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
Author Stephen King
Cover Artist Linda Fennimore
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Horror novel
Publisher Doubleday
Released 1983
Media Type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages 416 pp
ISBN ISBN 0-385-18244-9

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.

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

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. Luckily 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.

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 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. Nevertheless Louis 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. But 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 Micmac Native Americans. There 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. But 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's 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 travelled 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 spirit of the forest tries to frighten him away but Louis' own determination keeps him moving. The act 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, and first kills Jud with one of Louis's surgical scalpels, then 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. We learn, however, that he still has not learned from his mistakes, for after burning the Crandall house down, he returns to the burial ground with his wife's corpse. That very 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..."

In the film version, while Rachel and Louis are sharing a kiss, Rachel picks up a nearby knife. Then, the screen turns black. The last things you hear is Louis yelling NO and a sound which can be nothing other than Louis getting stabbed by Rachel.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.
  • 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 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.
  • At another point in the book, Jud Crandall explains the grave of a racoon in the pet cematary, 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. (In-joke, 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.
  • 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.
  • On FOX's hit Saturday night sketch show Mad TV, there was a stop-motion parody called "Davey and Goliath: Pet Cemetery" (a dual parody of the old religious Davey and Goliath kids' show and King's book). In the short, Goliath gets run over by a tractor-trailer truck, a motorcycle gang, and the cast of Riverdance. Davey and a Jud Crandall-like neighbor bury Goliath in the local Pet Sematary (spelled "Pet Semitary"). Soon Goliath comes back to life, ("Look Davey. I'm all evil now.") and chews the arm off the neighbor. Davey finds Goliath at the Pet Semitary, where he meets Goliath's "new friends": zombie versions of Garfield, Donald Duck, Yogi Bear (headless), and the Warner Brothers Roadrunner. Davey kills them all with a shotgun, but decides that "Since I was up there, I decided to bury them in that graveyard right past the old Pet Sematary."
  • In Pet Sematary, Rachel drives past a sign for "Jerusalem's Lot". (In-joke, 'Salem's Lot.)
  • In the Marjorine episode of the show South Park, Leopold "Butters" Stotch fakes his own death as part of a prank being played by the male schoolchildren on the girls, by pretending he was going to jump from a multi-story building but at the last second throwing a pig dressed in his clothes off the building; everyone assumed that the mess that hits the pavement was just his liquified remains. As his parents are mourning, a strange, Jud Crandall-type farmer comes to the Stoch house and pleads to Mr. Stoch not to bury his son's remains in the old '...Indian...' burial ground saying that, "sometimes...dead is better". However, Mr. Stotch had never heard of the burial ground before the farmer's warning, and this only ended up giving him the idea to bury Butters' "remains" (the smashed meat dressed in his clothes) in the sematary. The following night, the boys' prank on the girls was complete, so Butters returned home to reveal that he had just faked his own death. However, in the meantime his mother had convinced his father how unnatural what he had done was, that Butters might come back as some sort of hellspawn monster, and that really, "sometimes...dead is better". At that moment, Butters comes back, and his parents hysterically assume that he has been re-animated by the '...Indian...' burial ground. Saying that they're sorry, but he's hellspawn now, they chain him up in their basement, and kill a lady from "Quality Curtains" for him to "feed" upon.
  • 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.

[edit] Editions

[edit] External links


Stephen King
Bibliography
Novels: Carrie (1974) • ’Salem's Lot (1975) • Rage (as Richard Bachman) (1977) • The Shining (1977) • Night Shift (stories) (1978) • The Stand (1978) • The Dead Zone (1979) • The Long Walk (as Richard Bachman) (1979) • Firestarter (1980) • Cujo (1981) • Roadwork (as Richard Bachman) (1981) • The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (1982) • Different Seasons (novellas) (1982) • The Running Man (as Richard Bachman) (1982) • Christine (1983) • Pet Sematary (1983) • Cycle of the Werewolf (1983) • The Talisman (written with Peter Straub) (1984) • Thinner (as Richard Bachman) (1984) • Skeleton Crew (stories) (1985) • The Bachman Books (novel collection) (1985) • It (1986) • The Eyes of the Dragon (1987) • Misery (1987) • The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987) • The Tommyknockers (1988) • Dark Visions (cowritten with George R. R. Martin and Dan Simmons) (1988) • The Dark Half (1989) • Dolan's Cadillac (1989) • My Pretty Pony (1989) • The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition (1990) • Four Past Midnight (stories) (1990) • Needful Things (1990) • The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands (1991) • Gerald's Game (1992) • Dolores Claiborne (1993) • Nightmares & Dreamscapes (stories) (1993) • Insomnia (1994) • Rose Madder (1995) • Umney's Last Case (1995) • The Green Mile (1996) • Desperation (1996) • The Regulators (as Richard Bachman) (1996) • Six Stories (stories) (1997) • The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass (1997) • Bag of Bones (1998) • The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) • The New Lieutenant's Rap (1999) • Hearts in Atlantis (1999) • Dreamcatcher (2001) • Black House (sequel to The Talisman; written with Peter Straub) (2001) • From a Buick 8 (2002) • Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (stories) (2002) • The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger (revised edition) (2003) • The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla (2003) • The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah (2004) • The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower (2004) • The Colorado Kid (2005)
Cell (2006) • Lisey's Story (2006)
Non-fiction: • Danse Macabre (1981) • Nightmares in the Sky (1988) • On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) • Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season (cowritten with Stewart O'Nan) (2005)
Original ebooks: Riding the Bullet (2000) • The Plant: Book 1-Zenith Rising (2000)
Audio Recordings
Audiobooks: L.T.'s Theory of Pets • Blood and Smoke (2000) • Stationary Bike (2006)
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