--most absolutely adorable and utterly realistic child characters I've ever read. And I've read a lot. He sacrificed him on the alter of Literary Naturalism because he considers that more important.

Now, let me tell you, I never wrote SK an angry letter. I believe then, and I believe now, that a character's fate is ultimately the author's business. As much as I might not like it, Tad is King's character, not mine. End of story. I know I wouldn't anyone else telling me whether to have a character live or die. It surprises me a bit, that I've never heard King offer this as a defense. He doesn't write to please his audience; he ultimately writes as he sees fit. Those who wrote letters only made things worse, it seems to me; King never re-vamped Cujo, and I suspect those letters are what inspired his creation of Annie Wilkes.

It was years later that a birthday gift of The Dark Tower: the Wastelands turned me into a bona fide King fan. I've all of the DT tower books of course, and the Talisman and Eyes of the Dragon. And some of the non-fantasy ones of course, though still not all of them.

Recently I've read the Outsider, Doctor Sleep and Revival, which was depressing and heartbreaking again, but very thought-provoking.

But it is always Cujo that I associate King with the most. Back then when Pet Semetary was being promoted as King's scariest novel ever, KIng was, to me, the author of deceased kids and parental grief, made all the worse because he wrote it so uncannily realistic. Tad is THE character that comes to mind first whenever I thing of King's work. He, and his demise, made a stamp on me that never quite washed away.

But I think maybe now it's time to just get over it; Tad's finished, he's dead, his folks knew it, King knows it, and it's time to move on, just as King often observes regarding real life.

Unlike King, I'd rather keep real-life tragedies out of fiction.

But why now?

It's pretty much because of The Institute. I could even more about how The Institute has blown me away more than any other King book, even the DT series. As to why, I did write a post explaining part of why that is in the Institute section. I thought of posting that thread over there, but, as you can see it's mostly about the Tadder. It's not that I think that Luke, is in any way an expy of Tad; he's more like Jake, although the situation he's in , and everything about it just grabs me even more. It's possibly the best novel about a kid facing off against Evil I've ever read. One reason is that the whole "killing the few for the sake of the many" is at the heart of the story, and also the theme of evil people virtually always rationalize their actions as good.

Anyway, The Institute is head and shoulders above even other SK works, in my opinion.

I have been an SK fan for years now, but I am now becoming far more of an SK fan than ever before. I owe it all to King's crafting of The Institute.

So maybe I should stop associating SK with the painful memories of Tad's death at all. Do they really matter, especially in light of the Luke Ellis story? The author who wrote THAT shouldn't be associated with characters he killed off decades ago. In short, I should just let go of the past. If Victor and Donna Trenton can do it, why can't I? When it comes to Cujo, I should just look the other way from now on.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree?

 

There were a few answers to this, and most seemed to agree. But since I wrote that, I've found that I still never could QUITE just forget about the Tadder. He is, after all, the first King character I ever encountered, and would surely have gotten me hooked on SK at an early age were it not for his death. From the very start, Tad grabs the audience's sympathy like few other characters could and doesn't let go. once we first encounter him starring "with drugged fascinated horror" at his black closet door. We're they're will Tad experiencing his terror. He's rendered unbelievably realistic for a four-year-old, especially one who's almost UNrealistically abdorable. We get to know the Tadder as a full-fleshed out character over the course, something few authors could accomplish for such a young child, until, well, you know what happens at the end. James Van Hise, author of The Illustrated Stephen King observes that Victor and Donna Trenton have a four year old son that "we come to know quite well." In James Van Hise's review of Cujo, he writes that King had previously written that you couldn't "build up the reader's interest in a character, only to kill him off", but that's exactly what he does when he kills Tad.

  And so it is.  The ending is not really about Tad, the character we've empathized with from the start, because Tad is no longer there. It's about Victor and Donna coping with parental grief. I recall reading a King intro back in the eighties by author and religious man Andrew Greely, who speaking for King fan's in general sating that "we adore King" in spite of endings like this (I didn't, at the time), and noted the "silver lining" in Cujo, namely that Vic and Donna have "lost their four-year-old" but have "found each other" at the end. Not to trivialize Vic and Donna's marriage, but I noted that silver lining myself at the time, and saw the possible implication that their getting back together was more important than Tad's life being taken from him a little disturbing. 

As for King himself, his comments regarding Tad's death have sometimes contradicted themselves over the years. Here is a quote that I recall reading possibly in  a magazine in the 80s, that I found posted in a comments section. The poster aid the interview was in 1984:

 "I was asked if I could revive him for the re-draft; at the publishing company they didn't want him to die. And I said no, that it would be a lie to say that he was alive. The movie people came along and said, 'What do you think about if the kid lived?' And I said fine, because movies are not books, and what they do doesn't bother me. I thought it would be real fun to see what happened if he did live. Even though I knew that it wasn't real. That would be make-believe. The kid really died."

And I was inclined to agree with that. The word, though, would be "canonical" rather than "real." It's all fiction of course, but in the canonical version Tad died. Even after I did finally see the movie (which didn't explore what really happened after Tad was saved, the way King did with Tad's death), I still only considered Tad a deceased child. The movie didn't do it for me anyway. But I have a book about Stephen King movies, where it says that the directors and SK both agreed to have Tad live in the movie, and one reason being that viewers/readers would have the luxury of choosing which ending the liked the most. But in the above interview King is essentially saying that viewers have no such luxury!

Tad's death came up again in a different book, I believe 80s edition of The Stephen King Companion, in which he opined that after the movie that "he was sure" Tad had probably an "even worse death" from  rabies, because he thought saliva had gotten on him or something. Now this is where I'd have to disagree. There's an even bigger contradiction going on, for one thing. He'd said previously that the movie version is make-believe anyway, so who really cares? But since King did not write the movie screenplay, he has no say in it. What happened to Tad following the end of the movie would be at the screenwriter's discretion, not King's, and it seems unlikely they would wanted him dead after he was saved. 

King did, however, write a screenplay for the film himself, just not the one that got used. And in his version, as might be expected, we do learn a little more about what happened following Tad and Donna's rescue. Tad is is found to have been suffering from childhood leukemia, explaining that he was already in a weakened state before the ordeal, though it is now in remission. It is indeed better and more fleshed out than the movie ending we got, but it seemed to me that SK was wanting to write a tragedy, but was restraining himself from doing so at the time. This was still when he was dealing with fears of something happening to his own young children at the time, and those fears kept wanting to express themselves! 

Knowing as we do now, that King would eventually incorporate all of his fiction into a single vast "multiverse", it's still possible that version of Tad did survive, and still exists somewhere out there. This screenplay, as it was written by King himself, IS canonical! 

Remember, there was a boy who looked like a somewhat older version of Tad walking down a New York street, accompanied by a woman who looked like Donna, and a dog who looked like Cujo in the film version of The Dark Tower. Yes, that was totally unlike the multi-volume series, and may not connect at all with King's multi-verse, but still...

Finally, there's a quite recent development, of King mentioning a novella, apparently a ways off from being published, entitled "Rattlesnakes", which he said was a sequel to Cujo. It involved two or three small girls falling into a snake pit and NOT surviving. SK, it seems, is back to his old, pessimistic self here, much as he was when he wrote Revival. From this, it's not clear how this ties in with Cujo. Is the spirit of Frank Dodd involved in any way? I have a theory that the entity that possessed Frank Dodd and later Cujo may have been in the service of the Crimson King, and one of his missions--apart from the pure evil joy of terrorizing and later causing the death of an innocent child--was to destroy child who might a threat. it's been said that Tad might have been slightly psychic, the same as lots of kids in King's universe and that may have explained his connection to the entity, and why it sought him out. Of course, if Tad were a potential "breaker" the CK would have wanted him captured not killed, so maybe that's not the reason after all. Tad might have been something else. But since he died, we won't know if he harbored some kind of psychic ability or not. What kind of connection, if any, "Rattlesnakes" will have to the Tadder we don't know. Tad himself won't appear, save perhaps in a flashback, for obvious reasons. Or will he? Did he end up serving the Great Ones in the Null, or what, will we find out? Donna's quote at the end of Cujo, "I keeping sensing him...feeling him, around every corner" might hint at a spiritual presence, though it probably refers only to memories. When and if any other info that we never found out when the Tadder's life was cut short is revealed, we may not have too long to wait.