YJ and Cujo (bit of a pretentious comp lit post, feel free to scroll on by <3)

Hear me out, I think Stephen King's novel Cujo (1981) is a great comparison for the show's agnosticism re supernatural elements.

Spoilers for Cujo (and content warning for scary dogs, isolated and trapped scenario)

In the story of Cujo, a constellation of awful events conspire to leave a mother and her young boy trapped in a broken down car during a deadly heatwave with a rabid Saint Bernard as their warden. It might sound a little silly but I promise it's one of King's most harrowing books, and that's saying something.

It's 1980 so there are no cell phones. They can't leave the car or the dog will tear them to shreds. The heat is dangerous even in the open, but they're stuck in a pre-1980 car, making it a literal oven. It's broken down so the air conditioning won't work. They can't open the windows more than a crack or the dog will get in.

It's a truly nightmarish scenario and this woman is trapped like this with her slowly dying-of-dehydration-and-heatstroke son for almost 72 hours.

There are a lot of factors in this coming to be. The dog is recently rabid but not yet dead (rabies has a 100% fatality rate), the dog's family is away, the woman's husband is taking time apart bc their marriage is breaking down.

But.

But.

Here is the closing passage of the first chapter of Cujo, which talks about how years earlier in the same town, Castle Rock, "a monster" came in the form of a killer named Frank Dodd:

"The monster was gone, the monster was dead. Frank Dodd moldered inside his coffin. Except that the monster never dies. Werewolf, vampire, ghoul, unnameable creature from the wastes. The monster never dies. It came to Castle Rock again in the summer of 1980."

This undercurrent of Cujo (the rabid Saint Bernard) as the incarnation of some unkillable monster, "the apotheosis of monsters," as King wrote in IT (1985), is never made explicit in the text. It can be read as a coy metaphor for the "monstrous" nature of trauma and suffering. It could also be read as a malevolent substratal presence, or entity.

The staggering amount of cruel coincidence that transpires to cause Donna Trenton, the woman in the car, her hellish summer weekend could be just that--coincidence--or it could be the universe playing a particularly nasty practical joke on her, or it could be the work of some supernatural force.

For Donna, it's all the same. For Donna, it's all an infernal three days of terror and thirst; for the Yellowjackets, it's all a freezing nineteen months of horror and hunger.

"There was no It, you know that, right? It was just Us.

What's the difference?"