PET SEMATARY
(1983)
Although it may be rightfully argued that such Richard Bachman titles as Rage (1977) and Roadwork (1981) constitute Stephen King’s darkest visions, it has to be said that the novel that the writer himself considers his bleakest and most pessimistic is Pet Sematary.
Originally written in the spring of 1979, this is the book that for several years had the reputation of being known as the “story so horrifying that he was for a time unwilling to finish it.” (So states the dust jacket copy of the hardcover first edition.) A further indication of how long King struggled with it comes from the author’s notation on the last page stating the composition of the novel occurred from “February 1979–December 1982.”
What is generally not known is that King actually did complete the novel in the summer of 1979, but found it so grim that he decided not to publish it. Even his wife, Tabitha, whom King has always used as the first reader for all his work, agreed with him that he had finally written a story that should be permanently put away in a drawer. And so it was. The fact that it was eventually published in 1983 had far more to do with a dispute with a past publisher, Doubleday & Co., than it did with a desire to squash the rumors that he had once authored a novel he himself found “too nasty” to have published.
Like so many of his early novels, Pet Sematary focuses on the lives of a
single, small family unit residing in Maine. A young doctor, Louis Creed, moves from Chicago to set up residence in the small town of Ludlow. His family consists of his lovely wife, Rachel, and two small children, five-year-old Ellie and two-year-old Gage. On the surface, life is good—Louis is to be the new head of health services for the University of Maine at nearby Orono. But the comfortable old house in which they live is set near a busy road, one often used by truckers driving their massive eighteen-wheelers. And one day Ellie’s beloved cat, Church (derived from “Winston Churchill”), is run over and killed by a speeding vehicle.
Ellie is grief-stricken, and Louis, who has never been particularly strong in discussing or practicing matters of religion or faith, is at a loss to satisfactorily comfort her in her loss. From an elderly neighbor, Jud Crandall, the doctor learns an incredible secret known only to the locals. Nearby is a “pet sematary” (as it reads on a crude sign misspelled by children) that was once an ancient Indian burial ground. It has existed there for untold centuries, and is supposedly haunted by the legendary creature known as the Wendigo. The amazing secret of the cemetery is that anything buried there does not stay dead. Whatever is buried is soon revived to some semblance of life. Louis buries the cat there, and incredibly, the pet does return—although it is a mean, zombielike incarnation of its former self.
In a situation similar to one expressed in the classic 1902 tale by W.W. Jacobs, “The Monkey’s Paw,” Louis Creed finds himself in the extraordinary circumstance of having the power—through the use of the pet cemetery—to be granted three wishes. His first is to have his daughter’s beloved pet returned to her, and it is. It is not normal, it is not friendly, but at least it is back.
Then a far greater tragedy occurs—young Gage later runs out into the same busy road and is struck and killed by a truck. Now it is the parents who cannot be consoled in their overwhelming grief. Rachel’s sister had died a lingering death from spinal meningitis when she was quite young, and she cannot bear the tragic and sudden death of her boy. Too many painful wounds have reopened, and she is nearly insane from the senseless loss of their younger child.
Half mad himself, Louis digs up the body of his dead son from the local cemetery and reburies him in the dreaded pet burial ground, hoping against hope that he can bring his son back to life. He doesn’t care what price has to be paid for the boy’s return; he only knows that he will do anything to make his family whole again. And so his second grisly wish is granted through the unholy power of the Micmac Indian burial ground.
But what returns from the pet sematary is his son in appearance only.
Gage is actually an undead, soulless monster, cursed with murderous instincts of pure evil. Using one of his father’s scalpels, the boy first brutally murders Jud Crandall, and then butchers and mutilates his own mother. Louis in turn has to destroy the loathsome creature that was once his son. (Ellie has gone to stay with her mother’s family in Chicago and is spared the entire ordeal. However, through her psychiclike nightmares she is aware of the horror befalling the rest of her family.)
But Louis has not learned from his terrible experience. Although he dimly realizes what unnatural horror had befallen his son, he insanely reasons that if he can just bury his recently deceased wife in the pet sematary quickly enough, then she will be revived more or less “normal.” However, Louis’s third and final wish doesn’t come true in quite the way he desires. In the novel’s devastating last sentence, his loving wife does return to him after being revived by the supernatural powers of the pet sematary: “‘Darling,’ it said.”
Fade out to total darkness.
Pet Sematary shares many themes prevalent in the darkest corners of the Stephen King Universe. Chief among them is that no one is truly the master of his destiny, that anyone and anything we love can be taken away from us at a moment’s notice. The only force we can depend upon in our life is the love we share with our families, and even that can be stolen away at any point. King has repeatedly stated in interviews that for him, the greatest horror one can experience in life is the sudden and tragic loss of a child.
In the early novels Carrie (1974), Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), and especially Cujo (1981), teenagers and children die violent and senseless deaths. Yet in each of them there is some faint ray of sun on the horizon that King leaves to comfort the reader. However, in Pet Sematary there is no sense of any happy ending, even though young Ellie apparently will survive to see another day. The father, mother, and son, however, remain dead—or undead. It is only mere chance that the daughter is allowed to live, and it’s extremely unlikely the remainder of her existence will be a happy or fulfilling one.
The author is also dealing here with the question of one’s faith and religion. Louis is a man who believes, as a doctor, that he is somehow above the laws of God and nature, that he can circumvent the natural order of life and death simply because he is well-educated and supremely rational. But within the Stephen King Universe, death can come at any time to anyone—for any reason. Most importantly, death can visit any of us—good or bad, young or old, beloved or stranger—for no logical reason whatsoever. Even so, life is not always worth holding onto at any cost.
Indeed, as an unheeding Louis Creed is warned by Jud Crandall, “Sometimes, dead is better.”
PET SEMATARY: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
LOUIS CREED: A thirty-five-year-old doctor, he has brought his family to Maine to better his career and their lives. A pragmatic man, the fact that he holds no strong religious beliefs enables him to find a rational meaning behind every mystery. But when he brings his daughter’s cat and then his young son back from the dead, he realizes to his everlasting misfortune that there are some mysteries that should never be explored. When he restores his murdered wife back to life, it can only be presumed that she, in turn, destroys him.
RACHEL CREED: The loving wife of Louis Creed, she is a devoted mother to her young son and daughter. She has been emotionally scarred since childhood by the experience of her sister Zelda dying a lingering death from spinal meningitis. At age eight, Rachel witnessed her sister’s agonizing demise, and has never forgotten the horror of that experience. Rachel is later slain at the hand of her own undead son, wielding the bloody scalpel he has stolen from his father’s doctor’s bag. Her husband refuses to accept her untimely passing, and brings her back using the supernatural powers of the pet cemetery. But she comes back to his forgiving arms as an “it,” not a “she.”
GAGE CREED:The toddler who is killed by a speeding truck and is then only temporarily laid to rest by his grieving family. After sending his wife and daughter to stay with her parents, Louis Creed digs up his corpse and reburies him in the dreaded pet cemetery. Gage returns from the dead as an evil thing who then butchers Jud Crandall and later his own mother. Gage is then killed a second time, this time with lethal injections administered by his own father, now gone insane.
ELLIE CREED: The five-year-old older sister of Gage Creed, she escapes the fate of her parents when she is placed in the care of her mother’s parents in Chicago. Like her father, she is cursed with psychic visions of the dead. Her current whereabouts are unknown.
VICTOR PASCOW: A young man who has the misfortune to be fatally hit by a speeding car on the first day that Louis Creed starts work at the university’s health center. He is brought to the facility near death, but before he expires he supernaturally warns Louis about the awful consequences to be reckoned with should he ever use the cursed power of the pet cemetery. Ghostly visions of him continue to haunt Louis—and later his daughter, Ellie—but to no avail in preventing further tragedy to the Creed family.
JUD CRANDALL: The elderly neighbor, born in 1900, who lives closest to the Creed home. He becomes fast friends with the Creed family, especially with Louis, who regards Jud as the wise father he had never known. (Louis’s father had died when the boy was only three.) A native of Maine who enjoys a good long beer and a good long talk, he is the man who reveals to Louis the terrible secret of the pet cemetery so that Ellie could have Church returned to her. After Gage’s death, he rightly suspects that Louis will try and bring his only son back to life, but his warning goes unheeded. Ultimately Jud pays for his sharing that forbidden knowledge at the murderous hands of little Gage.
PET SEMATARY: ADAPTATIONS
By the time King decided he would sell the film rights to Pet Sematary, his career had advanced to such a stage that he could demand in his contract that the production be shot in Maine or not be made at all. He also had the power to dictate that only his own screenplay adaptation be used. (This was the first of his novels that he would be openly credited with having adapted to the screen.) In both cases, his stipulations were carried out, and King had the further pleasure of seeing the motion picture become a moderate success at the box office when it was released in 1989.
Although directed by Mary Lambert, who had only helmed one feature previously (entitled Siesta, it was not in the horror genre), Pet Sematary remained faithful to King’s close adaptation of his original novel. (His old friend George Romero was originally slated to direct, but scheduling conflicts forced him to bow out.) Starring Dale Midkiff as Louis Creed and Denise Crosby as his wife, Rachel, the most notable bit of casting was Fred Gwynne in the role of Jud. Gwynne delivers a wonderful performance that
captures the essence of a Stephen King character better than almost anyone who has come before or since. Unflinchingly gory and shocking, the 102-minute picture is in many ways as dark and bleak as its source material. Unlike the radical change in ending he had allowed in the movie version of Cujo in 1983, King knew that his growing legion of fans could deal now with a totally downbeat ending.
The success of Pet Sematary at the box office led to a totally unnecessary sequel being released in 1992. Not too surprisingly, it was called Pet Sematary 2 and starred Edward Furlong and Anthony Edwards. (It is a standard clause in the purchasing of motion picture rights for a story or a novel that the producers also retain the rights to any possible sequel. This explains how, without King’s desire or participation, there have also been screen sequels—often direct to video—to ’Salem’s Lot, and multiple low-budget follow-ups to the features based on the stories Sometimes They Come Back and Children of the Corn.) Although capably directed by the same director as the original, Mary Lambert, there is unfortunately little to recommend here, even for King completists.
PET SEMATARY: TRIVIA
• Jud Crandall mentions in passing a tale of a Maine tragedy in which four people were savagely killed by a rabid dog. That story was, of course, fully related in Cujo.
• At one point, driving through southern Maine to try to return home, Rachel Creed reads a group of road signs. Several towns are listed, including one named Jerusalem’s Lot. She thinks to herself that it is not a pleasant name, although she has no idea of the legends surrounding the accursed town as related in ’Salem’s Lot.
• In the movie adaptation, Stephen King has a cameo role as a minister.
• In the television adaptation of The Shining, Stephen King appears in a cameo as band leader Gage Creed.
• In Insomnia, readers are told that the little bald doctor Atropos keeps one of Gage Creed’s sneakers in his lair as a trophy.