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Pet Sematary

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This article is about Stephen King's horror novel. For the film adaptation, see Pet Sematary (film). For other meanings, see Pet cemetery.
Pet Sematary
File:Front cover of 'Pet Sematary'.PNG
AuthorStephen King
Cover artistLinda Fennimore
LanguageEnglish
GenreHorror novel
PublisherDoubleday
Publication date
1983
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages416 pp
ISBNISBN 0-385-18244-9 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character

Pet Sematary (1983) is a novel by Stephen King. 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.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler 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 Ellie's cat, Winston Churchill (Church for short). 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. Fortunately their new neighbor, 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 from a nearby chemical processing plant.

Jud and Louis quickly become close friends. Since Louis's father died when he was three, his relationship with Jud takes on a father-son dimension. 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 cemetery (misspelled "sematary") where the children of the town bury their deceased animals. This provokes a heated argument between Louis and Rachel the next day. Rachel disapproves of discussing death and she worries about how Ellie may be affected by what she saw at the "sematary". (It is explained later that Rachel was traumatised by the early death of her sister, Zelda, from spinal meningitis.)

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 refers specifically to the "deadfall," a dangerous pile of tree limbs that form a barrier at the back of the cemetery 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 only a dream, until he discovers his feet and the bedsheets covered with dirt and pine needles. Louis still 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 after the Creeds' cat Church is run over outside his home at Thanksgiving. Rachel and the kids are visiting Rachel's parents in Chicago, but Louis frets over breaking the bad news to Ellie. Sympathizing with Louis, Jud takes him to the pet cemetery, supposedly to bury Church. Instead of stopping there, Jud leads Louis farther on a frightening journey past the deadfall at the rear of the Pet Sematary to "the real cemetery": an ancient burial ground that was once used by the local Micmac Native Americans. 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 afternoon, when the cat returns home, however, it is obvious that Church is not the same as before. While he used to be vibrant and lively, he now acts ornery and "a little dead", in Louis' words. Church instinctually hunts for mice and birds much more often, but he rips them apart without eating them. The cat also smells so bad that Ellie no longer wants him in her room at night. 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. Overcome with despair, Louis considers bringing his son back to life with the power 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 stating "dead is better". 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. His wife has traveled to Chicago with their daughter to visit her parents. Louis steals his son's body from his grave (nearly being discovered by the police patrolling the streets around the cemetery) and hikes to the Micmac site. Along the trail the Wendigo monster of the forest nearly frightens him away, but Louis' own determination keeps him moving.

The burial act in the woods has horrifying consequences for him and his loved ones. Gage returns from the dead as a monstrous, demonic shadow of his former self, able to talk like an adult. He first taunts Jud about his wife cheating on him with his friends then kills Jud with one of Louis's surgical scalpels then rips out his throat with his teeth, and then kills his mother, who has returned to their home, worried that Louis is in danger. Louis confronts his son and sends him back to the grave with a lethal injection of drugs from his medical supply stock (after giving a lethal injection to Church.) We learn, however, that he is mentally coming apart and still has not learned from his mistakes; after burning the Crandall house down, he returns to the burial ground with his wife's corpse. That night, Louis is playing solitaire when he feels a cold hand fall upon his shoulder and hears the voice of Rachel cooing (though sounding gravelly and hideous) "Darling..."

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Main article: Pet Sematary (film)

Pet Sematary was made into a film in 1989 and directed by Mary Lambert, starring Dale Midkiff as Louis, Fred Gwynne as Jud, Denise Crosby as Rachel and Miko Hughes as Gage. 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.[1]

There was also a sequel, Pet Sematary II, which met with less financial success.

On IMDB, it states there will be a remake released in 2008. There have been several rumours of George Clooney as Louis Creed.

Trivia

  • King was inspired to write the 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, Smuckey, out on the highway. She threw a tantrum after the cat's burial, which 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.
  • The novel takes place in Ludlow, Maine, a small town in Aroostook County[2]; a location King would later use forThe Dark Half
  • At one point in the book, Steve calls Louis and invites him to play racquetball. When Louis declines, Steve says "Come on! All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, you know!" (This is an in-joke referencing The Shining.)
  • The short story, The Monkey's Paw, which partly inspired the theme and structure of the novel is mentioned in the novel. The night before Gage is to be buried, Louis hears a knock on his door. The visitor is in fact Jud, but Louis is for a moment reminded of the story.
  • The novel makes numerous references to "Oz the Gweat and Tewwible," a play on "Oz the Great and Terrible," who was Zelda Goldman's favorite storybook character.
  • Ellie (and possibly even Louis, since it is unknown what became of him after Rachel's reanimated corpse returned) is the only survivor in the Creed family
  • Gage Creed's accident is mentioned in King's novel Insomnia
  • At another point in the book, Jud Crandall explains the grave of a racoon in the pet cemetery, as when it was buried, it was perfectly legal to keep wild animals without rabies shots, before a rabid Saint Bernard went crazy in Castle Rock (a reference to events in King's novel, Cujo).
  • After reading the novel through for the first time, King and his wife Tabitha were so disturbed by the storyline that King left it unpublished for several years. Stephen King considers it the most frightening novel he has ever written.
  • The punk rock band The Ramones is mentioned several times throughout the novel. They wrote a song called "Pet Sematary" based on this novel which was used in the soundtrack of the film. This song was nominated for a Razzie Award for "Worst Original Song" in 1989. The German industrial metal band Rammstein later did a cover version of the song with The Ramones' approval.
  • Shortly after this Rachel drives by a town called Pittsfield. Pittsfield is mentioned in King's novel Dreamcatcher as the town that the student Jonesy catches cheating comes from.
  • Another strong influence upon the writing of Pet Sematary is the Native American myth of the Wendigo, a terrible and fascinating creature of the forest, spawning, among other things, cannibalism.
  • In the TOKYOPOP manga I Luv Halloween, the main characters attempt to bury a victim in a burial ground very similar to the Pet Sematary
  • The Canadian comedy troupe "The Gentlemen", wrote a parody based upon the novel and its subsequent film and sequel entitled Kibbles and Kids. The sketch revolves around a dog food ad for the owners of any dogs buried in the Micmac ground.
  • The Cereal that Gage Creed ate (Coacoa Bears) was a cereal made by the Sharp company in Cujo.

Editions

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