Pet Sematary
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This article is about Stephen King's horror novel. For other meanings, see Pet cemetery.
Pet Sematary (1983) is a novel by Stephen King. The novel explores the issues of the permanence of death, and whether it is something to be accepted or fought. By the author's own reference, the story line owes something to The Monkey's Paw, a folk tale best known from a version written by W.W. Jacobs. King's novel goes a step beyond the folk tale in considering what would happen if the possessor of the paw's power failed to realize his error after the second wish.
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Plot
Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago, is appointed director of the University of Maine's campus health service. He moves to a large house near the small town of Ludlow with his wife Rachel, their two young children, Ellie and Gage, and their cat, Church. From the moment they arrive, the family runs into trouble: Ellie hurts her knee after falling off a swing, and Gage is stung by a bee. Luckily their new neighbour, an elderly man named Jud Crandall, comes to help. He warns Louis and Rachel about the highway that runs past their house; it is constantly used by big trucks.
Jud and Louis quickly become close friends. Since Louis's real father died when he was three, he sees Jud as a surrogate father. A few weeks after the Creeds move in, Jud puts the friendship on the line when he takes the family on a walk in the woods behind their home. A well-tended path leads to a "pet sematary" where the children of the town bury their deceased animals. This provokes a heated argument between Louis and Rachel several days later. Rachel disapproves of discussing death and she worries about how Ellie may be affected by what she saw at the "sematary". (It is explained that Rachel was traumatised by the early death of her sister, Zelda, from spinal meningitis — an issue which is brought up several times in flashbacks.)
Louis himself has a traumatic experience during the first week of classes when Victor Pascow, a student who has been fatally injured in an automobile accident, addresses his dying words to Louis personally, even though the two men are strangers. On the night following Pascow's death, Louis experiences what he believes is a very vivid dream in which he meets Pascow, who leads him to the "sematary" and warns Louis to not "go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to." Louis wakes up in bed the next morning convinced it was, in fact, a dream — until he finds his feet and the bedsheets covered with dirt and pine needles. Nevertheless Louis dismisses the dream as the product of the stress he experienced during Pascow's death, coupled with his wife's lingering anxieties about the subject of death.
Louis is forced to confront the subject of death at Halloween, when Jud's wife, Norma, suffers a near-fatal heart attack. Thanks to Louis's prompt attention, Norma makes a quick recovery. Jud is grateful for Louis's help and decides to repay him when Church is run over outside his home at Thanksgiving. Rachel and the kids are visitng Rachel's parents in Chicago, but Louis frets over breaking the bad news to Ellie. Symphatizing with Louis, Jud takes him to the pet cemetery, supposedly to bury Church. But instead of stopping there, Jud leads Louis further on a frightening journey to "the real cemetery": an ancient burial ground that was once used by the Micmac Indians. There Louis buries the cat on Jud's instruction, with Jud saying that animals buried there have come back to life.
Not really believing, Louis thinks that the subject is finished until, the next day, the cat returns home. But it is obvious that Church is not the same as before. For one thing, while he was vibrant and lively before, he now acts ornery and "a little dead", in Louis's words. Jud confirms that this condition is the rule, rather than the exception, for animals who have been resurrected in this fashion.
Louis is deeply disturbed by Church's resurrection and begins to wish that he had never done it. Tragically, Gage is run over by a speeding truck several months later, even though Louis very nearly manages to prevent the accident. Overcome with despair, Louis considers bringing his son back to life with the help of the burial ground. Jud, guessing what Louis is planning, attempts to dissuade him by telling him the gruesome story of the last person who was resurrected by the burial ground. Jud concludes that "the place has a power" and that this power caused Gage's death because Jud introduced Louis to it.
Despite this, and his own reservations about his idea, Louis's grief and guilt spur him to carry out his plan — with horrifying consequences for him and his loved ones.
Trivia
- King was inspired to write this novel while living at a house in Orrington in the late 1970s. There was a cemetery for dead animals behind the house, and the children who maintained the graveyard had named it "Pet Sematary". Not long after King's family had moved in, his daughter Naomi lost her cat out on the highway. She threw a tantrum after the cat's burial that was transcribed word-for-word into the book. A few weeks later King's youngest son got close to the road and was almost hit by a truck.
- After reading the novel for the first time, King and his wife Tabitha were so disturbed by its story line that King left it unpublished for several years.
- In common with other King novels, the effects of family and childhood experience on adults is a central theme, as is the way the human mind rationalizes seemingly impossible events.
ISBN numbers
- ISBN 0385182449 (hardcover, 1983)
- ISBN 0451150244 (paperback, 1984)
- ISBN 0450057690 (hardcover, 1985)
- ISBN 0671582275 (audio, 1998)
- ISBN 0743412273 (mass market paperback, 2001)
- ISBN 0743412281 (paperback, 2002)
- ISBN 0613592476 (library binding, 2003)
The film
Pet Sematary was made into a movie in 1989, starring Dale Midkiff as Louis, Fred Gwynne as Jud, Denise Crosby as Rachel. A man, Andrew Hubatsek, was chosen for Zelda's role because the filmmakers could not find a woman bony enough to portray the terminally-ill girl 3 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098084/trivia). This film was the first adaptation of a Stephen King novel to include his name in its title.
The movie is more faithful to the story line and structure than is common for novel-to-movie adaptations in the horror genre. Even so, several plot elements — such as Louis's troubled relationship with his in-laws and his sorrow after Gage's death — were either combined, truncated or dropped due to the limitations of a movie-length script.
External links
- Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King's Pet Sematary (http://stephen-king.net/reviews/review.asp?id=%7B488C3FE9-3287-434C-81F6-56BC71FA58ED%7D) Essay that examines whether Pet Sematary can be described as a Gothic novel
- Love and Death in Stephen King's Pet Sematary (http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/essays/petsem.htm) An analysis of Louis's motives for using the Micmac burial ground, and Jud's motives for telling Louis about it