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 continue Stephen King’s Pet Sematary with Chapters 40-42. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! Content warning for child death.
Recent chapters must have been an evil dream, or a “hellishly detailed moment of imagination” as Louis raced death for his son’s life.
In the instantaneous vision of disaster, Louis just missed grabbing Gage’s jacket. In reality, he just snagged it, pulling Gage out of danger. There was no crushing grief, no wake, no appalling public fist fight with Rachel’s father. Instead:
Early on, Gage showed a great aptitude for swimming. In high school, he converted to Catholicism, causing Rachel to predict he’d marry his Catholic girlfriend to the destruction of all his academic and athletic hopes. But he went on to Johns Hopkins and a gold medal at the Olympics. Louis and Rachel watched his triumph on TV. “I guess this caps everything,” Louis said, but then he saw Rachel’s elation change to horror. Looking back at the screen, he saw not Gage on the podium but another boy.
The cap to everything, in reality, was baby Gage’s cap, on the road, full of blood.
Louis wakes to a gray morning, a raging hangover, and the evil reality of his son’s burial day. At last he breaks down sobbing, thinking that he’d do anything for a second chance. Anything at all.
* * *
The prevailing gray and black of the grave-side ceremony are punctuated for Louis by Gage’s white coffin, floral tributes, the violent green of Astroturf and the yellow payloader hiding behind a hill until the actual burying can begin. Jud comforts Ellie as Louis has been unable to. His gaze reproves Louis, but Louis can do nothing when his thoughts are full of Gage.
* * *
The final funeral ceremony, “the rite of food,” takes place at the Creeds’ house. The party is quiet, but drinks are raised, with Louis downing several beers himself. He watches Rachel’s parents comfort her and avoid him. He makes the right replies to condolences; if he seems distant, people will excuse it. No one can know he’s thinking about graverobbing. Just as a game. It’s not like he’d ever do anything.
After the party, Louis drives back to Pleasantview Cemetery. He follows winding paths to Gage’s grave, ignoring the internal Jud-voice that warns “you’re looking up a road you don’t want to travel.” Pleasantview isn’t like the Pet Sematary. Its acreage is “sanely divided into quadrants,” whereas the Sematary is all rough concentric circles, recalling that ancient symbol of the spiral, twisty bridge to the unknown. He realizes now that the Sematary is a come-on for the true burial ground beyond.
Standing over Gage’s neatly raked earth, Louis continues thinking about resurrection logistics. The cemetery gates will be locked at night. There may be a watchman. What if he’s caught? He imagines criminal charges, losing his job, Rachel horrified, Ellie harried by classmates. But—Gage could live again! According to Jud, Timmy Baterman came back a daemon. Though determined to think rationally, not wishfully, Louis can’t believe that would happen with Gage. He could be muddled, diminished, but Louis would still love him. Still, horror sweeps him when he realizes he’s drawn a spiral on Gage’s grave. He rubs it out and leaves, furtive as a trespasser.
Back home, Louis realizes the time between death and reburial may be critical. To expedite Gage’s resurrection, he’ll need to send Rachel and Ellie away. He persuades Rachel to go back to Chicago the next day with her parents. She resists. The family needs to stay together, and she senses Louis hiding something. He denies it, and promises to follow her and Ellie after arranging things in Ludlow.
The Goldmans are thrilled to host Rachel and Ellie. Almost like magic, it’s easy to get last-minute flights. We also hear that the truck driver who hit Gage wasn’t drunk or high, just had a weird urge that day to speed through Ludlow. He’s since tried to hang himself. But surely even if the burial ground nudged the driver, it can’t control airline prices.
Irwin Goldman calls to apologize for what happened at the funeral home. The old man breaks down crying. Louis tries to retain his resentment, but suddenly thinks about really burying the hatchet with the Goldmans and abandoning his resurrection plans. Letting Gage go seems the sane path to reweaving their lives. Or—would it be killing Gage a second time?
Even while packing, Rachel has doubts. Is Louis hiding something? And—Ellie’s had a nightmare about seeing her father at the kitchen table, eyes open but dead. An understandable nightmare, and yet Rachel senses “a quality of prophecy.”
Later, in bed, Louis reminds Rachel of the time they were afraid that infant Gage might be hydrocephalic. It turned out he wasn’t, but what if he had been? Would she still have loved him? Of course, she would have: Gage would have still been Gage, mentally disabled or otherwise.
The Degenerate Dutch: Alternate-Gage’s conversion to Catholicism is accompanied by random slut-shaming of his girlfriend.
Libronomicon: Oz “the Gweat and Tewwible” continues to symbolize the horror of death, power or lack of power barely obfuscated behind the curtain. Louis also considers the methods of “Dickensian Resurrection Men”—most likely Jerry Cruncher in A Tale of Two Cities, a character who has entirely fallen out of my memory since high school—and quotes Andrew Marvellon the nature of graves.
Madness Takes Its Toll: If Gage really had been killed, Louis believes it would’ve driven Rachel crazy. Not that it would be easy to tell, with how people keep giving her Valium.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Goddammit, Louis. And Goddammit, Stephen.
I knew, starting Chapter 40, that “none of that happened” couldn’t be true—would end up a dream or a fantasy. But like Louis, I wanted to believe. And King sends books in all sorts of weird directions, so maybe…? Maybe Gage dies later, or someone else dies instead, or the wendigo gets at the family some other way, because after all something has to happen in all those remaining pages. But not this? Please?
And so of course I go into the following chapters all too sympathetic with Louis’s wishful thinking, and all too aware that I am not immune.
My least favorite finding in cognitive psychology is that studying cognitive bias doesn’t make one any less prone to it. In fact, those of us who specialize in the failure modes of human reason have extra tools for convincing ourselves of the things we want to believe—bolstered by the conviction that we know how to protect ourselves against loss aversion, confirmation bias, the sunk cost fallacy, etc., etc. It’s possible to mitigate those things with enough training and attention, sometimes, but all too often the quest for rationality is self-defeating.
Even moreso than psychologists, doctors are trained to think through high-stakes problems calmly, rationally, with an eye to the evidence. There’s a reason they’re also not supposed to handle those problems for their loved ones. Louis brings all his professional mind-tools to bear on the task of “deciding” whether to resurrect Gage. And those tools get him exactly where he wants to go—and nowhere that’s a good idea.
But really, once you have the evidence that resurrection is possible, its advisability is a purely empirical question, right? Even the safest treatment has some percentage chance of negative outcomes. Thus a negative outcome is not evidence that a treatment is dangerous. Never mind if the best observed outcome is something minorly-malevolent but shaped like a cat, that you find revolting to touch and disturbing to have near your kids. You could get the same effect, sort of, from a head injury. If you think about it, the potential side effects of the burial ground aren’t that different from an intellectual disability. The word Louis uses is now considered a slur, but on the other hand “of course you’d still love your kid and keep them at home” was not an attitude to be taken for granted in the early 80s.
And on the more important hand, intellectual disability is surprisingly distinguishable from wendigo-puppeted undeath—assuming you don’t have massive motivation to decide that it isn’t.
Like any good medical professional, Louis also considers moderating factors. Time since death ought to logically make a difference, especially since the worst known outcome came after a delay due to overseas shipping. Ideally we would run tests on mice, but there’s no time for that. Better to do—that thing you’re not doing—quickly, while the odds of minimizing sequelae are high.
And if you’re considering doing that thing you aren’t doing, better to get other people out of the way. It’s not like you could explain beforehand, or like they would be able to give equally rational input into the decision. A fait accompli, that’s what you want. Even if you haven’t figured out how the post-hoc explanation would be easier. Even if your wife, not actually a complete idiot, can tell that you’re lying. It’s not like she’s going to guess the truth.
Nor does Louis worry about the details of Jud’s warnings. It’s ridiculous (rationally) to believe that something might reach out from the burial ground and urge a truck driver to unsafe speeds, let alone that it might provide convenient airline tickets. So there’s no reason whatsoever to fear that this whole line of thought has been touched off by an outside force. No need to worry that active malevolence is all that makes your “treatment” possible.
Louis has planned everything out very logically. He’s accounted for all the possibilities. He’s even considered, and tried to counter, his own wishful thinking about the conclusions that he wants to draw—and after that, still drawn them. With all that caution, what could possibly go wrong?
Anne’s Commentary
The first time I read Pet Sematary, I bought the opening of Chapter 40, that “none of those things,” those too-hideous things spawned by Gage’s death, had happened. Nor did I snort with shocked outrage, thinking that King had committed the capital narrative-crime of erasing harrowing story events with an “It was all a dream,” or in this case, an unbelievably condensed moment of imagining what would happen if Gage made it to the road.
In fact, the dream is the story of how Gage lived to mount that podium of ultimate achievement for an Olympic gold medal. From that height, he might have gazed into a future of triumphs. Or rather, the dreaming Louis might have gazed farther into Gage’s triumphant future, if only he hadn’t woken up as “The Star-Spangled Banner” crescendoed and the cap on Gage’s swimming career changed into a little boy’s cap filled with blood.
The blood-filled cap killed me. I had bought Gage’s alternate future, Louis’s dream, not because it was credible after the preceding chapters, but because I had wanted so damn hard to buy it. What might have been exponentially upped the horror of what really was.
Inserting the dream here is one of King’s finest moments. On top of the emotional gut-punch, it illustrates the universal human vulnerability that’s going to bring Louis down. Earlier we’ve seen how he prides himself as being unflinchingly rational, as befits a scientist and physician. Other people may try to deny the Big Inevitability which is death. It’s understandable for a child, like Ellie, to do this. Rachel’s death-denialism, however, nears pathological levels. Okay, she finally tells him about Zelda, making her phobia more understandable and allowing him to cut her some slack. Still. Dead is dead. Louis won’t deny the Big Inevitability because he doesn’t want it to be true. Louis doesn’t yield to wishful thinking. Louis knows what he knows.
Until he doesn’t know it anymore. Because Micmac burial ground. Because Church resurrected. Because, back a bit, the ghost of Victor Pascow. Here are things never dreamt of in the philosophy that schooled him, or if dreamt of, sturdily rejected.
By Chapters 40-42, Louis has incorporated these new realities into his philosophy. Therefore, when he considers taking Gage to the burial ground, he isn’t being irrational. He is considering a possibility, albeit one he doesn’t understand the way he does the biomechanics of blood circulation. And so? He probably couldn’t claim to understand quantum physics, either.
Bottom line: As far as practicality’s concerned, it’s no intellectual sin for Louis to think about bringing his son back to life. The intellectual sin he must guard against would be letting emotion cloud his judgment. It would be believing what he wants to believe to the point of ignoring possible contraindications, the shoulds of the matter. What about Hanratty’s resurrected bull, who turned mean? What about Timmy Baterman, who turned more than mean, maybe demonic, monstrous? To put those extremes aside, what about Church? Undeniably, the cat has changed for the worse, but he’s only proven dangerous to small creatures, and that’s just an exaggeration of his essential felinity. Ellie still loves him, in a way, kind of.
If Gage came back diminished, dulled, Louis and Rachel would still love him, just as they would have if he’d been born with those handicaps. Louis has ascertained that capacity within himself. Rather tortuously, he’s gotten Rachel to admit to the same capacity. And that’s the important thing, right? It’s what parents do, even if, um, their child “had grown up to commit rape and murder and the torture of the innocent.”
That was going to the extremes again. At most, Gage might never learn to read.
Right? Right. No wishful thinking here. No glossing over the problem of how family, friends, neighbors, the public at large, would react to a dead boy back “riding his trike in the yard.” To hesitate because of such difficulties would be listening “to the voice of cowardice.” Would be “killing [Gage] a second time.”
So Louis decides the right thing to do will be to manipulate Rachel into taking herself and Ellie off to Chicago. It will be to ignore Jud’s warnings. It will be to dismiss another of Ellie’s prophetic-seeming dreams even though her last one, about Church’s death, came true. Even thought Louis can’t quite push this new “prophecy” out of his mind.
But come on. A man can only welcome a few strange things into his philosophy at once. He can be allowed to set some aside. Not the ones that might interfere with his plans—that would be the sin of believing what one wants to believe. No, just the strange things that are irrelevant at the moment. The ones that are too strange. Like Jud’s idea that the Micmac burial ground exerts uncanny power, and that its power is growing now and influencing—the actions of truck drivers? The urge of a toddler to run from Daddy at just the wrong time? The availability of last-minute airline reservations, for chrissakes?
All right. I’ll allow that Louis is correct to scoff at the notion of uncanny powers controlling airline reservations. Not even the Wendigo could pull that one off.
Next week, we celebrate our 500th post with Frank Darabont’s 2007 adaptation of King’s The Mist. Join us, and keep a careful eye on the weather!
