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The Limits of Horror: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (Part 12)
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The Limits of Horror: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (Part 12)
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on October 16, 2024
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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 36-37. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! Content warning for child death.
“It’s probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience… when the nightmare grows black enough, one… evil begets another, until finally blackness seems to cover everything… At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one’s sense of humor begins to reassert itself.”
Not that Louis Creed is thinking sanely following Gage’s funeral. Rational thought ceased well before the fistfight broke out at the funeral parlor.
Since the accident, Rachel has dragged herself around the house, hair uncombed, eyes blank. She speaks in disjointed, senseless phrases. Ellie, too, talks little. She carries a photo of herself and Gage everywhere she goes. Louis barely notices their condition; he constantly replays a mind-movie about what would have happened if he’d been quick enough to grab Gage. It’s his PA Steve who administers sedatives to Rachel and Ellie. It’s Jud who handles the funeral arrangements, as he did for Norma.
Steve and Jud stay with Rachel and Ellie while Louis goes to the funeral home for the morning viewing—not that Gage’s coffin is, or can, be open. Gage’s newest game had been to run away. Three days earlier, he ran down the lawn toward Route 15, heedless of Louis and Rachel’s yells to stop. Nor did Gage heed the drone of the approaching ten-wheeler. Louis made a desperate flying tackle, but his fingers slipped off Gage’s jacket, and then Gage was in the road, where the truck struck and dragged him down the road.
Louis endures the commiserations of friends and neighbors, absently counting how many times he hears each standard expression of sympathy. Then Rachel’s parents arrive. Louis is moved to forget his long quarrel with them, especially Irwin, who has never considered Louis a worthy husband for Rachel. But Irwin refuses to shake hands and pulls Dory away, to Gage’s small rosewood coffin.
Rachel manages to attend the afternoon viewing. At lunch, she bursts into tears. Louis can’t comfort her. Church, murderer of small creatures, somehow holds him back. It’s Steve who embraces her, his eyes reproaching Louis, while Jud’s stay lowered as if in shame.
In the afternoon, Irwin confronts Louis while Rachel is with Dory, smelling of Scotch. He’s just told Rachel that this is the inevitable result of marrying against her parents’ wishes. Louis is incredulous with horror. Irwin pours out a list of Louis’s crimes: how he lured Rachel into marriage, turning her into a “scullery maid,” how he let Irwin’s grandson be run down in the road like a “chipmunk.” He’s a killer of children!
In front of the mourners, Louis punches Irwin in the mouth. Irwin jostles Gage’s coffin and breaks a vase of flowers. Rachel rushes in and screams at Louis not to hurt her father. But it’s Irwin who chops Louis in the throat, then kicks him while he’s down. Still screaming, Rachel breaks from her mother. Louis manages to catch Irwin’s foot and trip him. When Irwin sprawls against the coffin, he sends it crashing to the floor. The casket latch breaks. Mercifully Gage doesn’t spill out, but Louis glimpses him before the lid falls shut. He sits on the floor, weeping, unable to respond to Rachel’s continued screams. A crazy image fills his mind: He’s at Disney World with Gage, and Gage is laughing as he shakes hands with Goofy.
Back home, he puts Rachel to bed and administers another sedating shot. He tries to apologize for the fight, but she shrugs him off. How bad is she? Pretty bad, she says. Terrible in fact. Louis has no answer. He’s suddenly resentful of her, Steve, all the mourners. Why must he be the “eternal supplier?” He can’t do much more for Ellie, who sits watching TV in her bedroom, squashed into Gage’s director’s chair and gripping his photo. She gets into bed, then calmly tells Louis she’s going to pray to God for Gage to come back. Don’t say God can’t bring people back to life, because she heard in Sunday School how Jesus brought back Lazarus. She’s going to carry the photo, sit in Gage’s chair, eat his favorite cereal, read his books. She’s going to get his things ready… in case.
She understands, Louis thinks, that someone has to keep Gage alive, at least in memory. He stays until she’s cried herself to sleep. Then he goes downstairs to get drunk. Church reclines opposite his chair, ready to run if Louis decides to dispense more kicks. Louis drinks to Gage, demands to know what Church has to say. Church only stares back with his dull, strange eyes. Eight or nine beers later, the thought comes naturally to Louis’s mind: When are you going to do it? When are you going to bury Gage in the annex to the Pet Sematary?
Lazarus, come forth.
A chill of “elemental force” shakes Louis. He remembers the afternoon when he carried Gage up to nap and was struck with cold premonition. He remembers Jud’s shock when he asked if anyone ever put a person in the Micmac burying ground. Don’t even think about that, but Louis has to. Church changed, but the family has adapted. Or is that rationalization? Church isn’t really a cat anymore. What if Gage came back… not human?
Still, the idea has glamour.
There’s a knock on the door. Louis overcomes his fear of what might be outside and opens to find Jud—and lets him in.
What’s Cyclopean: “…the day had sung and gibbered with absurdity” may honestly be the best use of “gibbered” I’ve encountered.
The Degenerate Dutch: The text keeps underscoring Irwin’s Jewishness. The Yiddish swearing, and the comparison to the at-the-time-current Israeli prime minister, don’t help. He’s the only character whose Judaism is emphasized, and the least sympathetic of the three Jewish characters; Rachel’s unobservant and seems not to be passing on any of the culture to her children.
Libronomicon: Louis speculates darkly on the purpose and title of the funeral guestbook: My Deathbook? Funeral Autographs? The Day We Planted Gage?
Alien concepts such as lunch are compared to Louis’s teenage science fiction reading: Heinlein, Leinster, and Dickson.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Black humor marks “the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down”. Not that “wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity” sounds all that appealing under the circumstances.
Anne’s Commentary
“It’s probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience.”
In his opening to Chapter 36, King echoes the solemn cadences of Lovecraft’s iconic “Call of Cthulhu” lead-in, while obliquely challenging its premise that the human mind is mercifully unable to “correlate all its contents.” By “contents,” Lovecraft means knowledge. By “any limit,” King refers to emotional capacity, specifically that for horror. He doesn’t think there’s any merciful cut-off point beyond which a person cannot be more horrified, nor should there be. Horror is a reaction to horrors, that is, to things both dreadful and evil, and horrors tend to breed like werebunnies, “horror spawn[ing] horror” until their “blackness seems to cover everything.”
Lovecraft imagines that if humanity—the grand collective “we”—ever integrates its “dissociated” bits of knowledge into a true understanding of reality, it will either retreat from that overarching knowledge into a safe new “dark age,” or it will “go mad.” Sticking to the individual human mind, King imagines a similar choice. If horrors (hence horror) are limitless, a person suffering from “a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity” must either fall back upon their sense of humor (their embrace of the irrational, of which both laughter and denial are tactics) or break down utterly bonkers (the irrational embracing the person in an inescapable bearhug.)
Louis Creed, steeped as he is in the horror of Gage’s death, has reached no ultimate either/or junction. He’s functioning within the immediate reality of his loss, barely engaging with burial preparations. His conspicuous failure is in supporting Rachel and Ellie; with two mind-movies constantly playing before his inner eyes – what did happen to Gage, what might have happened if only – he has little bandwidth for their needs. And there’s something beyond normal shock in his withdrawal. At the between-viewings restaurant lunch, Louis wants to go to his weeping wife, knows it’s his responsibility, but he can’t do it, and here’s why: “It was the cat that got in his way.”
We know, we know. Jud has said often enough that a resurrected Church is fruit of the seed Louis planted in Micmac ground, and so Louis’s to tend. He bought Church and all Church’s small victims. The terrible question is whether, in spite of Victor Pascow’s ghostly warnings and that on-the-stairs premonition of doom in September and those compounding weirdnesses en route to the Pet Sematary “annex,” he also bought Gage’s death on ill-omened Route 15.
Having bought the glamour of the secret place beyond the deadfall, having wanted to buy it, what will Louis buy next? What’s the biggest, baddest reason why Church gets in the way of Louis accepting his most critical post-Gage responsibilities?
Is it because Church is a constant proof that dead isn’t necessarily dead? That the living can coexist with the formerly loved undead with reasonable comfort? How much more than the living Church has Louis loved the living Gage?
How much more would he be able to love an undead Gage? After all, such a Gage would be able to go to Disney World with Louis. He’d able to laugh at a handshake from Goofy. That image comes so powerfully into Louis’s head at the nadir of the funeral home festivities, while he sits weeping on the floor by Gage’s coffin. It couldn’t have been just an exhausted bit of wishful thinking. It must have been another premonition, right? What about the wild idea he’d had when they first approached their new house in Ludlow, how sweet it would be to leave his travel-weary and irritable family behind, Church too, and run for a new life in Disney World. How much sweeter to run not all alone but with Gage, to whom Louis must owe a greater chance at another life than he’d could ever have owed to Church.
On the Thanksgiving night when Church died, Ellie dreamed in Chicago that her cat had been run over. In Chapter 37, she tells Louis that she believes Gage could return because of the Lazarus story she heard in Sunday school. I wonder if Ellie believes the more strongly in his potential revival because some similar clairvoyance has suggested there is someone who can bring about this miracle. Someone as near to her as God is supposed to be.
Someone who might play God, unless Jud has come to Louis on the night before his son’s burial for the reason I’m thinking.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Ow.
I read this week’s chapters. Then I hugged my wife. I didn’t hug my kids, because they were asleep and don’t appreciate getting woken up even when their mama has been shaken by a scary book—and they definitely didn’t want to hear about what made this particular book so scary.
Give me unnamable monsters. Give me reality-breaking apocalypses. Give me asshole narrators getting eaten by grues. All will get a more thoughtful analysis, and a happier reader, than a toddler killed by something that kills real toddlers every day.
As I said last time, “One chapter I can be rolling my eyes at Louis’s unthinking sexism and almost-gentle toxic masculinity, the next I can tear up over the all-too-adult emotions associated with parenting… and beg Louis to more regularly tell his son he loves him.” This week’s reading is very much the latter: brutal and effective, allowing little critical distance. Sometimes when I’m writing, I hit a scene where my mantra is “just write what’s true”. These are somehow both the hardest and easiest scenes to write. Hard because figuring out what’s true versus what’s authorial flinch is huge and raw. And easy because it’s raw; if you can get past that reluctance to face the thing on the page, it just comes pouring out. My suspicion is that King was in that space for this section. It’s all pain and all ugly, human responses to it.
This is not to say that we’re free of unthinking sexism—but we’re shown where it becomes unbearable. Female grief is treated as dangerous. Rachel and Ellie must be medicated, must have men judge whether they’re up for the funeral, must have their sanity judged based on the strange things that they say or don’t say in the aftermath of the unimaginable. That’s wildly unfair. But male grief is treated as unacceptable. Louis doesn’t get a sedative, just told to hold it together for his wife and daughter. He’s not allowed to not be up for the funeral, or to be going through motions beneath the ocean-deep weight of shock. Even his horrible father-in-law—Irwin says and does unforgiveable things because anger is his only acceptable outlet. No rich, loamy soil is allowed to flourish in a man’s heart. That’s wildly unfair, too.
But Louis assures the coffin seller that he and Rachel have never made distinctions about blue versus pink clothing.
Throughout these scenes, like Louis, we keep circling back to the gap between prophecy and aftermath. We get all the desperate counterfactual imaginings – Louis trying to wish himself into the world that King described in his introduction, the terrifying near-miss. We get increasingly layered levels of detail, with just enough held back to imply nightmarish images. We get the platitudes that friends and family offer, more for their own sakes than for the central mourners’. Louis absolutely does not want to consider the brevity and extent of his son’s suffering.
Jewish etiquette tip: “His memory for a blessing” is not only an appropriate platitude in most situations, but doesn’t claim to soften the bad thing that happened, and makes no assumptions about specific metaphysical beliefs. We can always hope that eventually the memory of the loved dead will give more comfort than pain. It even works for the un-loved dead, because you can get quite a lot of blessing from remembering that you don’t have to deal with them anymore.
Rachel’s father, for example – wouldn’t it be nice to not have to deal with him? And for the reader, wouldn’t it be nice to not have to wonder whether the rich, daughter-protecting, goyish-son-in-law-hating Jew is based on Shylock?
Then Louis is at long last home, barely able to hug his daughter and unable to comfort his wife, and the idea of mutual comfort stays unexamined. So beer it is, to cushion pain if not ease it, and to allow examination of a truly terrible idea.
It sure is terrible. And since we’re just at the beginning of Part II, it seems all too likely that Louis and Jud are likely to follow it—over the hill, through the woods, and all the way off a metaphorical cliff.
We’re taking a break next week, because Ruthanna’s traveling and doesn’t want to deal with time zone calculations. Join us again in two weeks for the all-too-online horror of Manish Melwani’s “Mammoth”.[end-mark]
The post The Limits of Horror: Stephen King’s <i>Pet Sematary</i> (Part 12) appeared first on Reactor.
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