Warning: The following contains major spoilers for Stephen King’s “Pet Sematary.”
At this point in his career, there’s no telling how many nightmares Stephen King has caused. From the unnerving terror of The Shining, the grueling brutality of Misery, and the “Good for Her” horror of Carrie, the bestselling author specializes in every conceivable method of haunting the dreams of his Constant Readers. When asked which of his own novels he finds the most scary, King names his 1983 masterpiece Pet Sematary. This harrowing story chronicles the systematic destruction of the Creed family as they’re haunted by the shadow of death lurking in the woods behind their house. In a 2001 introduction to the novel, King writes about a year spent living with his young family on a dangerous road in rural Maine and a terrifying incident in which his young son ran into the road. A story many parents can relate to, this near-miss eventually spun into a terrifying novel as King followed the “what if” haunting his mind. He admits to putting the story away, deeming it too upsetting for publication. Upon revisiting the novel several weeks later, King remembers, “I was horrified by what I had written, and the conclusions I’d drawn.”
Pet Sematary follows the destruction of the Creed family as they move from Chicago to rural Maine. Louis takes a job as a doctor at a University clinic, bringing along his wife Rachel and children Ellie and Gage. The young father makes fast friends with his neighbor Jud Crandall who introduces the family to a quaint little Pet Sematary in the woods behind his house. When Ellie’s cat, Church, is struck by a passing tanker truck, Jud leads Louis to an even more powerful burial place much deeper in the mysterious woods. Awakened by the spirit of new life, the sinister power haunting the Micmac burial ground seems to invade their idyllic home and Gage becomes the next victim to die in the road. Overcome with grief, Louis attempts to reverse the terrible trauma by burying his toddler son in the unholy ground but ultimately finds out the hard way that “sometimes dead is better.”
There is no way to accurately measure terror. What frightens one reader may seem tame and even banal to another. We bring ourselves to each novel we read and no two people will ever experience a story in quite the same way. However, we can examine the sheer volume of frightening material in Pet Sematary using King’s own formula for classification. In an introduction to the author’s first non-fiction book Danse Macabre, a treatise on the horror genre, King describes the heirarchy of fear: revulsion, horror, and terror. Pet Sematary contains multiple examples from each category, bombarding the reader with frightening blows from all directions. In a later Facebook post, King clarifies this thesis, giving examples we will use to examine the novel. In addition to a plethora of fearful passages, King’s novel delivers an emotional gut punch nearly as terrifying as anything lurking in the story’s dark corners. Pet Sematary becomes all the more terrifying for its ability to twist our emotions. Simply put, King’s story of death and destruction rips our bleeding hearts out then stomps them into the stony soil.
Revulsion
“… the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm.”
When Louis first takes a job at the university infirmary, he believes it will be less stressful than a Chicago emergency room, but his first real day on the job turns out to be anything but easy. The young doctor is doing inventory when passers by rush in with a dying man named Victor Pascow wrapped in a blanket sling. The poor man has been struck by a car while jogging and sent flying head-first into a tree, mortally wounded on the side of the road. King gives us an intimate description of his injuries, using revulsion to explore the awful details of death.
“His neck had been broken. One collarbone jutted from his swelled and twisted right shoulder. From his head, blood and a yellow, pussy fluid seeped sluggishly into the carpet. Louis could see the man’s brain, whitish-gray and pulsing through a shattered section of skull. It was like looking through a broken window. The incursion was perhaps five centimeters wide; if he had had a baby in his skull, he could almost have birthed it, like Zues delivering from his forehead. That he was still alive at all was incredible.”
Though Pascow confronts us with our own mortality, King’s book is filled with bloody and accurate visions of death. He describes with unflinching glee the sick sound of Church’s body being peeled from the frosty lawn and shocks us with horrifying glimpses of Gage’s dismembered body. A hat full of blood and a patient undertaker give us disturbing hints at the unthinkable state of this mangled little boy. When Louis does finally unearth Gage’s coffin, mold growing on the tiny face leads him to believe his son’s head has been lost. The novel is a powerful meditation on death and King forces us to lay cheek and jowl with the grim reality that awaits us all.
Horror
“… the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm.”
Though Ellie enjoys a family trip to the nearby Pet Sematary, Rachel does not. The mother of two has a phobia of death and all related rituals due to a traumatic incident in her youth. Rachel’s older sister Zelda contracted spinal meningitis and wasted away in the back room of her childhood home. At just eight years old, Rachel was frequently tasked with caring for her dying sister whom she believed had begun to resent her own health and mobility. It was Rachel who watched as Zelda finally died and she’s lived for years with the guilt and horror of her sister’s agonizing death.
After Gage dies, Rachel rushes back from Chicago hoping to prevent a situation she barely understands. Arriving first at Jud’s house, she’s shocked to hear the crackling voice of her long-dead sister. Whatever has come back from the dead in Gage’s body has found a way to harness Rachel’s darkest fears.
“She was hunched and twisted, her body so cruelly deformed that she had actually become a dwarf, little more than two feet high; and for some reason Zelda was wearing the suit they had buried Gage in. But it was Zelda, all right, her eyes alight with an insane glee, her face a raddled purple; it was Zelda screaming, “I finally came back for you, Rachel, I’m going to twist your back like mine and you’ll never get out of bed again never get out of bed again NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN–”
Though adjacent to the main story, Zelda has become one of Pet Sematary’s most enduring nightmares and one of the most frightening creatures in all of King’s vast catalog. Other moments of horror involve Pascow’s decomposing body appearing to Louis in the dead of night insisting he follow him to the Pet Sematary. Later, while carrying Gage’s plastic-wrapped body along the path to the burial ground, a demonic head appears just inches before him on the path. And nothing can prepare us for the horrifying description of the undead toddler waving a scalpel with the moss from his grave still growing on his ruined shoulder.
Terror
“Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own has been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”
Hoping to stop Louis from making a grave mistake, Jud sets up watch on the front porch of his house. Unfortunately larger forces are working to facilitate Louis’s dark mission and Jud finds himself lost in a deep sleep. He wakes to the undeniable certainty that someone, or something, is lurking inside his house. An evil presence has crept past, waiting in the shadows for the perfect moment to strike.
“Jud could make out bulking shapes in the gloom–Norma’s armoire, the Welsh dresser, the highboy–but no details. He tried to get to his feet on legs that had gone to water, his mind screaming that he needed more time, that he was too old to face this again without more time; Timmy Baterman had been bad enough, and Jud had been young then. The swing door opened and let in shadows. One of the shadows was more substantial than the others.”
In addition to all the tangible nightmares, Pet Sematary practically pulses with an overwhelming sense of dread. Pascow’s death ignites a streak of death and destruction that slowly encircles the family while systematically tearing it apart. King builds the tension so subtly that it’s difficult to choose a single moment of terror in the supremely unnerving story. Another instance of pure terror sees Pascow returning to Louis’s bedroom on Halloween night, lingering just outside the bedroom door as well as Gage’s tiny shadow creeping past a sleeping Louis to silently taking a weapon from his medical bag.
One of the novel’s most haunting scenes occurs while Louis follows the path to the Micmac burial ground. Immediately after seeing the disembodied face lingering in front of him, the frightened father hears a massive beast crashing through the wilderness just feet away from where he stands. The Wendigo has passed by him, carrying with it the power to charge a person with the taste for human flesh. This scene is merely a sample of the many passages that make the reader terrified to keep going, but unable to stop. We simply cannot leave these beloved characters in their terrifying positions, however, we’re not sure we’ll be able to handle what may be in store for us if we dare to turn the page.
Personally Touched
“… horror does not horrify unless the reader or viewer has been personally touched …”
With a talent for empathetic writing, King manages to pull off a minor literary miracle within the pages of Pet Sematary. Louis spends the final two acts of the story committing one unthinkable act after another. Chief among these is his decision to dig up the body of his own son and carry it through haunted woods in the middle of the night. However, as unreliable as Louis’s choices are, we never doubt his motivations. King writes these horrific scenes with such insight and care for his doomed protagonist that we begin to wonder, would we not take the same chance? Along with these glimpses into Louis’s head comes a ringside seat to some of the most devastating moments a parent could ever imagine. After enacting his plan to sneak into the cemetery, Louis is confronted with the reality of his son’s brutal death all over again.
“He got Gage under the arms, aware of the fetid dampness, and lifted him that way, as he had lifted him so often from his evening tub. Gage’s head lolled all the way to the middle of his back. Louis saw the grinning circlet of stitches which held Gage’s head onto his shoulders.
“Somehow, panting, his stomach spasming from the smell and from the boneless loose feel of his son’s miserable smashed body, Louis wrestled the body out of the coffin. At last he sat on the verge of the grave with the body in his lap, his feet dangling in the hole, his face a horrible livid color, his eyes black holes, his mouth drawn down in a trembling bow of horror and pity and sorrow.”
Other moments of emotional torture include the heartbreaking moment in which Gage’s coffin crashes to the floor during the visitation, Louis’s recurring fantasies about narrowly averting tragedy by saving his son’s life, and the heartbreaking moment he’s forced to kill Gage again after his horrific experiment has gone dreadfully wrong.
“The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”
When asked why we choose to read horror, King’s thoughts in Danse Macabre point to an attempt to manage the terrors we face in our own lives. What parent hasn’t worried about failing to protect their child? Who hasn’t hugged a beloved pet and silently vowed to do anything to keep them safe? Fully immersing us in every level of fear, it’s difficult to read this book and emerge unscathed. We all love someone, and the thought of losing them, of seeing their bodies torn apart, and being powerless to reverse the tragedy is something that revolts, horrifies, and terrorizes us to our core. King’s story shocks and scares because it’s so relatable, but it also provides the reader with a valuable tool.
By exorcizing his own nightmares, King allows us to channel our own fears regarding the inevitability of death. When we read Pet Sematary, we follow the Master of Horror down the harrowing path to “what if” and somehow emerge with a greater ability to accept the unknown.
New movie Pet Sematary: Bloodlines premieres this Friday on Paramount+.
The post Why ‘Pet Sematary’ Might Be Stephen King’s Scariest Novel appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.