Thoughts on old favourites, and how 'Pet Semetary' ties to the Dark Tower.
So -- despite yesterday's dismay -- I actually finished reading all the way through 'Pet Semetary'. It lasted three BART trips between Concord and San Francisco, which is about normal for an average-sized novel, especially one I've read before. ('The Stand' can last me as much as a week, whereas I'll read on Robin Cook thriller on the way to work, and another one on the way from work.) It's one of those books that I love and have loved since I first read it, and will doubtless love through however many readings I manage.
'Pet Semetary' is the book that King once said he put aside for years because it was too gruesome to finish, thus proving that once you've crossed a line, there's no going back, since several of his later works (I'm thinking specifically of 'Dreamcatcher') were just as full of gore, if not moreso. But at the time, 'Pet Semetary' was the living end. Pretty much literally. Sadly, despite this fact, it was lower on my list of forbidden books -- helpfully provided by my mother -- than the works of Heinlein, 'Christine', ''Salem's Lot' and anything by V.C. Andrews.
(I sometimes blame the fact that I am an obsessive Stephen King fan on the fact that he was one of the very few authors I was forbidden to read, during an era when my mother turned a blind eye towards my reading Poe, Clive Barker, Bradbury, Anne Rice and T.S. Eliot. But when I'm being more serious, I have to admit that I still don't care for Heinlein or Andrews, while King makes up more of my yearly volume of 'pages read' than any other author. So it's probably more serious and genuine affection than ongoing childhood rebellion.)
'Pet Semetary' is a perfectly lovely story about a perfectly lovely family, and when happens when they accidentally stumble into the grip of an ancient force that may or may not be actively evil, but is definitely actively wrong. Whether or not it's unnatural is never quite defined; on the one hand, death is described as being the most natural force of them all, and the forces of the Micmac burial grounds pervert and deny death. On the other hand, the trips to the mountain are described as being wrapped in the natural world, and the focal character muses on nature as an active and present force while he takes those journeys. What happens there is more than natural, perhaps, but -- in a book where death is hard and brutal twice, even as it's quick and clean twice -- the idea that death could be denied is never quite consigned to 'unnatural'. Just 'wrong'. I respect that; not all that is natural is right, and not all that is wrong is unnatural.
The writing in this book is just splendid. King is a storyteller; he's not a sophisticated one, not always, but he knows how to make you see people, understand them and sympathize with their problems, and he does all that before he hurts them so deeply that you actually understand why they do the horrible things they do. I can't say I would understand that dead was better, if I had the same chance to take it back.
And of course, there are the Dark Tower connections.
King has said more than once that he's been telling the story of the Tower since he could remember; more and more, I find myself looking at his early works in context of the Tower as a whole, and wondering whether he's ever told any other story. The Micmac Indians -- whose ground turned sour after the Wendigo touched it -- built their burial ground high against the sky, like a tower, and they built it in a spiral ('Desperation', 'The Regulators'). (You can also draw a connection between Tak and the Wendigo itself, although Tak never raised the dead and the Wendigo didn't appear to directly possess living flesh.) Victor Pascow, the jogger who serves as the book's distant psychopomp and gatekeeper, speaks in a tongue that looks very much like a proto-form of what will later become the Language of the Unformed. And of course there's the 'Insomnia' connection, since we see Atropos (servant of the Random) with one of Gage's sneakers -- the implication being that the Random killed him, which would make the Wendigo and its lands servants of the Random.
There are also connections to other books, some clear -- 'Cujo', ''Salem's Lot' -- and some more oblique -- 'IT'. But in the end, the shadow of the Tower falls over everything.
'Pet Semetary' is the book that King once said he put aside for years because it was too gruesome to finish, thus proving that once you've crossed a line, there's no going back, since several of his later works (I'm thinking specifically of 'Dreamcatcher') were just as full of gore, if not moreso. But at the time, 'Pet Semetary' was the living end. Pretty much literally. Sadly, despite this fact, it was lower on my list of forbidden books -- helpfully provided by my mother -- than the works of Heinlein, 'Christine', ''Salem's Lot' and anything by V.C. Andrews.
(I sometimes blame the fact that I am an obsessive Stephen King fan on the fact that he was one of the very few authors I was forbidden to read, during an era when my mother turned a blind eye towards my reading Poe, Clive Barker, Bradbury, Anne Rice and T.S. Eliot. But when I'm being more serious, I have to admit that I still don't care for Heinlein or Andrews, while King makes up more of my yearly volume of 'pages read' than any other author. So it's probably more serious and genuine affection than ongoing childhood rebellion.)
'Pet Semetary' is a perfectly lovely story about a perfectly lovely family, and when happens when they accidentally stumble into the grip of an ancient force that may or may not be actively evil, but is definitely actively wrong. Whether or not it's unnatural is never quite defined; on the one hand, death is described as being the most natural force of them all, and the forces of the Micmac burial grounds pervert and deny death. On the other hand, the trips to the mountain are described as being wrapped in the natural world, and the focal character muses on nature as an active and present force while he takes those journeys. What happens there is more than natural, perhaps, but -- in a book where death is hard and brutal twice, even as it's quick and clean twice -- the idea that death could be denied is never quite consigned to 'unnatural'. Just 'wrong'. I respect that; not all that is natural is right, and not all that is wrong is unnatural.
The writing in this book is just splendid. King is a storyteller; he's not a sophisticated one, not always, but he knows how to make you see people, understand them and sympathize with their problems, and he does all that before he hurts them so deeply that you actually understand why they do the horrible things they do. I can't say I would understand that dead was better, if I had the same chance to take it back.
And of course, there are the Dark Tower connections.
King has said more than once that he's been telling the story of the Tower since he could remember; more and more, I find myself looking at his early works in context of the Tower as a whole, and wondering whether he's ever told any other story. The Micmac Indians -- whose ground turned sour after the Wendigo touched it -- built their burial ground high against the sky, like a tower, and they built it in a spiral ('Desperation', 'The Regulators'). (You can also draw a connection between Tak and the Wendigo itself, although Tak never raised the dead and the Wendigo didn't appear to directly possess living flesh.) Victor Pascow, the jogger who serves as the book's distant psychopomp and gatekeeper, speaks in a tongue that looks very much like a proto-form of what will later become the Language of the Unformed. And of course there's the 'Insomnia' connection, since we see Atropos (servant of the Random) with one of Gage's sneakers -- the implication being that the Random killed him, which would make the Wendigo and its lands servants of the Random.
There are also connections to other books, some clear -- 'Cujo', ''Salem's Lot' -- and some more oblique -- 'IT'. But in the end, the shadow of the Tower falls over everything.