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Park, Jai Young. “A Mortal Fight with Madness: Reading Desire in Cuju.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 40.1 (2014): 63-81. This essay attempts to construe Stephen King’s Cuju as a text of desire with various desire theories. Many thinkers have attempted to clarify the perception of desire. For example, Hegel contends that people experience various stages like “consumption” and “recognition” in order to resolve desire. Freud asserts that (sexual) desire is engendered from an uncompromising gap between “the affectionate” of childhood, who is an idealistic person that the child loves, and “the sensual,” the target of his/her physical desire. And Lacan claims that desire is substantiated in the loss of “completeness” in the chasm between the Imaginary Order and the Symbolic Order. Employing those philosophical thoughts, this essay scrutinizes the characters of Cuju and dissects the significance of their psychic changes while they are dealing with desire. It ponders on the implication of madness in relation with aberrational desire. It also explicates the historical connotation of the name Cujo and attempts to expose the substantiation of desire embedded in the myth of killer Dodd, Tad’s monster dreams, Donna’s infidelity, and the allegorization of Cujo. (Chonbuk National University)