The 1980s was a dark time for Stephen King. By accounts, his alcoholism was at its worst during this period, and he also struggled wit ha cocaine addiction. I always felt this bled through into his fiction, as Kings novels written during this period are among his darkest, most vicious works (and also, perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, some of his best).
People associate horror fiction with bleak plots and unhappy endings, but King is, despite his reputation, an extremely optimistic writer. Throughout his fiction, one sees a recurring motif of a benevolent force, often unnamed or unspoken, tat seeks to counterbalance the darkness faced by his characters. He has referred to this “the coming of the White” (probably not a term he uses anymore, given contemporary context), and it takes many forms: the hand that strikes the cleansing A bomb in The Stand, Maturin the turtle in the Dark Tower series and It (I assume it’s the same turtle, though I don’t think he gets a name), Father Callahan’s glowing cross in Salem’s Lot. Even if the main character dies (as he sometimes does) or tragedy strikes (as it almost always does), most King books conclude with a sense, at some level, of balance restored. The White sometimes comes late, but it comes.
Well, the White never shows up in Pet Sematary. I would consider it King’s darkest book, and appropriately so, for it deals with the horror that looms above all others in the heart of every parent: the death of a child. King is at his usual best setting up the town of Ludlow and building a friendship between Louis Creed, a doctor who moved his family to this sleepy town from Chicago, and Jud Crandall, one of King’s stalwart Maine lifers, who ayuhs his way into Louis’ heart. When the family cat dies while Louis’ wife and kids are away, Jud shows Louis a way to bring it back by burying it in an old Mi’kmaq burial ground. The cat comes back, just like the song says, but it comes back wrong. This proof of concept, however troubling, is enough to goad Louis into repeating the experiment with his own son, after the boy is killed by a truck.
The result is King’s most potent morality play, a profound metaphor on the destructive power of grief, and how if improperly channeled, it rips apart those it flows through.
Or at least, it should be.
If the book has a weakness, it is King’s repeated suggestions that the burial ground itself is manipulating things, and that the characters are only one step up from puppets in the malevolent land’s pantomime. I assume King did this to help explain some of the characters’ more irrational choices, but I think it is a mistake. The characters do indeed act irrationally, but grief is irrational. Knowing everything Louis knew at the time—that the ground had the power of resurrection, but the creatures that come from it don’t feel quite right, and secondhand accounts of human resurrections were disastrous—and faced with the death of one of my own children, would I make a different choice? I like to think I would, but any parent who says so with certainly is lying to themselves and to you.
I think Pet Sematary would be a stronger book with the references to the Sematary’s manipulations cut out. But even with them in, it’s a hell of a book. One of King’s best.
