Postmodern Gothic:

Stepen King’s Pet Sematary

Jesse W. Nash

Although sympathetic critics have given it an impressive literary lin-

eage, Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary has resisted easy categoriza-
tion. Mary Ferguson Pharr detects the influence of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, but she notes that King’s work is the least self-conscious
of many such variations (120). Tony Magistrale, in “Stephen King’s Pet
Sematary: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited” and in his book Landscape of
Fear: Stephen King5 American Gothic, finds a strong affinity in theme
and purpose with Nathaniel Hawthorne, among other New England
and/or transcendentalist writers. Slavoj Zizek relates Pet Sematary to the
tragedies of Sophocles (25-26).
One need not, however, give King such a distinguished pedigree to
appreciate Pet Sematary’s complexity or recognize its importance in
contemporary popular culture. To do so, one might suggest, runs counter
to the very spirit of King’s works. As he himself informs us in Douglas
Winter’s Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, King’s primary sources for
his novel are his own life experiences and fantasies, popular culture, and
his reading of archaic burial lore (145-146, 150). In other words, the key
to understanding Pet Sematary does not lie in the “classical” literary tra-
dition so much as in popular culture itself and how popular culture
appropriates, reworks, and re-presents more classical literary artifacts.
Pet Sematary’s connection to Shelley’s Frankenstein in particular
must be seen within the dynamics of a contemporary popular culture
matrix. In Danse Macabre, King refers to Frankenstein as “caught in a
kind of cultural echo chamber” (65). People are often less familiar with
Shelley’s actual text than they are re-presentations of the figure of
Frankenstein in popular culture. It is helpful to think of the echoes
Frankenstein sets in motion in terms of Clifford Geertz’ notion of “webs
of significance” (5). The webs in which King is enmeshed are not
entirely those of Shelley; even when he shares webs of significance with
Shelley, such as the problematic nature and popular fear of science and
technology, his attitude in regard to those webs is entirely different. For
example, in her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Shelley
151
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credits the ultimate origin of her novel to her husband’s and Lord
Byron’s rather tabloid, sensationalistic discussions of “Dr. Darwin,” but
she distances herself from those discussions, confessing that she does
not know if they are accurate depictions of what Darwin had actually
written or done (xxiv).
In Pet Sematary, on the other hand, King revels in the tabloid and
the sensational, using at one point in the novel the supposed authenticity
of the Shroud of Turin as an argument against scientific rationalism and
its debunking of the possibility of miracles (200). Along with “penis
envy” and the “oedipal conflict,” the Shroud is one of those strange
truths that Arnie Cunningham in Christine recognizes and to which he
subscribes (24). Similarly, to emphasize his preference of the sensational
over the purely realistic, King tells his readers in the introduction to
Skeleton Crew that in The Thorn Birds his “favorite part was when the
wicked old lady rotted and sprouted maggots in about sixteen hours”
(21).
In Frankenstein, Shelley’s focus is not on what is scientifically or
realistically possible but rather the moral dilemmas of modem human
beings. Pet Semtary, however, does want us to reconsider what is possi-
ble precisely because King is a child of the tabloid, the medical oddity,
and archaic lore. Therefore, if King is rewriting Frankenstein, he is
rewriting it from a vastly different personal, cultural, and historical per-
spective, and so much so, I would like to suggest, that Frankenstein and
Pet Semutury no longer share the same genre.
King’s novel is an example of what we might fruitfully think of as
“postmodem Gothic,” which is a transformation or historical mutation of
the traditional Gothic tale. Such a designation takes seriously King’s ties
to the traditional Gothic genre but also recognizes the influence of the
prevailing postmodernism of much of late twentieth century popular cul-
ture (see Collins). Such a designation has the added benefit of allowing
us to determine what is gained and what is lost in King’s transformation
of traditional literary forms. It will be suggested in this essay that King’s
postmodern Gothic is more amenable to popular or mass sentiment than
the traditional Gothic work, and thus King is more willing to tackle
explicitly cultural issues as opposed to the traditional Gothic preoccupa-
tion with personality and character. In the process, King is able to launch
a full frontal attack on the modem American experience, developing a
powerful and consistent cultural critique, using the voices of those he
understands to be typically marginalized in contemporary American
society, the child, the adolescent, the ordinary Joe and Josephine of
lower, middle, and rural America, the wise non-academic, and at least in
the case of Carrie, Verena Lovett forcefully argues, the tabooed, men-
struating woman (175).
 Postmodern Gothic. .. 153
What is lost in King’s mutation of the Gothic genre is more difficult
to grasp, especially since his Gothic fiction is often more successful in
portraying middle America than so-called “realistic” mainstream fiction
(Nash 38), but the problematic nature of his postmodern mutation cannot
be avoided. What is often lost in the gale of fright, supernatural menace,
and cynical social commentary is a certain sense of textual logic,
integrity, and purpose. Pet Semutary is a good instance of the dilemmas
King’s postmodern Gothic poses. In that novel, King gives us a cast of
characters whose actions and eventual fate are truly horrifying, but they
are placed in a logically inconsistent fictional universe, a universe so
supernaturally oppressive that they have no choice in the matter. Horror
is achieved at the expense of logic, but with the loss of logic, the novel’s
ability to address real problems in a real America is compromised. What
we must eventually fear in King’s fiction is not the real world of oppres-
sive parents and governments but the imaginary, but if this is the case,
King’s work loses its critical edge, its power to engage American soci-
ety. Thus, King’s greatest problem is a side effect of his greatest asset,
his postmodernism, his privileging of folk, archaic, and popular tradi-
tions over that of scientific rationalism.
This postmodern privileging of the popular and the archaic con-
verges nicely in Pet Semutary. If Rabelais is the master preserver of pop-
ular culture’s history of unrestrained and subversive laughter, as Bakhtin
argues (3-58), then Stephen King is the master of popular culture’s his-
tory of unrestrained, subversive, and thus unsettling fear. In the case of
Pet Sematary, the fear in question is the primordial fear of the dead and
the archaic forces associated with death and dying. Zizek is at least
partly correct when he notes that the “fundamental fantasy of contempo-
rary mass culture” is that “of a person who does not want to stay dead
but returns again and again to pose a threat to the living” (22).
Zizek’s description is lacking in two regards. First, the fantasy, as it
is rooted in the popular imagination and the archaic religious mind, is
based on a fear of the dead, and that fantasy is not that someone will
“want” to come back from the dead but that someone or something will
bring that person back. In Pet Sematary, it is not little Gage who wants
to come back; it is his father who will not let him go. A second and per-
haps even more significant aspect of this common fantasy is that it
expresses a pre-scientific or superstitious fear that death is not final, that
death can somehow be overturned, that one can be both dead and alive at
the same time. The importance of this fear is that it flies in the face of
what we know from our own experience and from what we know med-
ically and scientifically.
But it is precisely this superstitious fear that King privileges in his
critique of the American family and society in Pet Sematury. The fear he
154 Journal of Popular Culture
evokes is not escapist; it is evoked in earnest. It is obvious from King’s
comments in Winter’s work and his own Danse Macabre that he takes
his novel, its social commentary, and its supernatural ambience seri-
ously. Winter refers to King’s use of the supernatural as “rational super-
naturalism,” in which the order and facade of everyday life is overturned
(5-9). That is, King and his admirers tend to take his supernatural cre-
ations seriously, as more than literary creations, as in nineteenth century
ghost stories. These supernatural beings represent a popular and archaic
distrust of the scientific and the rational. In King’s hands, the supernat-
ural and the fear it generates do not offer an escape from the rigors of
culture, as in more traditional Gothic novels, but they offer an avenue by
which a direct confrontation with the problematic nature of the modem
American experience can be launched.
More often than not, the object of the supernatural attack in King’s
fiction, especially in Pet Sematary, is the modem family and its hapless
members. King’s postmodernism is nowhere more in evidence than in
his insistent deconstruction of the “magic circle” that is the modern
American family. An essential element of this deconstruction is King’s
privileging of adolescent discourse over that of adults and rationalism.
Adolescents must battle the supernatural because adults cannot or will
not, as in IT. Even when the supernatural is not introduced, as in Rage,
the adolescent is given a privileged place from which to speak, and to
speak unchallenged. The enemy of such adolescents, of course, is that
symbol of American modernism, the middle-class family. It is the family
that makes of adolescence such a gruesome age. According to King, it is
the sorry state of relationships within the family that makes the adoles-
cent vulnerable to the enticements of the supernatural, especially in
Christine. It is the fragile, illusory nature of the nuclear family that gets
Louis Creed in trouble in Pet Sematary. But one could easily point out
that King’s own “rage” in this instance is misplaced. The American
family is not designed to prepare its young for battles with the supernat-
ural. Whether or not such families do a good job of preparing their mem-
bers for the adult world is another question, but that is not the focus of
Pet Sematary or his other postmodern Gothic novels. The irony is some-
what incredible. The American family is judged to be inadequate
because it does not prepare its members to deal with the imaginary.
In King’s works, it is as if troubled, hypocritical families attract the
attention of the supernatural. There is a logical problem, however, with
King’s presentation in these novels, one that also plagues and eventually
undermines the textual integrity of Pet Sematary. The supernatural in
King’s fiction is rather catholic in its choice of families. In IT, the chil-
dren of both “healthy” families and obviously dysfunctional ones are tar-
 Postmodern Gothic ... 155
geted. In Christine, Arnie Cunningham is an easy mark for the supernat-
ural because of his rebellion against an overbearing mother and a weak
father, but so is his friend Dennis who comes from a more normal and
loving family. In Pet Semutary, ancient supernatural forces toy with the
Creeds, a young family riddled with problems, but also with an older
more mature family, their neighbors, the Crandalls. Thus, whether or not
one comes from a healthy or a dysfunctional family makes little differ-
ence in the battle with the supernatural.
So we have to wonder if, logically, the attack of the supernatural has
anything to do with the health or structure of the American family. If this
is the case, we have to wonder what role a critique of the American
family actually plays in the postmodern Gothic novel. The American
family is not the source of the evil that threatens people, and it is not
ultimately the family itself that attracts evil. More often than not, it is the
child, the adolescent, and the “adolescing” adult, to use Erikson’s apt
description (91), who attract evil because they are in rebellion against
the adult world. King’s privileging of the discourse of adolescents and
the discourse of fear traps him. The ultimate complaint of adolescents is
that they are misunderstood by adults, but King’s monsters and supernat-
ural beings seem to understand them well enough, that they are akin to
monsters in their own right, giving awkward credence to what adults
have feared all along, that their children are monsters, that they might
want to eat their parents, as they do in both Salem’s Lot and Pet
Semutury. In short, what King says he is doing in his novels is not what
his novels actually do. In fact, his novels work so well as artifacts of
popular culture because that old subversive fear that popular culture has
preserved since archaic times is rarely challenged. But if the supernat-
ural, the object of archaic and popular fear, is so catholic in its choice of
families and individuals, what difference does family structure make?
One can only assume that because King’s work is popular and postmod-
em, it must include an attack on adulthood and the family even if that
attack has no logical place in the tale. One can go even further. In the
battle with the supernatural, as we learn in IT, coming from a dysfunc-
tional family may be to one’s benefit.
Such contradictions especially complicate the narrative logic of Pet
Sematary and Louis Creed’s symbolic role in that narrative. A physician,
Creed moves his wife, two children, and cat from Chicago and the
tyranny of his wife’s Jewish natal family to Ludlow, Maine, which is not
as bucolic as it seems. Creed finds a father-figure in his older neighbor,
Jud Crandall, but it is this father-figure who introduces him to the old
Indian burial ground that lies just beyond the pet cemetery and who first
suggests that he might use the burial ground to resurrect the cat Church.
156 Journal of Popular Culture
When he resurrects Church, Creed only learns what the town and
Crandall have known for a long time: the dead do come back, but
“changed,” if not psychotic. But this does not stop Creed from eventu-
ally burying his son and then his wife in the burial ground, bringing
them both back but with homfying consequences.
It is clear from King’s own comments that it would be a mistake to
think of Creed as a hero (Winter 145-54). King is actually quite critical
of his protagonist. According to King, Creed “never ceases to be the
rational man” (Winter 151). It is not clear, though, how Creed is a ratio-
nalist, and on this point, the inherent weaknesses in King’s postmodern
Gothic resurface. More specifically, Creed is made to represent some-
thing he is not, rational. One does not have to be a clinical psychologist
to realize early on in the novel that Creed is acting and behaving irra-
tionally.
Inside his new house, Creed experiences a “premonition of horror”
(35). One might accuse Creed of being rational for not taking seriously
that premonition, but of far more importance is Creed’s seemingly irra-
tional avoidance of an everyday problem, the potentially dangerous loca-
tion of his home near a road frequented by speeding trucks, and yet he
takes no precautions to protect his two young children, Ellie and Gage,
by erecting a fence. When the family cat Church is presumably killed by
one of those trucks, Creed responds irrationally. He does not build a
fence at that point, heeding a real warning; no, he considers resurrecting
Church. So central is the cat to the health of his family-and thus the
significance of the cat’s name-that Creed takes the cat to the old Indian
burial ground and resurrects him. When Gage is killed by still another of
those trucks, he, too, is resurrected in spite of how badly Church turns
out. Gage goes on a killing spree, committing the ultimate atrocity,
killing and cannibalizing his own mother. Still, Creed does not learn
from his mistake. He takes the corpse of his wife to the old Indian burial
ground and resurrects her. No, Creed is not a rational man, but that is
because King as author will not let him be rational.
As Natalie Schroeder cautions us, the causes of Creed’s behavior are
ultimately “ambiguous” (137). By the time we are near the end of the
novel, it is not clear if Creed acts as he does to protect the “magic circle”
of his family, or once he has been introduced to the magic circle of the
Pet Sematary and what lies beyond it, the magic circle of Little God
Swamp, if it is not the powers of that other, more primordial magic circle
guiding and pulling him. By the end of the novel, we know that the
powers at work in the Indian burial ground have the ability to put Jud to
sleep and thus block his possible interference with Creed’s plans to
exhume and rebury Gage; they warn the older man to stay out of things
 Postmodern Gothic... 157
(321). At roughly the same time, as Creed is exhuming his son’s body, he
feels the power of the “place” growing and calling out to him (323).
Even earlier, Jud voices his fear that the “place” had arranged the death
of little Gage (274-75), and he, too, can feel the power of the place
growing (319). The driver of the truck which hits Gage cannot explain
why he speeded up instead of slowing down. Something came over him,
and he put the “pedal to the metal” (293). And Creed himself is put into
a deep sleep while Gage returns to wreck havoc at the Crandall home
(376). Because of the nature of the supernatural involvement in his
world and its manifest power, Creed does not really have the freedom to
be rational. What would it mean to be rational in the world of the
Wendigo?
Because we are in the midst of a postmodern Gothic universe in Pet
Sematury, wherein the premonition is privileged over reason, where the
dream should be taken seriously, and where ghosts have more authority
than scientists, we might expect King’s portrayal of the ghost Victor
Pascow to be less contradictory, but we would be wrong. Pascow dies in
the infirmary while under Creed’s care. Before he dies, he issues a warn-
ing. “In the Pet Sernatury,” he begins but falters and then eventually
says, “It’s not the real cemetery” (73-74). Later that night, now as a
ghost, Pascow visits Creed again. With dried blood on his ghostly face,
Pascow seems to Creed to be an “Indian” (83). His appearance is note-
worthy. We are tempted to think of him as the representative of a more
archaic, more natural form of religion, but Pascow’s warnings only seem
to plant the seed of temptation in Creed’s mind. Creed fails to heed
Pascow’s warnings, but Creed’s daughter, Ellie, does heed those warn-
ings and yet, because she does heed those warnings, she actually con-
tributes to a deepening of the tragedy that is unfolding in Ludlow.
While in Chicago visiting her grandparents, and presumably under
the influence of Pascow, Ellie dreams the truth about Church, that he has
been killed (172). Back in Ludlow, after Gage’s death, she dreams that
Creed, too, will die (300). On the plane trip back to her grandparents
after the funeral, she dreams of Gage coming back and retrieving a
scalpel from his father’s medicine bag (3 12). Pascow personally visits
her dreams to warn her that her father is in danger (316). But Pascow’s
warnings have a tragic consequence. Because of Ellie’s dreams, Rachel
decides to make a return trip to Ludlow to check on her husband.
Basically, Ellie and Pascow send Rachel to a rather gruesome death.
It is not clear if Pascow represents forces inimical to the Wendigo of
the Indian burial ground or if he himself is an “Indian” spirit. In any
case, the forces at work in Ludlow are so powerful that they can insure
that Rachel and Ellie will be away when Creed exhumes and reburies
158 Journal of Popular Culture
Gage. And those forces can extend their power beyond the realm of
Ludlow. There are sudden flight cancellations that make it possible for
them to fly to Chicago with Rachel’s parents immediately after Gage’s
funeral (295). When it becomes apparent that something is wrong in
Ludlow, Rachel is able to get a ticket back to Ludlow, but it is in a
roundabout, time-consuming fashion. She thanks “God” for saving her
the last seats on the various legs of her flight back (326), but it is obvi-
ous that she is being kept out of the way until it is too late for either her
or Creed. She, like her husband, has been carefully orchestrated from the
very beginning and orchestrated in such a way that they cannot resist.
In this postmodern Gothic novel, King weaves together archaic lore
and myth and the postmodern rebellion against rationalism. In fact, the
key to understanding Pet Sematary and appreciating its rich complexity
lies in noting the tension in that text between the supernatural and the
modem American experience. The ultimate symbol King uses to denote
the Mystery of death in Pet Sematary is a circle or spiral (286), and the
ultimate symbol of the modern American family, referred to cynically as
a “magic circle’’ (121), is Church the family cat. The modern American
family’s bonds are so fragile that it is held together by a pet, and when
that pet is killed, those bonds are so threatened that a man of reason,
Louis Creed, attempts the forbidden and what we normally think of as
impossible.
The problem with King’s postmodern Gothic universe is that in that
universe Creed can resurrect his son. When King discusses Creed, he
evaluates him as if he lived in our world and not in the Gothic world
King has created for him. King’s momentary lapses in this regard indi-
cate a greater problem with many postmodern Gothic artifacts of popular
culture. It is a problem King shares with such diverse authors as Frank
Miller, Dean Koontz, John Saul, and Anne Rice, to mention but a few.
The very real problems these authors wish to address, such as the nature
of the American family, child abuse, crime, and gender, are addressed in
such mythologically-exaggerated worlds that those worlds become the
problem to be overcome, and not the issues that first inspired them. In
Pet Sematary, King has transformed the Gothic tale in an exciting and
truly horrifying fashion, but in doing so, he has made something so
much more frightening that we forget to confront death.
One of the things that holds the American family together, King tells
us in Pet Sematary, is its fear and avoidance of death. Unfortunately, in
the “flash” of the novel, the true horror of death, its mundane character
and its very ordinariness, is lost, and that defeats King’s stated purpose
in writing the novel. He tells Douglas Winter that he “had never had to
deal with the consequences of death on a rational level” (147).The novel
 Postmodern Gothic... 159
was to be such an exercise, but very quickly the novel ceased to be an
investigation of death and funerals. As King tells Winter, when the ideas
came for the novel, and they came very quickly, it was not the death of a
cat or the possible death of his own son that triggered his emotional
response. It was the possibility that they might come back from the dead
(Winter 146). In this sense, King’s novel does not deal with death. It
deals with a fear that replaces the fear of death, and that fear is the fear
of the return of the dead. Such a replacement is a defense mechanism no
doubt, and that is probably why King’s novel is so popular and why the
ideas that form the basis for that novel are so persistent in folk and popu-
lar culture. Death may well be an issue the American family and society
will not face, but then neither will Stephen King.

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Jesse W. Nash,Adult Education, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL.