King's Highway pt. 58: Pet Sematary

THE NOVEL

Although it was nominated the year after it first appeared for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel (1984), neither Pet Sematary nor its author was reviewed particularly-favorably at the time. The New York Times expressed disappointment that "the horror, which, when the last drop of blood finally spills, (is no) worse than the experience of reading a 373-page version of W. W. Jacobs's famous short story, 'The Monkey's Paw.'" 

The reviewer also observes: "What has always made Mr. King so effective as a storyteller is his instinct for subtly exploiting the unconscious hostility and consequent guilt that men and women feel in the routine of living with each other and raising their children." True. This is as accurate as the previous comment re: the-experience-of-reading PS is off-the-mark.  

Kirkus also mentioned "Monkey's Paw" in its review, adding that "King's 400-page version reads like a monstrously padded short story, moving so slowly that every plot-turn becomes lumberingly predictable."

Its reputation has improved considerably over time - thankfully, as it's a funereally-good read, steeped in moral relativism and American Gothic Horror. I don't think it's perfect, but it works because it doesn't cheat: it ticks off each box of said genre with no apology and doesn't let you skip over any of the nitty-gritty. No, you have to dig the graves, climb the deadfalls, walk through the woods, and stay up grieving with no commercial break. 

I was unaware of the above reviews back in 1988 when I read it. At the time, it enjoyed the reputation of King's best novel among everyone I knew that had read it. Which was basically my buddy Chris and his older brother, my dentist, and my optometrist, all with whom I discussed a lot of King in those days. 

Reading this in 2012 "brought me back," no pun intended, and I had a strong associative-memory of being driven back and forth to those appointments and listening to Metallica's And Justice for All. At the time, the arrangement with my mother was that I could play my cassette on the way home after an appointment; on the way to, it was always Oldies 103.

Cover to the UK edition I read this time around. A side-note: it was cheaper to purchase this from a used-bookstore in UK, including the price of shipping, than it was to buy it locally. Always bizarre when that happens.

The story is like some negative print of A Christmas Carol. Where Ebeneezer Scrooge learns what he needs from his supernatural visitations to realize his salvation, Louis Creed, from the moment we meet him, is doomed. As is his family: of the four Creeds we meet (five, if you count Church the Cat, which I think we certainly should, so, five) all but one are dead by novel's end. (And the lone survivor is in the hospital, traumatized, under heavy sedation.) And where Scrooge's ghostly visitors are benevolent, Louis's are increasingly malevolent. Both works propose an epistemological system where supernatural forces from beyond the grave offer warnings and opportunities to the living; how they are heeded (or unheeded) determines everything else.

...Unaware of these other happenings, like slow-moving projectiles aimed not at where (Louis) was, but rather in the best ballistics tradition at the place where he would be...

It's a story that, from the dedication page to its last few sentences, is concerned with buried things, most particularly buried things that rest uneasily in the ground or in the unconscious. It's divided into three parts and an Epilogue. Part One, "The Pet Sematary," contains all that will resurface in parts two and three. The Creeds arrive at their new home in Ludlow, Maine. It lies between The Road, which is really an ominously-established highway where huge trucks barrel down the freeway, leaving a trail of dead animals on either side of it, and The Woods, through which a trail leads to the Pet Cemetery of the title. (The variant spelling comes from the crude, childlike scrawl on the weather-stained arch at its entrance) Beyond a deadfall-barrier at its edge lies a trail to the title for Part Two, "The Micmac Burial Ground," an otherworldly stony plain atop an ominous hill that lies under unrecognizable constellations. It is a supernatural place, where one hears horrifying lunatic laughter on approach and where time bends around itself. 

"It may sound like voices, but it's just the loons," Jud Crandall tells Louis. Although Jud is providing false assurance, here, loons are crazy-sounding, to be sure, and their mad cries reverberate through the North Woods.

Burial ground from the movie. Actually pretty much exactly how I pictured it from the book, so well done, movie.

And the Sematary itself. (I'll just stay with that spelling.)

What is buried there returns... though not like it was before. From a mixture of the burial ground and the buried-trauma of Rachel Creed comes the title for Part Three, "Oz The Gweat and Tewwible."

King says of this one:

"That book was pretty personal. Everything in it—up to the point where the little boy is killed in the road—everything is true. We moved into that house by the road. It was Orrington instead of Ludlow, but the big trucks did go by, and the old guy across the street did say, You just want to watch ’em around the road. We did go out in the field. We flew kites. We did go up and look at the pet cemetery. I did find my daughter’s cat, Smucky, dead in the road, run over. We buried him up in the pet cemetery, and I did hear Naomi out in the garage the night after we buried him. I heard all these popping noises—she was jumping up and down on packing material. She was crying and saying, Give me my cat back! Let God have his own cat! I just dumped that right into the book. And Owen really did go charging for the road. He was this little guy, probably two years old. I’m yelling, Don’t do that! And of course he runs faster and laughs, because that’s what they do at that age. I ran after him and gave him a flying tackle and pulled him down on the shoulder of the road, and a truck just thundered by him. So all of that went into the book. 

And then you say to yourself, You have to go a little bit further. If you’re going to take on this grieving process—what happens when you lose a kid—you ought to go all the way through it. And I did. I’m proud of that because I followed it all the way through, but it was so gruesome by the end of it, and so awful. I mean, there’s no hope for anybody at the end of that book."

Indeed. I suppose the last line is ambiguous enough where you don't know if Louis really lives or dies. (Though he is most certainly going to prison, if he does.)

The movie ends on a more definitive - but equally tragic - note.

There are many viewpoints on the phenomenon of sublimation, but the reader needn't concern his or her self too particularly with them. All that you need is spelled out or hinted-at-strongly-enough in the text itself.

"Louis thought [Rachel] might eventually get rid of this awful, rancid memory that had haunted her for so long... he knew that there are half-buried things in the terrain of any human life, and that human beings seem compelled to go back to these things and pull at them, even though they are cut. Tonight, Rachel had pulled almost all of it out, its nerve infected..."

Trauma that is not successfully excavated tends to come back with extreme prejudice, which is exactly what happens when Louis exhumes and re-buries their son Gage - run down in the road - in the burial ground beyond the Sematary.

I sympathize with the filmmakers, here; it's more or less impossible to convey on screen the Killer Gage of the novel.

Still, it leads to some unintentional comedy, as this clip demonstrates. His "signature giggle," in particular, is grating.

Gage Creed may be gone, but his sneaker will return in Insomnia.

The passages of the novel that describe the journeys to and from the burial ground are my favorite bits. King shines when he's walking in the woods. The grave-digging scenes are fine examples of suspense-writing. It's difficult to see how this tale could be told without them, though my thought while reading them was that they took up perhaps too much space. Speaking of, Louis got everything he needed to dig up his son's grave for $58.50. It'd be interesting to price the same items now; I bet it would be twice that.

The Micmacs themselves serve the story's themes of uneasy-burial and landscape-ghosts, as well. Jud describes them:

"They (were here) for a thousand years, or maybe it was two thousand - it's hard to tell, because they did not leave their mark deep on the land. And now they are gone again... same way we'll be gone, someday, although I guess our mark will go deeper, for better or worse. But (this place) will stay no matter who's here, Louis."

The Wendigo, that terrifying spirit of the North Woods, is the Trauma That Endures. Jud refers to Timmy Baterman - one of the "three ghosts" that visit Louis (in some form) - as "something that has been touched by the Wendigo. We "see" it in the shadows through Louis's eyes on his way to the burial ground with Gage. The Wendigo as a concept has always fascinated me, as has the tale of Jack Fiddler, who claimed to kill several of them; I've always wondered if he was just a serial killer who exploited the myth or if he was the Cree's real-life Van Helsing. (Cree/ Creed?) It is used to great effect, here, by King.

An illustration by Matt Fox for the Algernon Blackwood story, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, 1944.

SOME OTHER THOUGHTS

- The book is dedicated to Kirby McCauley. Whatever happened to that guy?

- Interesting fan theory on Norma Crandall can be found here on the SK Forum. If that doesn't open, the gist of it is that Norma died and returned to life via the burial ground and that this is Jud's secret (and ultimate doom). I don't think it's what King intended, myself, but it's a fun idea.

- At one point, Ellie mentions Little Black Sambo and Louis thinks "I'd have thought that would have become an un-book by now," i.e. something removed from schools in our thankfully-more-aware-of-offensive-racial-iconography era.

I don't think it's brought up here to deliberately evoke that idea of past-trauma buried in consciousness returning to bite you, though it's certainly worth noting how often this book "re-surfaces" (ahem - I've got digging things up on the mind) in King's work. It may even be mentioned as many times as Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." I don't have a running count or anything, or even a list of examples. That it's an incidental detail that resonates so well with the theme is probably just coincidence or luck, but we all know what Obi-Wan Kenobi has to say on that subject.

(Sambo's creator, by the by, is Helen Bannerman. Whether or not she's related to the late Castle Rock Sheriff is unknown.)

- Poor Church!

As far as abused-Creed-family-members go, Church wins hands-down. He's neutered, run over, covered in stank, kicked repeatedly, and then killed again. In the film, Church comes across as more malevolent; in the book, he's more a victim of circumstance. (I guess he does trip Louis when he tries to rescue Gage, but at that point, Louis has already abused him enough; I was cheering him on.)

- Poor Ellie, too; that kid's going to have quite a time getting over all this crap. Maybe she'll show up in Doctor Sleep.

- I didn't get a chance to listen to the radio serialization of the story, but it's out there.

THE MOVIE

Miko Hughes, then

Miko Hughes in Tropic Thunder (2008)

I somehow never saw this movie when it first came out (though I did have the Ramones tape that had the title-track; not one of their best. I loved it at the time) or any of the thousands of times it's been on cable since. A good overview of the recently-released Blu-Ray can be found here. "With a $57 million domestic gross, (it) became the most successful King film (up to that time), and it has only been eclipsed by three such efforts since (Misery, The Green Mile, and 1408)."

Successful at the box office, sure, but as an adaptation of the book, it's not-very. Dawn and I watched it last night. It has its moments. Judged against some of its contemporaries, it's probably more-than-acceptable. The burial ground/ cemetery/ real-Maine setting is cool, and the menace of The Road is conveyed well:

And Fred Gwynne gives an eccentric performance which is a little off-in-spots but still easily the best part of the movie.

The "Dead is Bett-uh" thing has definitely lived on in pop-cultural memory, for better or worse.

Mainly, the problems are these:

1) King's script makes some weird changes to the story: No Norma, but a maid-character named "Missy" is added (actually, the Creeds may have a laundry-lady, I can't recall offhand), and her death takes the place of Jud's wife's; what purpose does this change serve? Victor Pascow gets the "The soil of a man's heart is stonier, Louis" line; why? It makes little sense in its new context and is not reflected-back-upon by Louis at any point. Other puzzling changes: It is Jud and his friends who murder Bill Baterman and son and burn their home to the ground. (With no devilish smack talk from Tim before they do) Victor Pascow shows up, again, to warn Louis at the graveyard (And this daytime visit to the grave is a little odd... he ends up going back at night to exhume Gage's body, but we clearly see him throw a pick and shovel over the fence during the day. Huh? It seems needlessly confusing. I guess it's done to convey he struggled with the decision, or something, but it's not handled all that well.) Also, Steve Masterson is introduced only obliquely (he just sort of shows up at the funeral to restrain Louis) and his just-barely resisting the call of the Wendigo at novel's end is excised completely.

2) The casting. The girl playing Ellie is painful to watch in spots (or at least just annoying) but okay, maybe that's a judgment call. Doesn't dilute anything, really, for her character or place in the story. Rachel Creed, on the other hand,

is de-sexualized completely. If you recall from the book, she and Louis get it on a lot, which, I feel, adds good counterpoint; it helps sketch the humanity they slowly lose. But okay, maybe they were trying to keep it PG-13... except wait, it's rated R. Okay, well, maybe no one wanted to see Tasha Yar getting busy on fifty-foot screens. (Maybe Data. Maybe.) More importantly, her problem with death/ buried-trauma with Zelda is handled too breezily; it makes the scene where she recounts her sister's death seem like window-dressing rather than essential-characterization/establishment-of-theme. 

Speaking of Zelda, most everyone I've talked to about the movie mentions how scary the sequences with Zelda seemed to them back in the day. I can see how these scenes would have seemed creepy at the time, definitely, but they haven't aged well. 

Part of it is Perry Farrell's never-quite-disbelief-suspending performance as a little girl...

Okay, so it's not Perry Farrell, but Andrew Hubatsek. The "twisted sister" aspect is indeed gruesome in spots, but... I mean, it's far too obvious this is a guy in drag. Even for 1989 standards. Apparently, he was chosen because they couldn't find a girl "that skinny." This seems ridiculous to me

Zelda comes across as a pop-out scare (spinal-meningitis-'sploitation?) rather than a vehicle for Oz the Gweat and Tewwible.

Finally, Dale Midkiff is not a good choice for Louis Creed. Not only does he not seem like the character from the novel, he just isn't convincing as a doctor or a grieving father. The novel spends time making Louis's actions and his motivations, ambivalent as they are, believable; the film doesn't. He just mumbles and squints a lot.

3) The editing is erratic in key spots. Two scenes stand out: the sudden-switch to Victor Pascow being brought into the clinic at the University, and the sudden-switch from home-to-Gage's-funeral. They are too jarring, not in a gasp-inducing jump-cut way but in a deprive-the-scene-of-impact way. Establishment shots that could have gone a long way to better set the mood are missing, most particularly for Louis's ordeal at the graveyard and his journey back to the burial ground. The atmosphere from the book is lost, as a result, or at least much-watered-down. Not sure if this is a problem of the screenplay...

Another argument against a writer adapting his own material? GRRM seems to do ok. (shrugs)

or the director, Mary Lambert, whose other work is mainly in music video, though she did recently give the world Mega-Python vs. Gatoroid, memorable mainly for starring former 80s-"rivals" Tiffany and Debbie Gibson. There seems to be some historical revision going on whenever this comes up nowadays. The story becomes about what women directors in Hollywood have to overcome, and the work becomes brilliant/ visionary, no matter the content. Gosh, it's almost like that's a major, relentless problem these days, this sort of narrative framing/ conditioning. I realize there'll be those who just can't see that ever happening, and so it goes. Nothing I say or write can convince them, and the mere fact that I do is all they need to hear, yadda yadda. But, I'm sorry everyone: one's gender does not make one's filmmaking bad or good, the same way it doesn't make one's ideas any less/more brilliant (or awful.) People have just lost their minds. Not, again, like any of the so-afflicted would ever even consider the idea.

Whomever's fault it was, it definitely should have been fixed. As it stands, the film reads like a story with pages missing.

And 4) although this is admittedly very, very minor, during Rachel's flashback, she runs down the stairs screaming "Zelda's dead! Zelda's dead!" just like in the book, only she passes several "neighborhood kids" gathered around the door... what? Why are these kids here? Who are they? How did they get there? What's the point of adding them and introducing them this way?

So, final verdict, the power of the novel awaits effective realization onscreen. Not the worst thing I've ever seen and far from the worst-King-adaptation there is. Acceptable lazy-afternoon-fare. But with a little tightening up and some more thoughtful casting, it could have been so much better.

NEXT: Zeroing in on finishing/ ranking all the novellas and all the Bachmans. Or the "with Stewart O'Nan"s. Which will be complete first? Tune in to see, true believers!