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Pet Sematary
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...sometimes, dead is better...
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Pet Sematary
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Early publicity for Pet Sematary stated that the novel, hich King had written but not allowed to be released, was his scariest novel ever. King and his wife, Tabitha, agreed that this was no mere hyperbole. In a Fangoria interview conducted around the time of Pet Sematary's release, King said that he showed the manuscript to his wife, and she couldn't finish it. "It was too ... effective." Eventually, in 1983, the novel did see print. Was it as horrifying, as gruesome, as dark as all the hype purported it to be?
Thankfully, yes. This book is a runner-up for King's flat-on scariest novel (losing only marginally to The Shining), and it really is his darkest. It is a book about loss, and greif, and, simply put, death. Death, the great unknown; death, the all-encroaching. But as the characters of Pet Sematary discover, there are things worse than death.
Louis Creed is a doctor who moves his family to Ludlow, Maine from Chicago because of a job he accepted as an MD at the University of Maine at Orono. His family (Rachel, his wife, Ellie, his daughter, and Gage, his baby son) are generally happy about the move, thought they soon will come to have reservations. both children are hurt on the first day of the move. Louis makes friends with an elderly man across the road named Jud Crandall, who promises (also on that first day) to show them where the path behind their house leads. It is with these three seemingly innocuous events that the spiral in toward darkness begins.
The path behind the house ends up in a place known to the locals as the Pet Sematary (the misspelling courtesy of a hand-printed board above the entrance, made by children). It is a graveyard for children's pets, most lost to the Interstate Road which seperates the Crandall's and the Creeds' homes. The gravestones are set in a spiraling pattern, an image which will occur again and again throughout the novel. Later on, Ellie has questions about death, terrified that her cat, Church, will ahve to go to the Pet Sematary. Louis answers her honestly, and later, Rachel and he have an argument. She was badly shaken by the Sematary, and is uncomfortable with the idea of deth in general. We learn later that at the age of eight, she witnessed her sister Zelda die of spinal meningitis, an incident which scarred her for life. Her recollection is one of the novel's most harrowing, once again illustarting the novel's obsessive link between death and children. It only gets grimmer from here.
Later events happen in rapid succession: Louis's first day as a university MD is a horror. A man named Victor Pascow is run over by a car. Before he dies (alone with Louis), he gives Creed an ominous message warning him about the Pet Sematary and the grounds beyond. During Thanksgiving vacation, while his family is away, the cat Church is killed by a truck. Jud offers to help Louis, and brings him to the Pet Sematary. Then, he leads him further.
They arrive at the Micmac Indian burial grounds. Jud has Louis bury Church and build a stone cairn over the grave. Slowly, Louis realizes the cairns are arranged in a spiral, like the markers at the Pet Sematary. Later, when Louis is home alone, Church returns.
The burial grounds infuse life into the dead, but it has greater powers as well. It is a dark and secret place, a place which actually controlls matters of life, death, and obsession. After Church the cat returns (acting sluggish and smelling of the grave), the novel becomes saturated with death and pain.
Their little boy Gage dies, run over on the same road Church had been. Louis, becoming more and more obsessed with the memory of the burial grounds, decides to bring him back to life. Against Jud's stern warnings, he unearths his son (drawing an absent spiral in the dirt) and reinters him at the burial ground. Gage comes back, posessed by the dark spirit of the Micmac ground and of death. He kills Jud and Rachel before Louis can kill him again. The spiral tightens, Louis goes mad. Trying one more time for salvation, he buries Rachel at the grounds. The very last line of the novel encompasses her return (and the novel's theme), and is King's most terrifying sentance ever:
"'Darling,' it said."
Pet Sematary is a dark, unforgiving novel dealing with the very nature of death and greif. It never gives up, just hacks away at sanity and rationality until nothing is left. In the world of Pet Sematary, death begets death, lunacy begets lunacy, and the examination of terror is an excersize in darkness, in which no light can be seen.
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Pet Sematary has always been a special novel to me. It was the last time I saw the movie before reading the book (my Dad took my brother Jason and I to see the film when I was twelve and Jason eight; Jason freaked out at the sight of Pascow, so Dad and he went to see another movie, leaving me alone. In a dark theater. Watching Pet Sematary). When I told my Dad how much I loved it, he bought me the novel, making it the first King book bought especially for me (ones I had were hand-me-downs from my Uncle Doug.) I first read it when I was thirteen, in the attic of my Grandparents' cabin, in the middle of a rainstorm. Gave myself nightmares for weeks.
But it also confirmed my love for King, and it taught me about death. When you're that young, you don't know much except for what your parents tell you. The novel's frank dealings with death and the circumstances beyond it helped me compe with a number of real-life deaths I've had to handle. As with It , and many of the earlier novels, King told me the truth, and I'm indebted to him for that. When you're a kid, no one tells you the truth about things. He did. Long live King.
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I just re-watched the Mary Lambert-directed Pet Sematary last night so I could comment on it here. When I first saw it, I was tremendously impressed. This late veiwing, however, left me wanting more. Watching it in close proximity with a reading of the book just adds to the movie's detriment. The acting is fairly wooden (especially Dale Midkiff's), the little girl annoys the hell out of me, and Denise Crosby looks nothing like the Rachel in the book. Still, two very effective scenes are worth the price of admission: Rachel's story of her sister's death and the fight at Gage's funeral. The second on is more disturbing than scary, but left an indelible impression on me. So, give it a try. You might like it.
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