Pet Sematary

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This article is about Stephen King's horror novel. For other meanings, see Pet cemetery.

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. Image:Front cover of 'Pet Sematary'.PNG

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Contents

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Plot

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, Church. 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 neighbour, 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 real father died when he was three, he sees Jud as a surrogate father. 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 sematary" where the children of the town bury their deceased animals. This provokes a heated argument between Louis and Rachel several days later. 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 — an issue which is brought up several times in flashbacks.)

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 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, in fact, a dream — until he finds 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 when 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 to "the real cemetery": an ancient burial ground that was once used by the Micmac Indians. 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 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, even though Louis very nearly manages to prevent the accident. Overcome with despair, Louis considers bringing his son back to life with the help 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. 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 — with horrifying consequences for him and his loved ones. Gage returns from the dead as a monstrous, demonic shadow of his former self and first kills Jud with one of Louis's surgical scalpels, then his mother as well. Louis confronts his son and sends him back to the grave with a lethal injection of chemicals 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 "Darling..."

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ISBN numbers

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The film

Pet Sematary was made into a movie in 1989, starring Dale Midkiff as Louis, Fred Gwynne as Jud, Denise Crosby as Rachel. 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 3.

This film was the first adaptation of a Stephen King novel to include his name in its title. Stephen King wrote the screenplay himself, having become frustrated with how his novels were represented in film adaptations, and appears briefly in the film as a minister at a funeral.

The movie is more faithful to the novel's story line and structure than is common for novel-to-movie adaptations in the horror genre. Even so, several plot elements — such as Louis's troubled relationship with his in-laws, his sorrow after Gage's death and his consequent justifications for resurrecting his son — were either combined, truncated or dropped due to the limitations of a movie-length script. The repeated line from the book about "Oz the Great and Terrible" was removed and replaced by repeated appearances of Pascow and Zelda.

There was also a not-quite-so-successful sequel, Pet Sematary II.

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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 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.
  • After reading the novel for the first time, King and his wife Tabitha were so disturbed by its story line that King left it unpublished for several years.
  • The punk rock band The Ramones 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.
  • 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 an Avon lady for him to "feed" upon.
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External links

fr:Simetierre it:Pet Sematary he:בית כברות לחיות שעשועים nl:Pet Sematary ru:Кладбище домашних животных (фильм) fi:Uinu, uinu lemmikkini

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