Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we kick off Stephen King’s Pet Sematary with Chapters 1-6. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead!
“The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch.”
The Creed family has finally arrived in Ludlow, Maine after a long drive from Chicago. Louis Creed has accepted a position at the University of Maine, directing the campus infirmary. His “three hostages to fortune” are his wife Rachel, young daughter Eileen, and baby son Gage. Add in Eileen’s tomcat Church. Everyone’s worn out. Teething Gage bites the nipple that feeds him, which makes already uncertain Rachel cry, which makes Eileen join her and Church pace restlessly. Louis indulges in a brief fantasy of offloading his passengers and hiding out as a medic at Disney World.
The sight of their new house is cheering: a big New England Colonial surrounded by lush lawns and backed by a field for the kids to play in. Beyond the field are woods that go on “damn near forever,” state land that should go undeveloped for the foreseeable future—it’s tied up in litigation with the Micmac. Rachel declares it beautiful. Eileen cheers. Gage caps the magic by echoing Rachel’s murmur of “Home,” his first real word after ma and da.
Good omens end when they leave the car. Louis can’t find the house keys in the glove compartment, and soon the moving van will arrive. Eileen promptly falls off a tire-swing, skinning a knee. She screams so loudly Louis worries the neighbors across the road will hear. No sooner has he gotten her bandaged than Gage screams even louder. A bee has stung his neck. Eileen, panicking at this new peril, trips and resumes yelling. Rachel calls on Louis to do something. Louis decides he’s going crazy.
Into this chaos steps their over-the-road neighbor, an old man in bib-alls smoking an unfiltered cigarette and speaking in a Down East drawl. The usually reserved Louis warms to Judson Crandall at once. Before long he’ll look on Jud as the man who should have been his father, his own having died when Louis was three. With unexpected dexterity, given his gnarled hands, Jud plucks the stinger from Gage’s neck. When the moving van arrives with the house keys still AWOL, Jud fetches over the ones the previous tenant left with him. When Eileen points out a mown path behind their field, Jud says he’ll tell her about it sometime, then takes her, Gage and Rachel across the street to meet his wife and get Gage’s sting cooled down with baking soda.
While Louis supervises the movers, he learns that 83-year-old Jud has lived all his life in Ludlow, except for his WWI service. Now he’s happily retired with his wife Norma. Jud invites Louis to join him on his porch later for a beer. Louis doubts he’ll be up for socializing. But when Eileen and Gage have collapsed, with Rachel following suit, he feels too “jived-up” to sleep. Rachel jokes that Jud will get free medical advice regarding Norma’s arthritis.
The Crandalls’ screen porch features comfortable rattan furniture, a radio playing the Red Sox game, and a pail packed with ice and cans of Black Label. Louis has “the oddest feeling of coming home.”
He and Jud sit drinking beer. Norma has already retired. Louis asks about her arthritis, giving Jud an opening to solicit advice, but Jud doesn’t bite. Out on the road, a massive tanker truck bearing the legend ORINCO rumbles past. Orinco’s a fertilizer factory whose trucks are always coming and going, along with oil tankers, dump trucks, and commuters to Bangor and Brewer. There’s no peace from the “frigging” road these days. Route 15’s a mean one. Does Louis remember the path Eileen asked about?
Louis remembers.
The path, Jud continues, is kept up by local kids. It climbs into the woods about a mile and a half, leading to a pet cemetery. The road “uses up a lot of animals.” Mostly dogs and cats, but the Ryder kids lost their pet raccoon. “When a good animal gets run down in the road, a kid never forgets.”
Louis thinks of Church asleep with Eileen. Jud suggests they get Church fixed, so he won’t wander as much. Though Louis has been reluctant to neuter Church, and the “go-to-hell” look in the cat’s eyes, he says he’ll think about it. Now he better get to bed—he’s starting his new job tomorrow, with just a couple weeks to prepare for the September avalanche of students.
Jud extends an “anytime” invitation to the porch. Back across the road (where he’s had to wait out another truck and a line of cars), Louis checks on Eileen, then Gage. Seeing Gage in his usual face-up sprawl, Louis feels a surge of love “so strong it seemed almost dangerous.” No one watching, he delivers a kiss to the boy’s cheek.
From his and Rachel’s bedroom, Louis can see the Crandalls’ porch. Jud’s cigarette still burns, a red ember in the night. “The old sleep poorly,” he thinks. “Perhaps they stand watch.” But against what? Finally asleep himself, Louis dreams of Disney World, where he’s driving a white van marked with a red cross. A ten-year-old Gage sits beside him, while Church lies on the dashboard. On Main Street, Mickey Mouse is “shaking hands with the children clustered around him, his big white cartoon gloves swallowing their small, trusting hands.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Ludlow is in longstanding litigation with the Micmac nation over the state lands behind Louis’s house. Three guesses where the titular cemetery is, and the first two don’t count.
Libronomicon: Sesame Street books so rarely make an appearance in horror. What would Big Bird think of his cameo?
Ruthanna’s Commentary
We’ve just celebrated the 50th anniversary of Stephen King’s Carrie. His first novel opened a new era of trashy-in-the-best-way paperback horror; the anniversary edition has an intro by Margaret Atwood. The title alone brings me to the tiny beach by the pond where I took swimming lessons, sun on my back, used paperback perched on the edge of my towel—completely immersed in the delicious fantasy that school bullies were an inevitable precursor to terrifying psychic powers. I love my e-reader, but there’s something visceral about a fancily-textured cheap-paper cover on a book that costs precisely the total of your weekly allowance.
But I’m not in middle school any more, and if anything about that book horrifies me it’s the idea of replacing my teenage adoration with 30-plus years’ worth of bad fairies. And Pet Sematary is Anne’s favorite King and I’ve never read it. So we’re celebrating the anniversary of King’s debut by reading a different book entirely!
From the opening chapters, this feels like a good decision. My beloved Carrie and Firestarter focus on adult fear of teenage girls’ power, close enough to a power fantasy for an actual teenager. Pet Sematary centers a parent—not one of King’s vile abusers but an ordinary-for-1983 guy, imperfect but trying, dealing with adult loves and fears. From the introduction (thank you Steve for the content warnings), parental fears are likely to loom large. It’s a good match for 48-year-old me, trying to support and protect a family, who’s been through grief over losing people and animals and places.
Death, says the authors note, is a mystery—and burial a secret. That second isn’t precisely true—while all those interers of famous folk have indeed not written books, funerals aren’t hard to get into. But burial as profession and practice remains a locus of taboo. Modern people shy from cemetery keepers—and moreso in the 80s, before the recent crop of books pulling back that veil. Judaism requires participation in the burial by funeral attendees, but other practices may leave that to strangers and clerics. And even if you’ve contributed your shovel-ful of dirt, what happens below is a mystery for fungi and bacteria rather than humans.
So far, the book has avoided most of what annoys me in King: the blue collar attitudes shorthanded via bigotry and sexism, the fear of women and girls (which may yet arise via Eileen), the magical negros and Native Americans (I have a strong suspicion that this is coming up). Louis gets realistically frustrated with his kids after a long car trip—I’ve been there—but also loves them, and his wife, with all his trying-for-the-80s heart.
Have I mentioned that I don’t miss the 80s? Lying on the beach reading a used paperback from the corner store, yes. The acceptability of spanking, the rigid breastfeeding instructions, the weirdness around spaying pets, the merely-nascent idea of actually negotiating decisions with your spouse, not so much. And the smoking as a casual, homely character beat—I think Jud lights four or five during his introduction? I would list the universality of outdoor cats as an 80s thing, but our next door neighbors gave up on keeping theirs cats inside when the kids were little and kept opening the door. Yesterday I saw one of them running across the busy road where we live. At least Gage coos in the era of Back To Sleep, so kids will presumably… die of truck strikes rather than SIDS, maybe I’m not saving too much anxiety on that count.
One of the things King does well, possibly not consciously, is to turn up the anxieties and flaws of everyday life to supernatural levels. The extremity of emotion around kids, moving to an unfamiliar area with unfamiliar hazards, the risks we can’t reasonably avoid. It works particularly well here, where the characters are worth caring about from the start, where their reactions and emotions are easily within the realm of reason and sympathy. It’s telling that King originally trunked this one, that it felt too close to home.
Anne’s Commentary
In a September 2000 introduction to Pet Sematary, Stephen King considers a question frequently asked of him: Which of his books does he consider the most frightening? He answers without hesitation. In PS, King feared he’d finally gone too far into darkness for the public to follow, and so he shelved the manuscript. He was wrong about at least his own public’s capacity for terror. His other concern was his personal reaction to the recently completed draft. “Put simply,” he writes, “I was horrified by what I had written, and the conclusions I’d drawn.” PS was a beast that had to be buried, but what’s interred in a pet cemetery doesn’t necessarily stay in a pet cemetery.
When King left Doubleday, he owed them one more novel. The sole candidate in hand was Pet Sematary. Luckily, Tabitha King convinced Stephen that PS was “awful, but too good not to be read.” I agree with Tabitha one-hundred percent. I also get Stephen’s qualms. The book squeaks past Salem’s Lot for my favorite King, but it leaves the Lot far behind in terms of how deeply it harrows me with each reread.
Much fiction grows out of a writer wondering, “What if?” Some what-ifs are general: What if that late Cretaceous asteroid had missed, allowing the (nonbird) dinosaurs to prosper a geological while longer? Other what-ifs are personal: What if I never met my life partner—how elsewise might things have turned out? King’s Pet Sematary what-if is one of the personal ones. In the introduction mentioned above, he recounts his year as a writer in residence at his alma mater, the University of Maine. He and his family stayed in the rural town of Orrington, in a “wonderful” house the only drawback of which was the busy truck-frequented road fronting it. Their over-the-road neighbor warned them that the road “used up a lot of animals.” Proof lay in the woods beyond the Kings’ house: a makeshift graveyard with a sign rendered the more poignant by its misspelling, yes, “Pet Sematary.”
The Kings’ daughter had a cat.
The Kings had a toddler son.
The Kings suffered that year a hit and a near-miss, roadwise. What if—the near-miss had been a hit, too? And what if, unlike in real life, there was a way to undo the hits?
What if you couldn’t not try to undo them, for all the wisdom of the lines that close King’s extended PS epigraph:
Death is a mystery, and burial is a secret.
Barely into the second page of Chapter One, Louis Creed assures himself that the landmarks he’s following to their new house are right, but his tired brain adds that they’re as right as “the astrological signs the night before Caesar was assassinated.” Inside the car, the omens are downright discouraging, as his wife and daughter cry in tandem, his son fusses, and the damn cat won’t stop pacing. Louis even imagines ditching his family for a solo medical practice at Disney World. Then the new house comes into view, and all moods change. Well, maybe not Church’s, but Rachel and Eileen are thrilled, and Gage issues the ultimate good omen by saying for only his third word, Home. It’s a moment that will persist in Louis’s memory as magical.
Omens follow omens. The next set isn’t great. Louis can’t find the house keys. Eileen scrapes a knee. Gage takes a bee sting. Rachel is losing it. Louis is losing it. Then the best omen of all arrives, one helluva good neighbor in the person of Jud Crandall. He pulls stingers, sends Rachel and the kids to chill with his wife, rescues Louis with a spare set of house keys, and even enables a cooler-headed Louis to find his own keys.
Louis doesn’t take readily to strangers, yet he immediately likes Jud. By the time the movers leave and the other Creeds are asleep, Louis accepts the invite he’d meant to turn down; stepping onto the Crandalls’ porch, he feels he’s come home.
By the time he leaves Jud, he’s found his never-before-had father. Yes, that very first day, as the very start of Chapter One foretold. Omens following omens.
Omens, even good ones, can only exist when destiny does. From his bedroom, Louis notices that Jud’s still out on his porch. Louis might have taken comfort from the sight. Instead he thinks: The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch.
Before Louis can decide what they watch against, he’s dreaming about Disney World. This time Church and a ten-year-old Gage are with him in the white medic’s van, and Mickey Himself is shaking hands with the kids on Main Street. If this is a good-omen dream, where are Rachel and Eileen? Why Disney World again, when Ludlow is looking up? And why does King write that Mickey’s cartoon hands “swallow” the children’s “trusting” ones?
Am I weird to find Mickey Mouse and his freaky huge gloved paws nightmare fodder? What’s he hiding inside those gloves, anyway? What’s behind that perpetual grin? Never mind. I say Louis’s dream is another bad omen, and I say King’s brilliant to end the Creeds’ first Ludlow day.
Next week, we follow up a Poetry Month comment with Sarah Pinsker’s “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather.” Bring your guitars!
