Pet Sematary

The blowdown, or, as it is later referred to, the deadfall, is the barrier between the pet cemetery and the MicMac woods beyond. It is a barrier both in the physical and theoretical sense as it seems too artful to not be a manmade barrier. When Jud takes the Creed family to visit the pet cemetery, he warns: “‘Trees that fall down in a pile get mean’” (33). For Louis, the deadfall “merely sat whitening in the sun as it had done for decades. To Louis it looked like the skeletal remains of some long-dead monster, something slain by a parfait good and gentil knight, perchance. A dragon’s bones, left here in a giant cairn” (33). The blowdown therefore represents a barrier both living and not and straddles the worlds of reality and the place that exists after death. There is something monstrous and evil about the blowdown; it is inherently dangerous and serves as a warning not to cross onto a path from which one cannot return.

Victor Pascow reiterates this warning in Louis’s waking nightmare:

The deadfall from which Jud Crandall had called Ellie in alarm had become a heap of bones. The bones were moving. They writhed and clicked together […] ‘The door must not be opened,’ Pascow said […] The barrier was not made to be broken, Remember this: there is more power here than you know. It is old and always restless’ (73).

Although made of bones and therefore of the dead, the deadfall also appears to be moving and therefore can also be seen to be alive. In this way, the barrier supersedes both life and death, encompassing both while existing outside of the rules of the natural world. The author also associates climbing the deadfall with dreams, thereby further linking the deadfall to the idea of a barrier as dreams are themselves represented as barriers between worlds. Crossing between worlds represents an inherently dangerous act, one which Pascow warns Louis about. However, when Jud convinces Louis to follow him to the MicMac ground to bury Church, Louis realizes that “the deadfall could not harm him unless he allowed it to” (114). The audience knows that this false sense of security Louis has concerning the deadfall exists as a facet of his own hubris. After all, it is not the act of climbing the deadfall that is inherently dangerous; rather, it is the breaking of the barriers between the worlds of the living and the dead that represents the true threat to these characters’ safety. In crossing this threshold, Louis puts in motion the events that ultimately lead to the demise of his family.

Simply put, Oz the Gweat and Tewwible is death incarnate. It is a name that was created by Rachel’s sister, Zelda, who had a speech impediment, possibly as a result of her spinal meningitis. Throughout Rachel’s life, she has been terrified of Oz, a story she communicates to Louis. Louis then appropriates this terminology to represent death, as everything associated with death within the book seems to be somewhat childish in nature, possibly to foreshadow the death of a Gage, who is a child. Louis reflects upon this name: “People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery” (329). Zelda’s speech impediment makes death less filled with terror. The name fits with Louis’s rather childlike conception of the world as well, considering he is often incapable of dealing with adult responsibility. Oz is the god of all things dead, especially those things which once were beautiful—flowers or children, for instance.

Even as Louis contemplates resurrecting Gage, he knows that this is thwarting Oz, angering him in a way that can only end badly. This is because Oz is everywhere and sees all things; he is ubiquitous. Louis reflects on Oz’s capacity to be everywhere: “When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate” (359). Louis believes that the threat of death looms in every human action. However, he fails to see that by attempting to resurrect Gage, Louis is working for Oz by creating more death.

King uses the symbol of dirt to designate that which is associated with the grave. Although a simple enough symbol to connote death, dirt also has a darker context here, in which it also represents the unending hunger of death. As Louis fills up Church’s grave, he reflects: “there was only the whump of dirt on more dirt […] there’s never enough, he thought” (124). The idea that there seems to never be enough dirt indicates that death, as a force within the novel, has an unending hunger. Even though Louis is placing Church’s body in the grave—and so, in theory, there should be more than enough dirt to fill the smaller hole—Louis argues that there is not enough, as though the hunger of death is so strong that it requires more sacrifice, more exertion, more dirt. As a force, death always requires more.

Similarly, a character seems to be stained with dirt once they have touched death. Louis frequently finds himself covered with dirt when he is close to death; the dirt gets all over everything, staining the body of those it touches. After Louis buries Rachel’s body in the MicMac ground, she comes back, her voice “grating, full of dirt” (395). The stain of death becomes something they can’t escape, no matter how much they try to cleanse themselves. In this way, dirt can also be seen to symbolize Louis’s growing obsession with death as well as the fact that his actions concerning death seem only to yield more death. Once marked by the dirt of the grave, Louis finds himself unable to extricate himself from the clutches of death, ultimately engendering his family’s demise.

Throughout the book, Louis daydreams about Disney World as a means of escaping his current life. At the beginning of the novel, when his family seems to need too much of him, Louis “dreamed he was in Disney World, driving a bright white van with a red cross on the side. Gage was driving beside him, and in the dream Gage was at least ten years old” (19). Louis has this recurring fantasy of leaving his job and responsibilities behind and fleeing to Disney World, although interestingly enough, Gage usually accompanies him. It seems as though the female characters in his family require too much emotional effort; Gage, on the other hand, expects little from his father, other than for Louis to keep Gage from dying, which Louis is ultimately unable to do. In this way, the audience recognizes this escapism as Louis’s own childish behavior. He seems to not be able to deal with the difficulties that life might present. Louis’s childish dreams of Disney World foreshadow his inability to deal with the death of Church. He cannot stand the difficulty of telling Ellie that her cat has died because he does not want to have to deal with the emotions that will result from this incident. Therefore, he follows Jud and proceeds to set in motion the rest of the narrative’s tragedies.

While the motif of Disney World demonstrates Louis’s tendency towards escapism, it also represents the impossible for Louis, a dream that can never be achieved. After Gage’s death, “Louis Creed wished he were dead. And suddenly, weirdly, an image rose in his mind: Gage in Mickey Mouse ears, Gage laughing and shaking hands with great big Goofy on Main Street, in Disney World” (234). It is only after Gage’s death that Louis remembers his dreams of escaping to Disney World with his son, although now this trip is impossible. In this way, Disney World appears in congruence with death itself to demonstrate the futility of Louis’s childish escapism. Nevertheless, Louis decides to try and make this dream a reality by resurrecting Gage; it is only after he considers escaping with his son that he decides to rebury Gage in the MicMac ground.

Throughout the novel, King interrogates the way in which dreams interact with and relate to reality. The narrator reflects that “[t]he nightmare really began when they brought the dying boy, Victor Pascow, into the infirmary” (57). Pascow represents the beginning of the horrors that Louis must witness. There is a kind of dreamlike and untenable quality to Pascow’s accident, as well: the idea that on the first day of school, a college student gets struck by a car and dies a grisly death seems unrealistic, to say the least. Rather, it seems to be someone’s nightmare, like a panicked dream that Louis might have before the first day at his new job. However, Pascow’s nightmarish death serves as a premonition of the tragedies yet to come.

Later in the book, Pascow himself appears in a dream Louis has in order to warn Louis not to enter the MicMac burial ground. Louis associates climbing the deadfall with dreams, as though dreams exist as barriers or liminal space between the world of the living and that of the dead. However, when actually pressed to climb the deadfall with Jud for the first time, Louis can hardly remember his dream and begins to think of life itself as a dream: “But now, tonight, that dream or warning or whatever it had been seemed years rather than months distant. Louis felt fine and fey and alive, ready to cope with anything, and yet full of wonder. It occurred to him that this was very much like a dream” (114). Pascow’s warning seems too far away to have happened to Louis, as though it occurred a lifetime and not two months before. Instead, Louis begins to think of his reality as a dream, eliminating any responsibility he might feel for his actions.

The novel is rife with misspellings, which the author includes to indicate how easily one can slip from amusement into sheer horror. After Jud takes the Creed family to the pet cemetery, Ellie is beside herself with fears of Church’s imminent death. Louis decides to treat her like an adult, albeit gently, and discuss the matter at hand, instead of repressing the fear of death like Rachel does:“That would put this whole nonsense of Pet Semataries (it was funny how that misspelling […] began to seem right) and death fears behind them” (54). Louis notes that the misspelling gets into his head until that is how he conceives of the cemetery, thereby becoming symbolic of Louis’s increasingly delusional state. Due to the misspelling, the cemetery seems harmless, almost innocent, when in fact it represents the very opposite. It is this childish aspect and regard for death that is so concerning; Louis does not notice how much power the place holds specifically because he relegates it to childish fantasy and whimsy.