‘Or option two.’

‘Two is that he can defend himself. As with the feral-dog fantasy, he can dish out Tae Kwon Do with extreme prejudice, roundhousing the retriever or else grabbing its skull and twisting its neck. The only problem is that if he does this, then he’s left standing there with a limp ragdoll in his hands, holding this dead dog, and when he looks up across the street, whom should he see but the little old lady in the tennis outfit and sun visor? Watching on in horror. The tears streaming down her grief-reddened face. Even worse in this respect would be if he didn’t kill the dog, at least not cleanly. If instead it somehow managed to sink its teeth into his forearm, such that MacDougall had to kneel down over the beast on the sidewalk and pound its head into the ground with his fist, the way UFC dudes do on TV, trying to pry its jaws apart. And the whole time the little old lady watching on and weeping, calling out her dying dog’s name while he brains it.’

‘The name!’

‘Exactly—this is what horrifies MacDougall above all. The fact that as this mankiller is trying to rip into his throat, some woman is calling, “Duke! Duuuuke!” Its name is Duke! It wants to tear him to pieces, and its name is Duke. Or its name was Duke—that’s precisely what’s so horrible. The little old lady thinks that this is still her dog, that she can call out “Duke” and that it will answer. But in reality Duke has left “Duke” far behind: it has already gone feral, retreated into some nameless part of itself. The woman can shout “Duke!” all day long and receive no response. It doesn’t know Duke from Adam. MacDougall and the dog are alone now, stranded on the nameless side of its mind.’

‘This being the philosophical dimension of his fear in the fantasy.’

‘That there is something pre-symbolic inside the dog. Some primordial core. Like a little black tailbone, Tefloned against interpellation: the name rolls right off it. You can domesticate your dog, train it as a puppy and give it a name, but somewhere deep inside there will always be this wild residuum. The part of your dog that’s not your dog. The past life—the species memory—that’s still preserved inside it. Hence the horror of rabies: rabies is what uncages that namelessness.’

‘Cujo stops being Cujo the moment the bat bites him.’

‘This detail would not have escaped MacDougall’s attention, no. He would invite us to consider the prominence of the dog’s name in the movie. How people keep calling “Cujo!” How the movie’s even called Cujo. The whole point is that the dog has a name. It’s not a wild dog that’s terrorizing people, it’s somebody’s pet. That’s gone and betrayed its name. Which is a thousand times more frightening, from MacDougall’s point of view. Now other monsters, they don’t even need names. If it’s a shark movie, the title’s just the most salient body part: jaws—what’s going to bite you. If it’s subterranean sandworms, the title’s just their calling card, their like signature seismological tocsin: tremors—what warns you they’re coming. Naturally we refer to the shark as Jaws and the worms as Tremors, colloquially, but these aren’t names the way Cujo’s a name. What’s terrifying about Cujo is precisely that he’s called Cujo. Or that he used to be. Or so MacDougall would say, if he were sitting here with us tonight.’