Apologies for the break in posting on this – I meant to have them all up before the end of October but some life events got in the way. I think it’s okay though, there’s no reason not to stretch spooky season right into Samhain. After all, the veil is thin. Now, a bit about the uncanniness of grief.
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I think Pet Sematary must be one of King’s most famous novels, because I bet there are a lot of people who have not read it or seen one of the movie adaptations that could probably still give a general synopsis through cultural osmosis. Folks who haven’t read The Shining or ‘Salem’s Lot can probably say that they’re about “a family cooped up in a mountain hotel whose patriarch goes crazy over winter” and “vampires,” but I think there are a good number of people who can get a lot more specific than that about Pet Sematary.
The novel is about a young family, led by father and husband Louis, who moves to a new house in a new state (Maine, of course). The house is near a pet cemetery (spelled “Pet Sematary” on the sign) and new neighbor Jud tells Louis that it is more than it appears. When the family cat is killed on the road, Louis buries him in the pet sematary. As the old song goes, “the cat came back, the very next day.” But it comes back different.
And when the family’s son, two-year-old Gage, is tragically killed in similar circumstances, Louis, driven mad by grief, buries his child in the pet sematary. And he, too, comes back different.
And as Jud said, “sometimes dead is better.”
That’s the short of it, but the long of it is so much more. See, Louis isn’t driven mad by grief (at least not at first). His decision to bury Gage in the pet sematary isn’t impulsive, but methodical. He makes a pros and cons list, for Pete’s sake. And yet, knowing that the likelihood that Gage will come back “normal” is low, knowing that the cat came back wrong and knowing the stories that Jud had told about animals and once a person who came back wrong — and worse — he goes ahead with it anyway. Is it selfishness, grief, or simply love that blinds him to the truth of what will happen?
Stephen King loves to foreshadow upcoming horrors in the most casual way, adding a jarring tonal moment to the buildup of his terrors, and he employs that to incredible effect in this novel. I can’t imagine what it was like to read Pet Sematary when it was first released, to get through a couple hundred pages about this lovely, wholesome family and their sweet little boy, and then be hit with the line: “And Gage, who by now had only two months left to live…” without knowing it was coming. I think I would be sick.
In horror we talk a lot about the unheimlich, the uncanny. According to Freud, the unheimlich is not only about fear caused by the unknown, but specifically “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” For example, the uncanny valley, in which things like wax figures or lifelike robots or realistic CGI figures inspire fear or revulsion because of the way they come close to resembling humanity but do not cross the threshold, as I discussed last week in my essay on doppelgangers.
Likewise, folklore and superstition throughout history and across cultures has spoken of creatures that have mostly humanoid shapes or traits but demonstrate inhuman behaviors or feature “off” proportions that identify them as “other.”
Some people hypothesize that the uncanny valley is an evolutionary trait; that we have evolved to feel aversion toward things that look almost but not quite human as a way of avoiding close contact with corpses and the dangerously contagious. Others have a more supernatural-tinged theory: that our fear of the not-quite-human is meant to protect us from those that may appear human but are not: vampires, werewolves, the undead, and so on.
Whatever level of credulity you have for such things, the uncanny valley is a real phenomenon, and the “came back wrong,” trope in horror is, for me, a pinnacle of the form. Someone you care about leaves or is taken, and they return, they’re not the same. Maybe you can’t quite put your finger on it, but something’s not right. What horror, to see the face of someone you love, and there’s something about them that you no longer recognize. This is why the hordes of shambling, nameless zombies don’t hit as hard emotionally as the one who was once known.
Sometimes the victims do not even know that they have come back wrong, or claim not to. The newly turned vampire appears at its beloved’s door, entreating them to be allowed across the threshold. They do not know what has happened to them, or why they are so thirsty. Or so they say. How much of them is still “them”, and how much is now some other thing?
One of the masterful elements in the narrative of Pet Sematary is the fate of Church the cat. Because while Church comes back different, dull and quiet and odd, he doesn’t come back evil. That would be too easy. If Church came back and immediately attacked Ellie, that is to say if he came back so wrong that it couldn’t be explained away, that you couldn’t talk yourself out of noticing it, then Lewis would have been that much less likely to attempt to bring Gage back.
But although Church comes back different enough that even in Rachel and Ellie, who don’t know what happened to him, begin to find him unsettling (as does Lewis, although he knows why), he isn’t overtly “wrong,” and Lewis is able to justify that even if Gage came back similarly different he would still love his son the same.
Horror often requires that characters don’t know what genre they’re in. What I mean by this is that horror requires characters to make choices that they wouldn’t make if they knew they were in a horror story. People often criticize the decisions made by characters in horror books and movies, asking why they would open that closet door in their child’s bedroom or go investigate that sound in their backyard at night, but if you’re not aware that you’re in a world where there could be a boogeyman lying in wait, why wouldn’t you?
In contrast, Louis is perfectly aware that he may be living a horror story. He knows that unnatural things have occurred, and he has heard tales from Jud about when those things have gone especially awry. Gage could come back normal, dulled, or evil; Louis knows all of these to be possibilities. He weighs up the odds, and decides to take the risk anyway. It comes at a horrible cost, but how can we judge him? If it was our child, our grief, wouldn’t we do the same? Or at least consider it?
In a way, isn’t grief an emotion of the unheimlich? There’s a quote by writer Jamie Anderson that “grief is love with no place to go.” Grief takes an emotion with which we are familiar, love, and transforms it into something that is a distortion of what was once known.
After fear, naturally, grief is the most prevalent emotion in horror, with the horror itself often serving as a metaphor for grief. From Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, we see themes of grief and grief personified (monster-nified?) as horror throughout the genre.
The horror of Pet Sematary is not only in the unheimlich of Gage’s return — the known and loved quantity of Louis’s son returning as something that was once “long familiar” and is now unknown — but also that our own understanding of the novel as a domestic story suddenly twisted into something unsettling as love becomes grief, a familiar emotion distorted into its uncanny foil.
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Next week’s unit and reading list:
Unit 4: Uncanny Architecture
Primary recommendations:
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Hereditary (dir. Ari Aster)
The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick)
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Secondary recommendations:
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
Backrooms (dir. Kane Parsons)
The City & The City by China Miéville
Doctor Who
