The Pops (2): Pet Sematary, Stephen King

Stephen King is as obvious a choice for the Pops as Shakespeare is for the Classics side, and presents an equally challenging problem of selection. Of course I was going to have to do a King novel, but which one? I wanted it to be one I hadn't read, but considering that Mr. King is (and I'm quoting the jacket blurb here) "the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers," it was clear that my own dabbling had barely scratched the surface and I would still have a wide range of material to choose from.

In the end I chose Pet Sematary for three reasons: (1) it is generally considered to be one of his better efforts; (2) its subject matter is pretty much pure horror, so I wouldn't be drawn into evaluating King's experiments with mixing genres (experiments that seem to me peripheral to what he's all about anyway); and (3) I saw the movie version back in 1989, and can still remember how vile it was. Which, given all of the shit I was enjoying in the 1980s, is really saying something. Was it the book's fault? Some part of me wanted to go back and find out.

So much for the selection process. Having made my choice, and duly read the book, I thought a good place to begin this consideration would be with some comparisons to Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. I know this is only the second book to come up on my list of the Pops, but I wondered if there were any common denominators already starting to take shape.

One that struck me right away was the conventionality. Now I don't mean by this anything to do with the conventions of literary genres. What I mean is the kind of thing people mean when they talk about the conservatism of the traditional mystery novel, which sees crime as the upsetting of a social and moral order that can only be re-established through the operation of (natural) justice and the exercise of reason and method. The world of the mystery is one of laws and the Law. Evil exists, but it has a rational explanation - the motive for the crime - that can be discovered, understood, and dealt with accordingly. This is clearly operative in Murder on the Orient Express, where even the crime itself becomes a non-crime when it's placed within this larger context ("Society has already condemned him - we were only carrying out the sentence.")

King's horror novels inhabit the same moral universe. Instead of the body in the library upsetting everything there is an intrusion of supernatural evil. And note the adjective. King has little sense of human evil - the world of malignant motives like lust and greed that fuel the murder mystery plot. For King evil is always something out of nature and the human sphere. People do terrible things because they are possessed by demonic, or daemonic, forces. There are many weak characters in his books, a weakness that makes them especially susceptible to the influence of evil suggestions, but few characters who are inherently bad. In turn, the social order that the evil disrupts is usually seen as benign, if not downright idyllic. The "big, old New England colonial" in Ludlow that the Creeds move into is typical, as is Louis's soon-to-be-adopted habit of drinking beer on the porch with his neighbour in the evening, and all of the little domestic touches he captures so well. The Creeds are good people, their neighbours are the very salt of the earth, Ludlow is a nice Norman Rockwell kind of town. Which is all a way of raising the stakes for what's about to happen. 

King loves to take these secure, domestic worlds and moral comfort zones and give them a good shaking. He can't resist setting us up all over again near the end of this book as Louis imagines the next family to move into his cursed house:

A young married couple perhaps, with no children (but with hopes and plans). Bright young marrieds with a taste for Mondavi wine and Löwenbräu beer - he would be in charge of the Northeast Bank's credit department perhaps, she with a dental hygienist's credential or maybe three years-experience as an optometrist's assistant. He would split half a cord of wood for the fireplace, she would wear high-waisted corduroy pants and walk in Mrs. Vinton's field, collecting November's fall grasses for a table centerpiece, her hair in a ponytail, the brightest thing under the gray skies, totally unaware that an invisible Vulture rode the air currents overhead.

And so it begins, as it always begins with King. You have to feel safe before you can feel threatened; at ease before the uneasiness starts. And at the same time, it's often the matter-of-fact consequences of the inversion of the proper order, or its dissolution into violent chaos, that is finally scarier than any of his monsters. What is the scariest part of this book? What aspect of it most feeds on our anxieties? The zombies? Or seeing how easily such a nice, modern, nuclear family falls apart?

If this underlying, conservative, "family values" sense of order is something King's book shares with Christie's, there is also one big difference. This is psychology. As we saw, Christie has little interest in getting inside her characters' heads. And of course there are obvious reasons why she wouldn't want to. It might give something away. King's approach is quite different. He isn't interested in types, and is comfortable with a point-of-view that frequently goes in-and-out of his characters' minds, usually presenting their thoughts in italics. 

Why? Because he wants us to feel their confusion and terror. We are trapped in Louis's head most of the book, and really only get outside it after he's gone insane.  The perspective also works because King has an incredible gift for capturing the directness of consciousness in language. He doesn't write the way people talk as much as the way people think. Understanding, sensation, and emotion are expressed in forms other than dialogue. When Louis considers his climbing of the dangerous deadfall to be an act of "utter assholery" it's not something he says, even to himself. It's just a thought. And here he is a little later approaching the burial ground:

  Louis began to shudder all over. His flesh - particularly that of his lower belly - began to creep. Yes, creep was the right word; his flesh actually seemed to be moving on his body.

What a terrific way to energize the cliché of creeping flesh - localizing it in a place you don't expect it (the lower belly?), and then, not hiding from it, but insisting on its physiological truth. And we are in Louis's head again, feeling the creep and testifying to its truth.

The book is full of this sort of immediacy, which also has the petty humour of the real, unspoken truth and mental detail. Louis's rage at his father-in-law is one great example:"He bought her six dresses and I brought her goddamn cat back from the dead, so who loves her more?" Another is the feel of his punch connecting with the same man's mouth: "Beneath the flesh of his father-in-law's lips he could feel the stern, unyielding regularity of his dentures." King's description of  that punch, beginning with the way the old man's "lips squash and splay back" and then following through until Louis's knuckles come up against the unyielding dentures, is first-rate.

As is a lot of the writing. Granted this is one well-padded book, but the suspense is professionally ratcheted up and King is always handy with a descriptive turn of phrase. I loved the horizon "the color of faded denim," the "chilly rind of moon," the way Louis's stomach gives "a great, unlovely lurch" while he tends to the dying Pascow. But how scary is it? And what is scary about a Stephen King novel anyway?

This gets me back to the film version. I think what I hated the most about that movie was its presentation of Rachel's sister Zelda, who is crippled with spinal meningitis. What I found repellent about it was the way Zelda, cruelly afflicted with a real degenerative disease, was made into a grotesque monster. Is that in the book as well? You bet (though without the obscene make-up used to transform  Zelda into something scarcely human in the movie). And did it make me feel the same way? Was I outraged at King's lack of sensitivity? His political in-correctness toward the disabled?

A little less so, because I think I appreciate what he's doing more. In the first place, he's writing a horror novel and that means nothing's sacred. You have to believe you're in a world where anything goes and nothing is going to be left unsaid. The other thing you have to consider is where King locates our sense of horror. Here's something I said about that in a review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon:

"King's primary insight into horror is that what scares us as adults is the same as what scared us when we were kids. As he has stated elsewhere, the best horror 'knocks the adult props out from under us and tumbles us back down the slide into childhood.' That is why so many of his novels, like this one, have children as the major characters, and play on archetypal childhood fears.

As part of the same pattern, figures normally associated by children with security or authority are routinely transformed into frightening parodies. Hostile or ineffective parents, savage family pets, diabolical dollies, and maniac cops are front-and-center in his fiction."

So . . . are crippled people scary monsters? Yes. Just like old women are all witches. This is how a child views the world (and Rachel's memories of Zelda are all childhood memories). Soul is form: heroes are handsome and beautiful, while the old and the disfigured are evil. It's a fairy-tale world, but when we're talking about horror we're talking about pressing some very primitive buttons. And once that social order I started talking about is gone, once the family structure has broken down and even the cat and the next-door neighbour have turned against you, it's "back down the slide into childhood." Childhood: that time of total insecurity when you could believe anything, even stories about dead people coming back to life. Is it any surprise that our last sight of Louis before his final transformation is of a man curled up in a ball, hiding in a corner, sucking his thumb? 

I think this is a very good book, and I wouldn't be surprised if it stays with us. In addition to telling a great little story, King is an author who captures "the way we live now" better than almost any other writer of popular fiction I can think of. His pop culture asides aren't tossed in for ironic effect, but appear as actual things - the plastic detritus and mental furniture of modern life. How many literary novels have the same attention to detail, the same realistic weight? All too few.

So do I have anything bad to say? Well, I have to admit that I've rarely enjoyed the payoff in a King novel. There's no denying he's a master of suspense, but I'm never satisfied with what's finally revealed behind the squeaky door. I don't know what we're supposed to make of the evil Spirit of the Woods with the horns and the forked tongue here, but I wish King had left it out. It seems cartoonish and unnecessary, especially since it doesn't explain anything. But  having said that, I did like the little twist at the end. And did I detect a tip-of-the-hat to Matheson's I Am Legend? In such an omnivorously allusive text, it seems anything can come back to life.