Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary is a 1983 novel by Stephen King. It was adapted into a film in 1989 and a second film adaptation is scheduled to be released in April 2019. The book takes place in semi-rural Ludlow, Maine, a small town that Chicago doctor, Louis Creed, has just moved to with his family. Dr. Creed has taken a job at the university and moved his family against the wishes of his wife’s parents, with whom he does not get along. Trouble begins the moment the Creed family steps onto their new property, as Louis’s daughter, Ellie, falls off a swing and scrapes her knee and the Creeds’ son, Gage, gets stung by a bee. An elderly neighbor, Jud, comes to help, and he and Louis become fast friends, with Louis viewing Jud as a surrogate father. Jud warns about the dangerous road they live on and shows the Creed family the pet cemetery on their new land; the family’s proximity to death makes Louis’s wife, Rachel, uncomfortable, as she was traumatized as a child by the violent death of her sister, Zelda, from spinal meningitis.

Death follows Louis like a shadow: the first week at his new job, Louis holds a university student, Victor Pascow, as he dies after getting hit by a car. Louis then dreams that Victor leads him to the pet cemetery and warns him not to go beyond the wooden deadfall. Even though Louis wakes up covered in dirt, he attempts to dismiss the dream as a case of somnambulism. On Halloween, Jud’s wife, Norma, almost dies of a heart attack but Louis is able to save her. Louis’s family goes back to Chicago for Thanksgiving, but Louis stays in town. When Ellie’s cat, Church, gets run over by a truck, Jud takes Louis to the MicMac burial ground behind the pet cemetery to bury the cat. Church comes back the next day but Louis notices that the cat has changed and become obsessed with eviscerating small animals. Louis keeps this a secret from his family, but they are all innately disgusted by Church and don’t want to be around him. A few months later, Norma dies, seemingly of natural causes.

A few months after that, Gage is run over by a truck on the road, and Louis and his family are destroyed. Jud realizes that Louis plans to use the MicMac burial ground to bring Gage back, and tries to prevent Louis from pursuing this plan, explaining that people have tried before and they always come back wrong, as though they are possessed by a demon. Louis ignores Jud’s warning and sends Rachel and Ellie to Chicago so that he can dig up Gage’s body and rebury it on MicMac land, but Rachel senses something is wrong and tries to come back to Ludlow to stop Louis, even though she does not know what Louis’s plans are. However, Rachel arrives too late, and a possessed Gage ends up murdering her and Jud. Louis kills Church with a morphine injection and then, after finding the bodies of both Jud and Rachel in Jud’s house, kills Gage the same way. Louis burns down Jud’s house but takes Rachel’s corpse to the MicMac burial ground, believing that this time will be different because he inters her immediately. In the final scene, Rachel comes up behind Louis and touches him with a cold hand.

The book is divided into three sections, all of which occur within the Ludlow setting except for Rachel’s harried attempt to get back to her husband at the end of Part 2. The first section comprises Louis’s introduction to the pet cemetery and the resurrection of Church. The second section comprises the aftermath of Gage’s death, including Louis’s decision to reanimate Gage as well as Rachel’s desperate attempt to prevent her husband from accomplishing this. In the final section, Louis must confront the decisions he has made that have killed both his best friend and his wife, although the author indicates he makes the same mistake again with his wife.

The novel itself represents a kind of reinterpretation of “The Monkey’s Paw,” a short story written by W.W. Jacobs in 1902. In fact, King himself references the monkey’s paw multiple times in the novel infairly blatant authorial winks to the audience. The most prevalent theme of the novel is dead is better. In typical King fashion, the author maintains that the horrors not readily apparent but that lie dormant within our own subconscious are worse than the reality of grief, no matter how bitter the tragedy may feel. In essence, King presents a kind of thematic flipside to the old colloquialism that the grass is always greener on the other side: sometimes, that grass has terrifying dead bodies in it that will destroy everything you love. This assertion may seem rather glib, but such is the nature of the book itself, which imposes a strange and ultimately eerie, childlike cast to the specter of death, which is frequently referred to in nearly infantile terms. This childlike language of death of course corresponds to Louis’s infant son becoming the embodiment and instrument of death itself in the final section.

The book is written mostly from the limited perspective of Louis Creed: although it is written in the third person, the reader rarely knows anything beyond Creed’s own thoughts. However, in the second section, the reader does catch glimpses of Rachel and Jud’s thoughts, which mostly serve to increase the narrative tension.