Once buried in the “cemetery of stuffed animals,” the dead come back to life to kill those left behind.
The story shows the fear of losing one’s family because of addiction – in the book, the dead son returns as a zombie. And that’s the tragedy of this story: it’s also about not being able to bring back the past. Should we play God if we could?
Stephen King is often very good at portraying father-son relationships, of course those that fail: “The Shining” is an apt one, as is the relationship between Roland and his foster son Jake Chambers in the “Dark Tower” saga. The description in which father and son Creed go flying a kite one last time is tragically clear, while we have already learned that the little one will die. When five-year-old Gage is hit by a truck – it was a matter of centimeters – his father, the doctor Louis Creed, does what he had previously done with his run-over cat: he buries him in the Indian cemetery. The cat came back to its kind of life smelly, staggering, lazy, passive-aggressive. Gage will be back too, and family peace isn’t on his mind.
According to King’s own story, “Pet Sematary” was a “drawer novel”; he carried the story around with him, found it too hard, and only published it to fulfill his contract with the publisher Doubleday, from which he had little interest would later break up in a dispute over money.
What would we have missed! King threw everything he had into this story. The undead, especially Timmy Baterman, who stares pointlessly into the sun (he was the first person buried in the Indian cemetery), are far more effective than the “Classic Monster” army from “It”. The best scenes have perfect timing: little Gage’s coffin falls from the pedestal after a fight among relatives, his little arm is briefly visible under the raised lid; and the real horror, that is the point of “The Cuddly Toy Cemetery”, is not lurking in the cuddly toy cemetery, but in what lies hidden behind it – the sacred territory of the Indians, where the Winnebago is up to its whispering mischief in the fog.
A story about death
From the first pages it’s all about death: how do you deal with it, what do you tell the children. Can we hope for a rebirth? Louis Creed digs, digs, bleeds and suffers like few of King’s heroes in order to get to the body of his son and initiate his resurrection. Of all people, Creed’s skeptical wife Rachel, who appears more sensible than anyone else, is overwhelmed by her emotions: she immediately takes her dead son, who has returned, into her arms. All doubts are wiped away. Big mistake. She doesn’t see what he’s hiding behind his back. It can be read as King’s cynical commentary on religion and its resurrection myths: believers are blinded by optimism and hope for eternal life.
Rachel’s husband will know what to do later. It’s about the question of whether we can let the dead and thus the past rest. But what’s more worrying is that wouldn’t we all make the same decision as Louis Creed?
This text is part of ROLLING STONE’s large Stephen King ranking