Pet Semetary King, Stephen. Pet

Pet Semetary

King, Stephen. Pet Sematary. New York: Doubleday, 1983.

Stephen King's Pet Sematary takes its name from a place, not a person, and the novel could only be set in a rural community, where a wild, overgrown and unsupervised area in which children bury their pets would be ignored. It is a quiet, ghost-haunted town where an Indian burial ground that can resurrect the dead can remain untouched by local developers. The fact that the book is set in Ludlow, Maine, a seemingly typical New England community that is hostile to outsiders like the protagonist Dr. Louis Creed and his family also creates a 'fish out of water' sensibility, as Creed must cope with a community he does not fully understand. Lastly, the fact that the area is remote, but still linked enough to civilization to be located near a major highway is significant to the plot, given that the Creed cat Church, then the Creed son Gage are both hit by cars and killed. Although Native Americans have lived all over the United States, it is difficult to imagine the book taking place in a more suburban setting, where the burial ground would likely have been used for a shopping mall or a development. In an urban setting, pets would not be allowed to roam free and although children get hit by cars everywhere, they are likely to be more closely supervised than they are in Ludlow.

Louis Creed goes through the most profound change in the novel. He begins the novel a rational man of science. However, after his son dies he becomes bent upon using the Indian burial ground to resurrect his son, as he has gone insane with grief, forgetting how different his daughter's cat seemed after being brought back to life. Even after he has to kill his son again, he is still determined to bring back his wife from the dead, refusing to learn from his mistakes. Louis is able to make good decisions at the beginning of the novel -- he is able to save Norma, the wife of his friend Jud Crandall, when she has a heart attack, and he is responsible for administrating student health services at the University of Maine, but he becomes possessed by the notion that he can completely defy death, and protect his daughter from the trauma of losing a pet, then himself from his son and wife's death. Gage, Louis' son, also goes through a profound change, beginning the novel as an innocent young boy, and then, after he is resurrected after being hit by a car, changing into a strange, zombie-like creature who kills and partially eats his own death-denying mother, as he is now possessed with an ancient Indian spirit, a Wendigo.