Is Dead Better?: Pet Sematary by Stephen King

This is my second time reading Pet Sematary, and I found it even deeper and creepier than the first time.  (See my first review here).

This time I read Pet Sematary for my course on horror and philosophy, a book I chose to cover because I remember it being a great example of how horror can help us face the fact of death.  I found a great article in a book called Stephen King and Philosophy called "Sometimes Dead is Better: King, Daedelus, Dragon-Tyrants, and Deathism" by Katherine Allen.  Allen discusses Pet Sematary (along with The Tommyknockers) in the framework of transhumanism and bioconservatism.


Some transhumanists refuse to see death as necessarily an inevitable part of the human condition: science may someday help us live longer lives, maybe even defeat death entirely; as Allen puts it, for transhumanists, "Mother Nature does not know best."  Bioconservatives, on the other hand, see this as misguided or dangerous: changing human nature may be impossible, or even worse, it may be possible but make us into something unrecognizable.  According to bioconservatives, current limitations of human nature make us who we are and maybe serve other beneficial purposes.

Allen makes a good case that King's Pet Sematary should be understood as a "deathist fable" (deathism is bioconservatism applied specifically to the issue of death).  Louis Creed starts off as something of a bioconservative himself, staring death straight in its steely eyes in his role as a medical doctor.  It's his wife Rachel who fears death, haunted by the death of her sister, Zelda, in childhood.

Louis starts to falter when he gets an extreme close-up of death as a young man named Victor Pascow dies before his eyes.  But King doesn't just say, "Victor died.  It was intense."  This is Stephen King we're talking about!  He details exactly how Victor's brain is visible through the hole in his skull, how the massive amount of blood has ruined the carpet, etc.  As Allen points out, King isn't just being gross or trying to shock us.  These detailed descriptions of death serve the purpose of confronting the reader with death directly (another good one: peeling a cat's frozen corpse off the frosty lawn).

Louis's major about face comes upon the death of his daughter's cat, Church.  As he puts it, death has come into the family circle.  It's personal now.  Jud, his kindly neighbor (although one wonders how kindly he really is...) has told him about the local pet cemetery, and another burial ground a bit deeper into the woods, one known to the Micmac people (a local Native American tribe).

(Honestly the main thing I don't like about the novel is how King uses the stereotype of Native Americans as "spiritual" or "noble savages" to stand in for the unknown or the absurd, in Camus's sense.  I don't see why it couldn't be early white settlers who did this, or why King couldn't spend a little more time giving us the story of the burial ground in relation to all the local Native cultures.  Sadly, the short cut of the "spooky old Indian burial ground" works well in mainstream US culture, but I'd like to see some problematizing of why that works so well).

One of my favorite things about the novel is how you know exactly what's going to happen, but hope Louis will do something else, anyway.  The sheer dread of it is delightful (in whatever way it is that sheer dread can be delightful).  And of course there are hints later that Louis isn't merely compelled by his grief and his desire to save his daughter from suffering.  The burial ground itself seems to exert some mystical pull.

I don't want to give any major spoilers.  Honestly the story has permeated popular culture to an extent that I probably couldn't spoil it if I wanted to, at least when it comes to a book this famous that has been made into a popular 1989 movie with a theme song by The Ramones and later spoofed by South Park.  There's also a remake of the movie on the way in 2019 with John Lithgow as Jud: check out some first photos here.

Without dwelling on details, though, I can say that Pet Sematary gives one of the most brutal, raw treatments of grief that I've ever encountered in literature.  If you've lost loved ones (including pets, of course), you might identify so much with King's characters that you'd consider the Micmac burial grounds or at least understand what Louis does.  And that's a pretty impressive feat for an author, which goes to show that this King fellow knows what he's doing.  I think he just might have a successful career if he keeps this up (I'm kidding of course; King has to be one of the most successful authors of all time).

Some deep philosophical questions lurk beneath all the creepy undead cats and kids and Wendigos: Would you abolish death if you could?  Might we be better beings without it?  Or is there some secret blessing dyed into the horrors of death, one that makes us the beautiful, tragic creatures we are?


See also my Goodreads review.