Pet Sematary

“Louis laughed, thinking how funny—funny and scary—it was the way that wives could read their husbands’ minds after a while.”

Rachel knows her husband, and therefore knows that he does not want to end up diagnosing Norma’s illness. To Louis, it seems strange that Rachel is able to so clearly understand his own thoughts, as Rachel’s thoughts often remain a mystery to him. This quotation serves to foreshadow the events in the second half of the book, wherein Rachel instinctively knows that Louis is going to do something terrible after he sends her away under the premise of mourning Gage’s death. Because Louis does not understand other people, Rachel’s knowledge of his own thoughts and her ability to foretell his actions seems strange to him.

“You learn to accept, or you ended up in a small room writing letters home with Crayolas.”

Louis reflects on Norma’s arthritis, saying that people who are sick live in a dichotomy: they can either accept the sickness and move on with their lives, or they can devolve into madness. In this way, Louis constructs the way in which people deal with grief and mortality as being dichotomous. However, Louis also indicates how close to madness people are at any point in time. In reality, it is very rare for people to be well-adapted to tragedy, hence the idea of tragedy itself. In fact, being able to deal with tragedy, especially concerning death, and easily moving on, might in fact indicate a kind of dearth of emotional wellness. Humans are not well-adapted to dealing with tragedy, and so are potentially always on the brink of madness. The entire novel, it seems, may consist of one man’s devolution into madness wherein Louis is unable to deal with the tragedy that befalls his family. Further, every time he attempts to make the situation better, he only ends up making it worse.

“Rachel liked her, and they had sealed their friendship by exchanging recipes the way small boys trade baseball cards, beginning with Norma Crandall’s deep-dish apple pie for Rachel’s beef stroganoff. Norma was taken with both of the Creed children—particularly with Ellie, who, she said, was going to be ‘an old-time beauty.’”

Louis likens his wife’s relationship with Norma Crandall to that between two children, demonstrating the patronizing and pejorative way in which he conceptualizes women. He views the trading of baseball cards and/or recipes as silly, something childish that only lesser individuals—such as children or women—take part in. In contrast, Louis does not talk about his relationship with Jud is these terms; rather, he speaks of the trading of stories as the communication of experiences that indicates a deeper bond than the one between Rachel and Norma. This line of thinking is, of course, sexist in nature and also alludes to the patriarchal belief that women are shallow and lack the emotional depth of men, an idea which is both problematic and paradoxical as women are alleged by these same gender norms to be the more emotional creatures.

Further, Louis uses the patronizing analogy of boys trading baseball cards specifically because that is something he has experienced. Louis is completely unable to understand experiences different from his own, and therefore uses what he knows as a method to subjugate other people’s experiences. Essentially, Louis seems to lack empathy.

“He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability […] Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.” 

Louis tries to comfort his daughter when she learns of the reality of death. Death as a concept is vague for a child, but when Ellie comes face to face with the reality of the pet cemetery, she cannot look away or close her eyes. King uses sensory language in order to communicate the tangible nature of death: death connotes real bones and bodies that no longer possess life, things that can be touched and felt. He then uses slippage in language in order to evoke the grief and other feelings that arise as a result of contemplation on death. The language slips between the tangible and the emotional, demonstrating the connection between these two aspects of human experience.

“As a doctor he knew a lot of things, and while the fact that death was just as natural as childbirth might be the greatest of them, the fact that you don’t monkey with a wound that has finally started to heal was far from the least of them.”

As a character, Louis is very comfortable—one might even call it arrogant—in his knowledge of things. He relies heavily on this knowledge, although he does not seem to understand the thin line that separates knowledge—that is, absolute truth—from belief. Louis knows that death is absolutely natural, and yet, later, he will see that death can also be entirely unnatural as well, as well as subverted.

Similarly, Rachel believes that death is unnatural; therefore, the line between Rachel’s belief and Louis’s knowledge of death remains more a question of semantics than anything else. Louis categorizes her belief as such, separating it from his knowledge. However, the audience learns that Louis does not have first-hand knowledge of death; that is, he has never witnessed the death of someone close to him, even if he likely worked on cadavers in medical school. Without this experience, the audience questions whether Louis can remain firm in his knowledge or whether this knowledge isn’t actually more of a belief.

“It’s a dream, he thought, and it was only in his relief that he realized he had been frightened after all. The dead do not return; it is physiologically impossible.” 

Louis is a hyper-rational as a person, and so he convinces himself that the reappearance of Victor must be part of his dream. He uses the excuse of a dream in order to blind himself to the truth: that the dead are walking among him. In this way, Louis is able to lie to himself, protecting himself from feeling the full consequences of his action. We see this same behavior later when Louis reburies Gage in the MicMac ground: he convinces himself that Gage will be fine when he is brought back to life, even though Louis knows deep in his subconscious that this cannot be true. Louis uses the excuse of dreams to blind himself to the harshness of reality, as though dreams can be used as a mechanism of escape.

“They walked down the far side of the wooded hill. The path curved in lazy S-shapes between the trees and then plunged into the underbrush. No boots now. The ground dissolved into cold jelly under his feet, grabbing and holding, letting go only reluctantly. There were ugly sucking noises. He could feel the mud oozing between his toes, trying to separate them.”

When Victor takes Louis to the pet cemetery, the setting shifts from idyll to a place with sinister, grasping motives. Instead of the gorgeous scenery that Louis witnessed when he made the trek with Jud, the land becomes something hungry to take. Merely walking takes effort, as Louis is forced to rend his feet free from the mud’s grasp. The land has turned from something beautiful to something ugly, the path plunging deep into a kind of hell, or possibly the limbo between the real world and hell. The audience gets the sense that Louis is crossing a barrier between one world and the next, and it seems as though the land is attempting to prevent him from doing this, or alternately, exerting its power over Louis as he crosses over it.

“Looking at Church made Louis feel sad. It was ridiculous, but that didn’t change the emotion. No more did he walk like a gunslinger; now his walk was the slow, careful walk of a convalescent […] Perhaps it was ultimately for the better that he had changed. Neither Rachel nor Ellie seemed to notice.”

After Church gets neutered, Louis realizes that he no longer possesses the same devil-may-care attitude that Louis so enjoyed. Here, Louis relates masculinity exclusively to violence, both of which he seems to believe are inherently tied to testicles. In this way, the author constructs masculinity in a way that relies heavily on the hetero binary of gender norms, conflating the cat’s own self-conception as being placed within social mores. Louis pities the cat because he feels as though Church has lost an aspect of his personality, as though biology—and, more specifically, anatomy—were somehow tied to personality. Louis is the only person in the family who notices this change, primarily because he is the only other male within his family who is not an infant.

“Your family’s supposed to be different, he thought now. Church wasn’t supposed to get killed because he was inside the magic circle of the family […] doctors compartmentalized just as cheerfully and blindly as anyone else […] You could stand up in front of a medical colloquium and cite leukemia figures in children until you were blue in the face and still not believe it if one of your own kids got a call of the Bone-Phone. My kid? My kid’s cat, even? Doctor, you must be joking.”

Louis reflects on the exceptionalism most feel in regard to their own family. It seems that in order to get through life, people convince themselves that their lives cannot be touched by death; they are therefore surprised to learn that they are not, in fact, exceptional—that they too must die, as must the people they love. King implies here that death exists as the great equalizer; it touches all people. Louis suggests that even doctors, who often encounter death fairly regularly, are not exempt from this theory of exceptionalism. Louis can hardly believe it when his daughter’s cat, Church, is subject to the same rules as every other living thing. However, the way in which Louis talks about this feeling of familial exceptionalism is interesting, mainly because it relies on the family as being part of a “magic circle.” Circles arise as symbols throughout the novel, often indicating some sort of ancient power. Here, Louis suggests that the idea of a circular safety net for the family exists as a kind of ancient power. As the metaphorical family circle breaks down, we see circles switch association and become linked with death.

“One foot stumbled, and he raked a gloved hand along the rock wall to his left for balance. The wall felt old, chipped and channeled and wrinkled. Like dry skin that’s almost worn out, he thought.”

King personifies aspects of the land: the rocks become the land’s skin, and the wind mimics its breath, moving in and out. Despite prizing his rationality, Louis notices this living quality that the earth possesses, although these thoughts come to him unbidden, as though from his subconscious. The worn nature of these rocks also indicates the presence of many other sets of human hands before him, possibly hands that have shaped this wall, giving parts of their skin as sacrifice to the land.

“‘The MicMacs believed this hill was a magic place […] this whole forest, from the swamp on north and east was magic. They made this place, and they buried their dead here, away from everything else. Other tribes steered clear of it […] Later on, not even the MicMacs themselves would come here. One of them claimed he saw a Wendigo here and that the ground had gone sour […] it’s a dangerous place.’”

Jud explains the origins of the MicMac burial ground after helping Louis rebury Church. The author uses Jud to explain the alleged circumstances of MicMac burial procedures, suggesting that the land itself is magic. After the land itself has turned, supernatural creatures are spotted there and the MicMacs themselves don’t visit it because it is seen as being dangerous. However, one questions whether it is the inhuman that is dangerous—as evidenced by the emergence of the Wendigo—or the human itself who has made the land dangerous. Jud does not say, but the audience is left to surmise the latter, as it seems only through human intervention that evils and danger occur. After all, only humans moralize death; other creatures merely accept it.

“‘Women are supposed to be the ones good at keeping secrets […] but any woman who knows anything at all would tell you she’s never really seen into a man’s heart. The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis—like the soil up there in the old MicMac burying ground. Bedrock’s close. A man grows what he can […] and he tends it.’”

Throughout this section of the novel, King personifies the land. In this quotation, Jud identifies how as the land becomes more human, and the man becomes like the land, with both comprised of poor soil. This identification with the land possibly relates to the fact that man cannot generate beings like women can. Rather, they must be content with rebirthing the dead as they cannot give birth to the living. In this way, the obsession with resurrection becomes a flaw that seems distinct to the male, illuminating his pride and flaws, which are somehow different from those of women. Readers notice that there are never any stories of women reburying animals, possibly because women have what men lack and therefore also desire: the ability to generate. In this way, Louis’s only generative ability comes from the dead.

“It was as if, he told himself later, he had spent that entire sunny post-Thanksgiving Friday morning waiting for Church to come back; as if he had known in some deeper, more primitive part of his mind what their night hike up to the MicMac burial ground had meant all along.” 

Some part of Louis seems to know the consequences of his burying Church in the MicMac ground. King casts this part of Louis’s brain as more primitive, perhaps aligning knowledge of nature and the MicMacs with primitivism. The insinuation, then, is that Louis is more advanced than the MicMacs, who seem much more connected to nature than Louis himself. This, of course, turns out to be false, as Louis, in this attempt to utilize nature for his own advantage, dooms himself and his family.

“‘The Wendigo story, now, that was something you could hear in those days all over the north country. It was a story they had to have, the same way I guess we have to have some of our Christian stories. Norma would damn me for a profaner if she heard me say that, but Louis, it’s true. Sometimes, if the winter was long and hard and the food was short, there were north country Indians who would finally get down to the bad place where it was starve […] or do something else.’”

Jud explains the origins of the Wendigo story to be rooted in some truth, primarily because the harshness and severity of the Northern winters necessitated cannibalism in order to survive. In this way, Jud hypothesizes that the MicMac tribe turned to cannibalism in order to survive and then justified their actions by blaming their alleged immorality on a supernatural evil: the Wendigo. Jud explains that this story was necessary to rationalize behavior, just as all stories are necessary to explain things that seem beyond human comprehension. Jud also aligns the story of the Wendigo with that of Jesus himself, who told his disciples to drink of his blood and eat of his body—practices the Romans damned as being cannibalistic. However, in Christian mythology, Jesus’s orders to his disciples are moral actions; one would desire this cannibalism, which is somehow not cannibalism due to Jesus’s divinity. In contrast, the MicMacs seem to damn this practice or at the very least construct it as evil, although this could also represent Jud’s (and the author’s) projection of Western morality onto the MicMac story of the Wendigo.

“That death was a secret, a terror, and it was to be kept from the children, above all to be kept from the children, the way that Victorian ladies and gentleman believed the nasty, grotty truth about sexual relations must be kept from the children.” 

Louis considers Rachel’s attitude towards death as diametrically opposed to his own. Rachel believes that death is not something to be discussed, that it is a dirty fact of lower classes much in the same way Victorian aristocrats refused to speak about sex. In this way, Rachel constructs death as being somewhat beneath her, and almost plebeian in nature. For much of the novel, Rachel represses any knowledge of death, thereby repressing her own experiences and allowing the harsh truth of her sister’s demise to fester like an infected wound. Paradoxically, it is by repressing the discussion of death that Rachel makes it dirty, just as by repressing the subject of sex one makes it taboo. Of course, some children are innately drawn to this kind of rebellion; by refusing to talk about or even acknowledge death, Rachel may cause her own child to become obsessed with it, just as Rachel seems obsessed with not talking or thinking about it. No matter how much one represses something, it eventually floats to the surface, and so Ellie must, as a result of life’s trajectory, deal with death, no matter how much control her mother exerts over not discussing it. In this way, Rachel demonstrates the same need to control that Louis exhibits, albeit in a different manner.

“But he had bought that rat, hadn’t he? The rat that Church had brought in, surely clawed to bloody ribbons, its intestines dragging, its head perhaps gone. Yes. He had bought it. It was his rat […] the cat that used to belong to his daughter and now belonged to him.”

Louis reflects on the ramifications of his decision to resurrect Church. He believes that he is responsible not only for Church but also for all of Church’s actions as a result of this decision. In fact, Louis believes that his decision to resurrect Church leads to Church no longer belonging to Ellie; rather, Church becomes Louis’s cat. This might partially be due to how different Church appears, as if to suggest that Church has entirely lost any of his previous characteristics. In this way, Church represents a new cat, not the same old beloved pet he once was, insinuating that it might have been better to leave Church dead. Louis uses the language of property and possession to convey this idea. Not only does he come to possess Church as something that he owns, he has also purchased Church’s actions, although at what cost is not readily apparent. Louis uses the language of transaction to suggest his own culpability in Church’s behavior, aligning property with responsibility through the medium of transaction. In this way, Louis’s relationship to the environment around him takes on an entirely capitalist tone, or, at the very least, one that concerns possession as the exclusive way in which humans relate to their surroundings.

“It’s probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls […] human experience tends […] to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.”

The beginning of the second section begins with these words. King suggests that the mind can expand to encompass all horrors, indicating that it is a malleable object or aspect of human personality. He also implies that this might in fact be a coping mechanism that humanity has learned, as he suggests that once the doorway to evil is open, once humanity breaks through that barrier, a torrent of horrors may then befall a person. The author argues that evil begets more evil; it seems fairly futile, in this sense, to try to work against it. The author even goes so far as to claim that in attempting to remedy the evils, humanity ends up begetting more evil, unconsciously choosing the wrong path in a method that is as inconceivable as it is inevitable.

“Louis was told how merciful it was that Gage hadn’t suffered 32 times by his own inner count. He was told God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform 25 times. Bringing up the rear was he’s with the angels now, a total of twelve times. It began to get at him. Instead of losing what marginal sense these little aphorisms had […] they seemed to punch deeper each time, angling in towards the vitals.”

At Gage’s viewing, Louis counts the number of times the same sentiments are expressed to him. Here, the audience feels not only the banality of these sentiments but also the deep grief of Louis, who is pushed into a cynical kind of sanity that is as unrelenting as it is terrible. We feel the physical assault that Louis feels as a result of these aphorisms and are incapable of making it stop; cruelly, the author renders his audience as helpless as Louis himself in order to help the audience empathize with Louis.

“And if his eyes seemed distant, his manner a little cold, people supposed he was thinking of the past, of the accident, of the Gageless life ahead; none (perhaps not even Jud) would have suspected that Louis had begun to think about the strategies of grave robbing […] only in an academic way, of course; it was not that he intended to do anything. It was only a way to keep his mind occupied. It was not as if he intended to do anything.”

At the funeral party for Gage, Louis already seems half-dead; he barely interacts with the people around him because he is consumed with thoughts of resurrecting Gage. Although Louis argues that these thoughts are hyper-rational, presenting the argument in an academic fashion, the audience knows better. In fact, the audience can see Louis’s rationality start to slip after the repetition of the last phrase in the final two sentences. Not only does the audience recognize that Louis is protesting a bit too much, we also understand that he seems focused on his arguments; Louis repeats himself, indicating a kind of obsessive nature to these thoughts. Here, the audience witnesses Louis begin to lose his grip on reality as he becomes consumed by the idea of Gage’s resurrection. He feels compelled to undertake this endeavor in a way that separates him entirely from rationality.

“‘I don’t know what I’m scared of. Daddy, I dreamed we were at Gage’s funeral and the funeral man opened his coffin and it was empty. Then I dreamed I was home and I looked in Gage’s crib and that was empty too. But there was dirt in it.’”

Ellie’s dreams foreshadow the events to come later in the novel. Throughout the novel, dreams serve as premonitions, such as Louis’s dream of Pascow. However, Louis refuses to listen to the warnings he has been issued, and so the dreams move on to his daughter, possibly in the hope that she might be able to prevent evil from being unleashed. In this way, even though the dreams often represent nightmares, they are essentially good, as they serve to counteract the evil of human action. They operate as warnings, even though the humans they warn fail to heed them. In contrast, actions are then associated with the dirt of the grave, which is itself a symbol of death. Within this quotation, then, the audience witnesses the forces of good battling against the forces of evil as they attempt to unveil the evil of human action. The dream itself represents good, whereas the dirt represents human evil, although both occupy the same literary space and therefore serve as a kind of balancing mechanism for the narrative.

“In a vague way, he rather hoped that would happen. It would lead to questions—where’s Rachel, what are you doing here, how’s it going?—and perhaps the questions would lead to complications, and maybe complications were what he really wanted. A way out.”

As Louis sits in the diner before digging up Gage’s grave, he hopes that someone will act in a way that takes him away from the path of Gage’s resurrection. Louis knows that this action can only yield further horror, and yet seems unable to extricate himself from the situation, as though his fate in this matter were predetermined. Louis is trapped on a path from which he cannot escape, even though a part of him desperately wants to be free from the pull of the MicMac burial ground. In this way, it seems as though King is constructing human experience as being one that is by design hopeless; instead of the free will, King presents a different proposal: that we are merely pawns in systems much greater than and entirely outside of our own control. Although this seems harrowing in theory, it also partially relieves Louis of responsibility for his actions henceforth. He cannot entirely be said to be culpable for the horrors that follow precisely because they are created by forces outside of his control. In this small matter, perhaps King suggests that we might find some absolution for our terrible actions if we were to think of them as outside of our own control.

“She could not explain to her mother why she had to go back. The feeling had risen in her the way a wind rises—an early stirring of the grasses, hardly noticed; then the air begins to move faster and harder, and there is no calm left; then the gusts become hard enough to make eerie screaming noises around the eaves; then they are shaking the house and you realize that this is something like a hurricane and if the wind gets much higher, things are going to fall down.”

Much like how Louis feels the pull of the MicMac burial ground, Rachel also likens the premonition that something is awry to a force of nature. Here, King presents consciousness as being inextricably linked to the earth. Although winds can be destructive when they spiral—such as during a hurricane or tornado—they are also depicted as being very strong. There is also the implication that their strength can be used to battle evil, just as Rachel is doing. In this way, it seems as though nature itself exists outside of the realms of morality. Rachel’s decision to go back to Maine allows her to be killed by her son and therefore begets greater evil. In keeping with the suggestion made in the previous quotation, then, it would seem that Rachel’s inclination to go back might stem from the same place as Louis’s drive to resurrect Gage. If this is the case, then the winds and natural forces Rachel describes (as well as the spiral itself) only lead to further destruction, as they foreshadow and necessitate Rachel’s death.

“Watching them, Louis felt a kind of sick wonder and self-loathing. Here he was, crouching behind a tombstone like a subhuman character in some cheap comic book story, watching lovers. Is the line so thin, then? […] I’ve become a grave robber in one simple step—what I suppose people would call a ghoul. He crammed his fists into his mouth to stop some sound from coming out and felt for that interior coldness, that sense of disconnection. It was there, and Louis drew it gratefully around him.”

After he successfully breaks into the cemetery, Louis must wait to dig up the corpse of his son because of a couple that passes by. He watches them carefully, in a manner that is entirely voyeuristic, as he feels completely separate from their lives. The only connection Louis seems to have is to the dead, and specifically to Gage. In realizing that he lacks all connection to the rest of the living world, Louis is forced to examine the line between humanity and inhumanity. King indicates, however, that this construction of the monstrous only exists within the human psyches, as Louis himself does not appear monstrous until he considers his own actions. In reality, that which is monstrous does not seem to be as well-defined, even in regards to the Wendigo, which is indeed a monster. However, it is only the various characters’ conception of the Wendigo that renders it monstrous, and perhaps not the beast in and of itself. In this way, perhaps King is suggesting that monsters must be created and imagined by humans in order to exist, and that the truest terrors live within the confines of our own minds.