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 43-45. The novel was first published in 1983. Spoilers ahead! Ongoing content warning for child death.
The day after Gage’s burial, Louis brings Rachel and Ellie to the airport for their flight to Chicago. Ellie has seemed distant all morning. Irwin and Dory Goldman join them, Irwin with an embarrassed glance at Louis. So the old man must have been drunk when he apologized.
Louis takes Ellie aside to assure her that she won’t be in trouble for missing school and that he and Irwin aren’t “pissed off” at each other. But Ellie is scared. She’s dreamed that at the funeral, Gage’s coffin was empty. Back at home, his crib was also empty except for dirt. Just dreams, Louis says, but he’s chilled. Ellie wants to stay in Ludlow; unsettlingly, she accepts Louis’s promise he’ll soon join the family with only renewed silence. Just before she and Rachel board, she tells Louis she’s not afraid for herself, but for him. She gives him one last look of “naked terror.”
* * *
As Louis leaves the airport, he realizes that, yes, he’s really going through with Gage’s resurrection. He stops at a hardware store to buy a hooded flashlight, digging tools, rope, work gloves, and a canvas tarp. He explains to the clerk that he needs to dig up his noncompliant septic tank sans nosy neighbors. He crams the gear into his Civic hatchback. If he returns to Ludlow, Jud Crandall may spot the tools and come to conclusions.
Instead of driving home, he takes a motel room before the night’s “wild work.” Sleep eludes him as he goes over his plans. He feels that “madness [is] all around, close, hunting him,” even while he “[walks] the balance beam of rationality.”
The plan: He’ll disinter Gage, then fill the grave in, drive back to Ludlow and… take a walk behind his house. If Gage returns, it will either be as himself, whole or “slowed,” or it will be as some monster or corpse-possessing demon. Either way, they’ll be alone in the house, so Louis can “make a diagnosis.” If he decides Gage can be reintegrated into the family, fine. If he comes back like Timmy Baterman, Louis will kill “him” and return the body to the Pleasantview Cemetery. Not to the Pet Sematary.
If Gage returns successfully, they’ll check into a hotel while Louis liquidates the family finances and calls for Rachel and Ellie to join them. They’ll escape to somewhere new, forge new identities. He remembers his moving day fantasy of running away to Florida. He sleeps at last, while Ellie wakes screaming midflight from a nightmare of Gage alive again and armed with a scalpel from Louis’s bag.
* * *
By the time they reach Chicago, Ellie’s in a state of “low hysteria” and Rachel’s very frightened. While the Goldmans collect their luggage, she takes a nauseated Ellie to a restroom. She tells Rachel she’s scared something’s wrong with Louis. On the plane, her dream was about being in the Pet Sematary with a person called “Paxcow” who said Louis was going there, and then “something terrible” would happen. Paxcow was sent to help her Daddy but can’t “interfere.”
When Rachel remembers the student who died on Louis’s first day in the infirmary, Victor Pascow, fear galvanizes her. She calls home on a payphone, but Louis doesn’t answer. She calls the infirmary, but Nurse Charlton hasn’t seen or heard from him. Rachel’s mind races. How could Ellie have known Pascow’s name when Rachel had kept that incident from her, as she’d kept all things related to death? Was Ellie having a “psychic flash of some sort”? And if so, what was threatening her Daddy? Perhaps—
Thoughts of suicide, committed at home, finally alone?
Rachel calls Jud, who’s surprised to hear about their trip. Was it Louis’s idea they should visit the Goldmans? When Rachel answers yes, Jud’s pause is long. Then he asks Rachel to describe Ellie’s dream.
Libronomicon: Dory Goldman fails, nervously, to read Erica Jong. Amid offerings of Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, Ellie wants to read a book that even Louis knows belongs under The Degenerate Dutch. And Louis quotes a “Victorian novel” regarding “wild work ahead tonight”—the source is not the appropriate-to-grave-robbery Frankenstein but the more ironically relevant Dracula, where the work in question involves putting down the undead.
The Degenerate Dutch: Aside from that unfortunate copy of Little Black Sambo, Rachel encounters graffiti about the creator of the indoor latrine being a “sexist pig.” Unclear if he’s being blamed for the extremely blame-worthy pay toilets.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Louis feels like he’s “walking along a narrow beam over a gulf of insanity. Madness was all around him, softly fluttering as the wings of night-hunting owls with great golden eyes: he was heading into madness… He walked the balance beam of rationality”. In fact, it’s not so much a balance beam of rationality as a narrow trench of madness. He could climb out so easily, but…
Anne’s Commentary
These chapters had me reviewing the entire novel so far, trying to figure out the psychic flashes that strike first Louis, then Ellie. By Chapter 44, Louis has had, in addition to the “flashes,” enough down-and-dirty encounters with the inexplicable not to “balk at the idea of monsters, or even of daemons, discorporeal beings of evil from the outerworld which might well take charge of a reanimated body”.
The first foreshadowings of disaster are completely explicable. The Creeds arrive in Ludlow exhausted and edgy. Three mini-crises occur in quick succession: Louis can’t find the house keys, Ellie falls off a swing, and Gage takes a bee-sting. Nothing supernatural there, just bad luck. Nor does Jud’s caution to watch the “yowwuns” around truck-heavy Route 15 have to be more than good advice to newcomers. Together, though, these events cast clouds over the narrative atmosphere.
And, given the author, the reader may well read much into those shadows.
Chapter 7 introduces the possibly supernatural in Louis’s “premonition of horror and darkness” on the sunlit stairs of their new home. For extra chills, Louis has an “out of nowhere” memory of his Uncle Carl’s coffin showroom while settling Gage in his crib. Coffins and cribs, not an auspicious juxtaposition. Why should Louis make it right then? Has he hit a cold-spot in the house, or perhaps one in the flux of future time?
Less readily dismissed supernatural stuff occurs in Chapters 12 and 16. Dying, Victor Pascow speaks to Louis in the voices of ancient Micmacs. Then Pascow’s apparition leads Louis to the Pet Sematary and warns him against going beyond the deadfall barrier. While Louis might credit the moribund conversation to his own stress, he definitely walked somewhere given the dirt and pine needles in his bed. But couldn’t sleepwalking be another manifestation of stress?
In Chapter 20, right after Nora Crandall’s first heart attack (helluva intimation of mortality), Louis hears Pascow’s dragging footsteps on the stairs. He stops another visitation by saying “No”—and finds no walking corpse when he opens the bedroom door. Must have been another dream, however much Louis feels otherwise. Still, warning what might Pascow have offered this time? Not to go with Jud to the Pet Sematary—and beyond—after Church’s upcoming run-in with a truck?
After Church’s interment in the Micmac burial ground, Pascow again ascends the stairs. An exhausted Louis is on the cusp of sleep, but permanently dismisses Pascow with the thought: “Let me alone, what’s done is done and what’s dead is dead.”
Pascow doesn’t come back, but in Chapter 25, after Louis has convinced himself that dead is indeed dead, undead Church returns. Essentially, this marks the end of Louis’s denial.
Significantly, it marks the beginning of Ellie’s “psychic flashes.” If I haven’t missed something, Ellie never shows paranormal abilities prior to Chapter 28, when she returns from Thanksgiving having dreamt that Church was run over. Rachel adds that Ellie woke up screaming over the weekend. That means Ellie’s dream wasn’t prescient, since Church died on Thanksgiving Day, two or three days before she dreamed about his accident. Maybe we could call her dream delayed clairvoyance, or, to be skeptical, an aftermath of her earlier dread that Church might die. That earlier dread seems like a natural inference from her visit to the Sematary.
Less clearly natural is Ellie’s conviction that the Christian god of her Sunday school could bring Gage back to life. To demonstrate her faith, she keeps Gage’s photograph and belongings close, saving them for his return. Is this desperate wishful thinking, or has she come to her own understanding that resurrection is possible—look at Church!
Ellie goes full-blown sibyl in this week’s chapters. Leaving Ludlow, she tells Louis about dreams of an empty coffin, a dirt-filled crib. In flight, she again wakes screaming, this time from a dream that Gage has returned and armed himself with a “knife” from Daddy’s MD bag. At the Chicago airport, she shares more details, including “Paxcow’s” warning. Realizing “Paxcow” must be the Victor Pascow whom Louis watched die, Rachel’s shocked into believing Ellie’s had a true vision. Poor Ellie, about time someone believed her. Jud Crandall will be the second person to believe. Whether he can do anything remains to be seen.
Having mapped out these weird goings-on, I’m still left wondering what two forces are contending for the soul of Louis Creed. There do seem to be two, the power-entity-whatever centered in the Micmac burial ground and the power-entity-whatever that “sent” Pascow to forewarn Louis. Can it be as simple as Good versus Evil, God versus Devil, Old/Outer One versus rival Old/Outer One?
If such opposites can be called “simple.”
As I read the situation: Having failed to influence Louis, Pascow and/or his Sender have switched to influencing Ellie. They don’t seem to be targeting Jud as an ally, though their malevolent Opposite may have done so, and succeeded in the crucial matter of Jud introducing Louis to their resurrection magic.
Jud, in that, you were a bad spiritual father to Louis. Can you make up for it by keeping him from revisiting the burial ground? At this point, with Louis having gone cold and “unplugged from his [living] people,” I fear he won’t be stopping himself.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Is King stretching out this not-too-late-to-turn-back period of terrible decision making? Or does it only feel that way because of the artificially slow pace at which we go through longreads? Or—does it feel that way because King, like me, really doesn’t want to get to the actual plunge?
I’ve mentioned previously that Pet Sematary gets a lot of power from anticipation that tips over the cliff into Cassandran prophecy. Putting on my cognitive psychology hat for a moment, a key part of engagement in fiction is participatory responses, the technical term for yelling at horror protagonists to please for the love of all deities not open that door. Or that recently-covered grave (Allbritton & Gerrig, 1991, hi there Richard!)1. So it makes sense to slo-mo Louis’s “completely rational” planning process. And to add as many opportunities as possible for him to turn back, or be forced to turn back by wife, daughter, or father figure. Will Jud get there in time to stop him? Will Pascow find a more effective warning method? Will Ellie’s psychic flashes get specific enough to be more useful? No, absolutely not. But we can hope. We can’t help hoping.
Poor Ellie. I catch in her a glimpse of Carrie and Charlie. Young girls, in King’s work, are always bearers of great power but insufficient opportunity for responsibility. And they always suffer for it. Ellie gets no advantage from not being the pivotal character in this one. At least Rachel is paying attention—even if she’s still at the stage of trying to come up with rational explanations.
Speaking of rationality, Louis is a prime illustration of how smart people can use it to be incredibly stupid. He’s calculated the odds and the options. He’s got everything worked out. He’s absolutely confident that if “Gage” is actually some demonic evil, he will be able to “diagnose” and “treat” that “condition,” and will totally not talk himself into believing that it’s just the same mental disability that caused his revulsion at undead Church. Rachel and Ellie—Ellie who said she’d be fine if Church died now—will certainly follow him cheerfully into new identities in Florida, abandoning grandparents and friends.
This is fine.
There’s only so much of a pass you can give a guy for not having seen his book cover. Or even for being willing to do anything to get his kid back. If he didn’t know it was a terrible idea, he wouldn’t be isolating himself quite so firmly from all possible argument. But oh, this is such a believable chain of bad decisions. I’m clinging to that chain by my fingernails, terrified of what happens when we reach the point of no return.
It does make me think about how changes to society, and changes to technology, alter horror. At one point our household GM refused to run games taking place after 2001, on the theory that cell phones ruined adventures. We’re currently playing a game where everyone has special deity-provided smartphones, so he got over it. But it does make adventures different. In the early 80s, Louis could reasonably imagine abandoning his life, and getting a job at Disneyland under a false name. Renting a new house, too, as easily as he got a hotel room under “Dee Dee Ramone.” The clerk presumably didn’t think the good doctor looked much like a punk musician—but he didn’t care, and neither did the hotel policies or local laws. I promise our younger readers that all of this was perfectly realistic. (Maybe? Not sure how far ahead of its time Disney was on panopti-policy. But it’s at least plausible.)
Contrast that with “Mammoth” and how it leverages the horror of not being able to get away from communications. Go back a few decades, and the hunter who can’t be escaped is a fantastical fear. The King in Yellow at least has covers that can be closed—indeed, with good enough judgment, never opened. The Ring is on videotape, and you might be saved by a particularly old and crotchety VCR. But in 2025, Louis’s best bet would be to keep the camera running throughout his amateur necromancy, start an online reality series about his hot new parenting trend—and hope that he doesn’t draw any worse criticism than the sad beige moms.
Next week, our new robot overlords are more disturbing than expected in Abigail Guerrero’s “Cartesiana.” You can find it here in Voidspace, or in the first issue of Skull and Laurel.
