A Materialist Critique of the Settler Occupation of Maine in Stephen King’S Pet Sematary

A Materialist Critique of the Settler Occupation of Maine

in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

Nathan Cleaver

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree

of Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

December 2020

ii A Materialist Critique of the Settler Occupation of Maine

in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

Nathan Cleaver

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Stacey Balkan, Department of English, and has been approved by all members of the supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Stacey Balkan, Ph.D. Thesis Advisor

______Taylor Hagood, Ph.D.

______Shelby Johnson, Ph.D.

______Oliver Buckton, Ph.D. Chair, Department of English

______Michael J. Horswell, Ph.D. Dean, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

______ Robert W. Stackman Jr., Ph.D. Date Dean, Graduate College

iii

Acknowledgements

While it may seem to those closest to me that this thesis is the result of countless hours

spent quietly by myself, I am deeply indebted to those who have provided me with

constant support.

Thank you to Dr. Stacey Balkan for hearing my ideas, validating my process, and gently

reorienting me when necessary. To Dr. Shelby Johnson and her great reading

suggestions. To Dr. Taylor Hagood for making late night classes fun.

Thank you for all the hours spent in CU 311 with friends and colleagues I will never

forget. Finishing this project and degree without you has felt near impossible.

Thank you to my loving wife, Jeannine, whose hard work and support made this possible

in the first place.

And, last but not least, thank you to my lovely cats whose constant reminders to take

breaks was much appreciated and almost always completely necessary.

Abstract

Author: Nathan Cleaver

Title: A Materialist Critique of the Settler Occupation of Maine in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Stacey Balkan

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2020

This project seeks to give Stephen King and Pet Sematary full consideration through applying a multi-faceted ecocritical approach to a novel so clearly founded on the relationship between the land and its inhabitants. Through my analysis of the environment’s role in Pet Sematary, I will engage with important questions asked by both

Historical and New Materialists in order to examine as completely as possible the relationship between Indigenous peoples and colonist conceptions of property, land use, and nonhuman agency present in the pages. Study of this sort engages in a critique of settler colonial ideals through a thorough examination of one of popular culture’s most successful and apparently errant offenders of intentional appropriation of Indigenous belief. Ultimately, this project seeks to reclaim not only Pet Sematary or King’s oeuvre, but the horror genre more broadly. Given the genre’s affordances for critiquing material histories, this project asserts horror’s utility for the development of new understandings of old fears and particularly as a means of asserting nonhuman agency.

A Materialist Critique of the Settler Occupation of Maine

in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

INTRODUCTION: Horror, King, and the Possibility of Revisiting Old Fears With New

Understandings ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE: Violent Dispossession and Colonial Hubris in Ludlow ...... 14

CHAPTER TWO: A Potent Nonhuman Agency ...... 49

CONCLUSION: Reclaiming Tentacularity in Horror ...... 76

WORKS CITED ...... 84

Introduction:

Horror, King, and the Possibility of Revisiting Old Fears With New Understandings

“Like the rides in the amusement park which mimic violent death, the tale of horror is a chance to

examine what’s going on behind doors which we usually keep double-locked. Yet the human

imagination is not content with locked doors.”

Stephen King, Danse Macabre

Let’s face it, horror gets a bad rap. It scares us, makes us feel uncomfortable, and often devolves into grotesqueries where other genres do not. However, as King notes above, hidden just beneath the skin is a body rife with critiques of hegemonic cultural representations, insidious family dynamics, the representation and experience of mental health problems, trauma, and so much more. A story told with the express purpose of causing fear can be seen in the ancient folk tales across the world. Even though, at its inception, Gothic fiction was derided by Enlightenment contemporaries for not depicting factual life, the genre often portrayed deeply embedded horrors that stemmed from very real historical events surrounding the religious inquisitions of the early 1100s. Papal authority sanctioned inquisitors’ use of torture in the early 1200s, giving way to brutal acts of torment and mutilation so often pointed to as a weakness of the genre. The first

Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto in 1764, introduced curiosity and fear into the literary canon whereas Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein presented a conception of scientific

belief into her tale of dread. Over time, writers such as Edgar Allen Poe and E.T.A.

Hoffman imbued their monsters with psychological traits and symbolism. The horror genre’s ability to embody these sorts of elements in flawed characters, ghosts, or monsters presents a unique opportunity to not only feel the weight of frightening experience but to understand the contexts that drive these fears.

After a brief lull during WW2, horror’s popularity resurfaced in the United States during the political and cultural unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. Largely spurred by the publication of Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin, The Other by Tom Tryon, and The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty, horror moved out of the pulps and into novel form. These three novels experienced great critical and commercial success upon release and were ultimately made into films that transfixed the nation during the tumultuous end of the

Vietnam War and beginning of the Cold War; effectively causing what is affectionately called “the horror boom.” Soon after, a wealth of authors emerged to capitalize on the boom. Among these authors, and perhaps the most well-known, is Stephen King. His publication of Carrie in 1974 was the first of sixty-one novels to be released up until

2020 with no signs of slowing. King’s narratives have kept the popular consciousness engrossed through his careful development of a fictional Maine with an entangled history that bleeds into each novel.

In the middle and late 2010s, horror again resurfaced as not only a commercial work horse but as an ample source of cultural critique specifically surrounding racial dispossession and settler expansion. Get Out (2017), a film whose director – Jordan Peale

– has called a social thriller, depicts internalized racism and neo-slavery in a “post-race”

America. Peale’s second film, Us (2019), offers an embodiment of what W.E.B. Dubois

called Double Consciousness1 through a social program’s (Hands Across America) cloning of participants and these double’s ultimate fight to gain supremacy and identity over the original. Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) offers a tale of generational choices enacting present trauma whereas his next film, Midsommar (2019), explores the possibility for benevolent euthanasia and communal living in the midst of troublingly violent sacrifice. Blood Quantum (2019) depicts a world in which Canadian First Nations peoples must fend off a zombie apocalypse that their blood makes them immune to. The world constantly takes bites out of the edges of the First Nations and other Indigenous peoples’ land and horror gives the opportunity for not only an assertion of Indigenous strength and sovereignty but a reclamation of the reservation’s defensibility. Stephen

King’s novels and films have also enjoyed this renaissance with remakes of both IT (2017 and 2019) and Pet Sematary (2019). Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians

(2020) and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020) are only two novels that have made significant critical impact. Television shows like The Haunting of Hill House

(2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020) take horror novels previously written and exemplify the necessity for revisitation with added understanding of slavery, racial violence, and settler dispossession and the fear these works portray by capturing the public’s attention and using their platform to embody the lasting trauma of previously conceived notions of the gender roles of the nuclear family and the Jim Crow South. Revisiting horror can be seen as trauma work; the necessary action of reopening that which scared or harmed a person in order to shed light and face that fear, work towards mending their relationship with that memory, and start to carve out a new way forward.

1 Dubois, W.E.B. “Strivings of the Negro People.” The Atlantic, August 1897. 3

Horror and the Environment

In 2020, it isn’t all that surprising that creators are turning to horror to represent the world around them. The world is quite a horrific place and there is no shortage of appalling headlines. Discriminatory police brutality committed against people of color too often resulting in death. A global pandemic has cordoned off a great deal of the country’s population in their homes for months on end. In the midst of impending climate catastrophe, the electoral college forces politicians to uphold fracking as a perfectly reasonable mode of extracting energy so as not to lose Pennsylvania’s votes. Through all of this, humanity faces an existential challenge over the fate of planetary habitability.

Earth is warming at an alarming rate and politicians continue to ignore well-founded scientific theories and studies. In the United States, California and other Western states have seen a rise in wildfires that have claimed homes and lives. Hurricanes batter the coasts with increased frequency and potency. Despite this, climate change denial is preached by the White House and climate conspiracies still make their rounds on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok. The existential nature of a warming planet is rife for horrific representation. The horror boom of the 1970s previously discussed held host to a great many of narratives in which the environment rose and attacked humans. Novels such as The Auctioneer (1975) and Harvest Home (1973) meld an invading Other with the environment to critique the division between urban, suburban, and country but also expose the fear felt by humans when confronted by forms of matter perceived as outside the human self. King himself has published many short stories and novels in and around the 1970s dealing with horror and the environment: The Stand

(1978), ‘Salem’s Lot (1975), Graveyard Shift (1978), Strawberry Spring (1978), and

Children of the Corn (1978). Each of these stories similarly portray the environment as aggressive and harmful, an outsider looking to inflict harm.

Explorations into the darker corners of the human’s relationship to the environment has gained traction in critical communities under the name ecoGothic or ecohorror studies. While environmental criticism initially rejected a call for the illustration of a negative relationship to the environment, scholars like Simon Estok asserted that

The ecophobic condition exists on a spectrum and can embody fear, contempt,

indifference, or lack of mindfulness (or some combination of these) towards the

natural environment. While its genetic origins have functioned, in part, to

preserve our species, the ecophobic condition has also greatly serviced growth

economies and ideological interests. (35)

Ecophobia, for Estok, is less about a negative relationship and more about simply understanding the genetic origins of the human’s understanding of nature and how, in a time of unprecedented growth, we have not moved so far away from our genetic fears.

Retreading horror novels in search of representations of the nonhuman, how they are materialized, treated, and interacted with, can help us understand where our consideration of the environment as something to be conquered or destroyed has come from and why

(other than impending climate disaster) it persists to the present day.

The environment pervades horror in a seemingly negative way, from The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), to The Haunting of Hill House (1959), to Pet Sematary

(1983). However, as time has marched on and human-caused climate change has become a scientific assertation, horror has adapted to representing a new relationship between the

human and nonhuman – with room for a newfound optimism through fear. Rather than instantiate extant invasion narratives usually associated with extraterrestrial visitation,

Jeff Vandermeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) wraps up a new relationship between the human and the nonhuman with the confusion of postmodernity by depicting a wayward entity that crash lands on Earth and begins assimilating all forms of matter together in an existential effort to recreate its home planet. Another example of a move from simple pandemic to contagion forced assimilation and evolution is Mike Carey’s

The Girl With All the Gifts (2014). Rather than retread old fear-based zombie narratives,

Carey’s story centers around a young girl who has contracted the fungal infection that turns humans into flesh-craving “hungries”. However, Carey’s twist is more in line with

Vandemeer’s perception of the relationship between human and nonhuman when a small group of children turned hungries are coherent and purported to be a sort of Zarathustran way forward for humanity. A less optimistic but thematically similar rendition of the fungal infection is Naughty Dog’s hit videogames The Last of Us (2013) and The Last of

Us Part 2 (2020). The Last of Us series depicts a cordyceps fungal infection that melds with humans and turns them into a wide variety of zombified monsters depending on how long the fungus has been allowed to grow in their system.2 Each of these stories, while some are more optimistic than others, call for the supplanting of humans as primary forms of matter and depict a world in which assimilation with the nonhuman is not a choice, falling in line with Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis.

In 2016, Donna Haraway theorized that rather than wait for “a comic faith in technofixes” regarding the planet’s impending destruction, or belief that “the game is

2 While a wildly less optimistic opinion of human/fungal relations, the series is due to capitalize on the recent horror boom and receive the HBO treatment in 2021. 6

over, it’s too late, there’s no sense trying to make anything better, or at least no sense having any active trust in each other working and playing for a resurgent world,” that the best hope for dealing with our current planetary predicament is for us to do the work to address the problem – rather than fleeing from it – and learn to live better with companion species. Sympoiesis, for Haraway, is understanding that “critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile” (97). Haraway goes further to state that “Critters – human and not – become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding”

(97). 3 This sort of relationship between human and nonhuman has been embraced and bolstered through many instances of contemporary horror narratives, as stated previously.

However, Haraway also states that “we relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings” (97). This sort of call for sympoiesis is radically optimistic and calls for the composting of all extant narratives: past, present, future, positive, negative. In embracing horror for the genre ripe for optimistic interrogation of old fears as it has proved to be, we can re-examine instances of ecophobia while using not only their original contexts, but employ newfound understandings of matter and be able to learn to face and live with our previous misunderstandings of the environment and rejoice in the potentiality for the instantiation of a new narrative.

King, the Environment, and the Treatment of Indigenous Epistemes

3 Critters, for Haraway, refers to all living things on earth. 7

Stephen King’s oeuvre is a good place to rethink our previous readings and apply a contemporary understanding of author, intent, and matter. Since Carrie, King has published a plethora of novels and short stories that found Maine and America as a place filled with terrors that lie just beneath the surface of society. King’s novels and short stories certainly feature a wide array of cultures as inspiration, including Kachina dolls and other ritualistic practices to denote non-Western ideologies as mysterious and potentially frightening. However, the bulk of the truly misguided use of Indigenous peoples as objects of fear has been committed by those taking creative liberties with his texts, not King himself. The feud between Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick over the treatment of the original text of The Shining is legendary4, but the film’s inclusion of

Indigenous iconography into the Overlook Hotel as sources of mysterious environmental horror has been adopted as King’s fault in the public consciousness. However, no

Indigenous iconography exists in the original text and are all result of Kubrick’s direction. The more recent re-release of IT, directed by Anthony Muschetti, attributes the

Ritual of Chüd – a mystical solution to Derry’s conflict with Pennywise the Clown – to an Indigenous tribe’s faith. In the novel, however, the Ritual of Chüd is passed to the

4 In a 2006 interview with The Paris Review King was asked what he thought about Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, to which he responded “Too cold. No sense of emotional investment in the family whatsoever on his part. I felt that the treatment of Shelley Duvall as Wendy—I mean, talk about insulting to women. She’s basically a scream machine. There’s no sense of her involvement in the family dynamic at all. And Kubrick didn’t seem to have any idea that Jack Nicholson was playing the same motorcycle psycho that he played in all those biker films he did—Hells Angels on Wheels, The Wild Ride, The Rebel Rousers, and Easy Rider. The guy is crazy. So where is the tragedy if the guy shows up for his job interview and he’s already bonkers? No, I hated what Kubrick did with that.” The interviewer then asked if he had worked with Kubrick at all during the development of the film, to which King replied “No. My screenplay for The Shining became the basis for the television miniseries later on. But I doubt Kubrick ever read it before making his film. He knew what he wanted to do with the story, and he hired the novelist Diane Johnson to write a draft of the screenplay based on what he wanted to emphasize. Then he redid it himself. I was really disappointed. It’s certainly beautiful to look at: gorgeous sets, all those Steadicam shots. I used to call it a Cadillac with no engine in it,” essentially removing any sort of blame possible for the Indigenous iconography present at the Overlook Hotel. 8

children by Maturin, a planetary sized turtle that lives in the Macroverse. Pet Sematary is one of the only instances where King directly uses Indigenous folklore to tell his horror tale. Due to this, the novel, and its author, have been derided as being just another example of xenophobic appropriation and the stripping of agency from Indigenous peoples. However, while these critiques are not totally unfounded, the text provides plenty of opportunity for a more nuanced reading of Indigenous peoples through an understanding of both anthropocentric and more non-anthropocentric material relationships and agencies within the novel.

King, in Danse Macabre – a thorough study of the horror genre – highlights the genre’s ability to reaffirm the norms of society through combat with the abnormal and ultimate triumph as a typified instantiation of some semblance of normalcy or by showing the reader “what awful things happen to people who venture into taboo lands”

(421). In his study, King uses “one pompously academic metaphor” in “suggesting that the horror tale generally details the outbreak of some Dionysian madness in an

Apollonian existence, and that the horror will continue until the Dionysian forces have been repelled and the Apollonian norm restored again” (422). Many of King’s novels follow this arc and the hero often triumphs over the forces of evil and restores some semblance of normative society. In IT, Pennywise’s murderous control over Derry is finally thwarted and, after much of the town is destroyed, it is rebuilt anew. The Dead

Zone ends with the protagonist’s death, but only after Johnny is able to effectively end a corrupt politician’s campaign. The Stand sees humanity do righteous battle first against a pandemic, then against each other, and finally move away from their idyllic post- apocalyptic childhood to re-found the police force and American normalization of the use

of firearms. Even King’s self-proclaimed magnum opus, The Dark Tower series, ends with the hope of the cycle changing and allowing Roland Deschain to achieve his long- awaited goals of saving the worlds. On one level, Stephen King’s novels seek to frighten readers through frequent descent into the Dionysian chaos he references. On another level, however, King’s work seeks to expose that which frightens and interrogate why that fear might be so deeply embedded into the American unconscious. The insidiousness of what lies just beneath the surface of American “every towns” factors heavily into

King’s narratives and fictional Maine.

The novels that do not end in good triumphing over evil and a return to “the

Apollonian norm” (422) is a far shorter list and Pet Sematary stands at the forefront as being one of King’s most pessimistic and horrifying novels. Rather than having chaos devolve from an established norm, King places an ordinary family in the midst of a seemingly chaotic ecological system that preys upon their bodies. The Creeds move to

Ludlow so that the father, Louis, can take a position at the local college as Director of

Medicine. The initial death of his daughter’s cat, Church, drives Louis’ newfound friend

Jud Crandall to bring him to the Micmac Burial Ground to bury it. Jud doesn’t inform

Louis of his intentions, rather he simply asks “do you love [your daughter]?” (King 112).

After they bury the cat, he returns from the dead, his daughter never knew, and all is well.

But, Church is not the same. He smells of dirt and walks clumsily. He seems to get pleasure from the family getting hurt and brutalizes birds in his spare time. Louis feels hatred for Church and spends much of the novel asking himself if he would do it all again

– to which he mostly says no. However, when Louis’s son Gage dies he is led back to the

Micmac Burial Ground. When Gage returns, he kills both Jud and his own mother,

forcing Louis to kill him and Church anew. Even though nothing has worked out thus far, the novel concludes with Louis bringing his wife to the Burial Ground for resurrection.

In Tony Magistrale’s 1988 attempt to legitimize Stephen King’s work through literary criticism, Landscape of Fear, he states that “Pet Sematary is a novel about secrets” (59). What follows is a rather anthropocentric misreading of Louis Creed’s agency within the novel, claiming multiple times that the plot that drives the narrative is a direct result of the doctor’s own rational misgivings and ultimately irrational decisions to deny death. Magistrale states that “Creed fails to acknowledge […] the inviolable distinction separating human idealism from the limitations of reality” and insinuates that

“Creed’s quest to circumvent the design of Fate succeeds only in perverting life” (59).

Magistrale continues along this misinterpretation of the novel, even though King’s characters constantly offer up spectral muddiness when it comes to the power dynamics between life and nonlife within Pet Sematary. This is not to deride Magistrale, as 1988 is a very different critical moment than 2020. However, the anthropocentric track Pet

Sematary has been placed upon in its admittedly small critical presence should be reexamined and acknowledged. A more contemporary example of criticism concerning

Pet Sematary, found in Renée Bergland’s The National Uncanny, blends anthropocentricity with the common claim that the novel is simply an intentional appropriation of Indigenous thought and folklore:

[Bergland] take[s] Pet Sematary’s popular success as an index of contemporary

popular fascination with phantom Indians. The story evokes current white

anxieties about Indian possession and repossession of land. It also draws on white

guilt about Indian dispossession, and white fear that they themselves might be

possessed by the vengeful spirits of the dispossessed. (166)

While certainly far closer of an interpretation, Bergland still takes quite a few liberties when flippantly engaging with the novel in the conclusory chapter of an otherwise powerful and well thought out critical analysis of Indigenous ghosts in American literature. Both of these analyses exemplify the scarcity with which Pet Sematary and

King have been treated within academic circles up until this point. Magistrale and

Bergland’s analyses serve to instantiate popular reception of the novel—as a work largely about a father’s attempts to deny the tragic death of his family through resurrection.

Despite extant critiques that the action of the novel runs through the putatively myopic lens of King’s protagonist, Pet Sematary in fact offers productive insights into the categories of life and nonlife through an assertion of the seemingly chaotic ecosystem of

Ludlow being the norm that isn’t returned to, but simply continued without conclusion.

Pet Sematary’s lack of conclusion can be seen as King’s indictment of the dualistic conception of a finite division between chaos and order typical of the horror genre. King’s novel is not simply frightening, it is a deep critique of settler colonial ideologies that led to the violent dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples in

New England and across America. An interrogation into the treatment and occlusion of

Indigenous experience and characters is undertaken in Chapter One of this project and reveals King’s underlying critique of such colonial practices through an addition of violent consequences for the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, specifically the Mi’kmaq – admittedly rather thinly veiled and inappropriately renamed the Micmac tribe in Pet Sematary. In Chapter Two, the action and control of the Burial

Ground over human and nonhuman actants in Ludlow is taken into consideration as King clearly demonstrates the potency of the land’s agency over the human. Ultimately, this project seeks to reclaim not only Pet Sematary or King’s oeuvre, but the horror genre more broadly for the possibility of optimistic study through new understandings of old fears and to assert its utility in the context of ecocriticism, particularly as a means of asserting nonhuman agency.

Chapter One:

Violent Dispossession and Colonial Hubris in Ludlow

“[The coast north of the Penobscot River is] a Countrey rather to affright then delight one, and

how to describe a more plaine spectacle of desolation, or more barren, I know not”

John Smith, 16245

John Smith, in 1624, knew what Stephen King has acquainted the world with today: Maine is a backdrop befitting the horrific. Surely, as an imperialist, Smith’s fears are likely stemmed from a stark lack of what John Locke considered improved land.

Something of this imperial fear of the New World’s “wildness” is certainly enmeshed in modern and contemporary conceptions of Maine’s topography, as the state’s terror is often stemmed from its depiction as cold, dreary, and thickly wooded. With the

Penobscot River serving as an artery, each waterway that stems forth pumps blood through the beating heart that is King’s fictional state. His landscape is dotted with townships, both real and not, that battle everyday monsters whether they are vampires, evil clowns, or the town bully turned politician.6 Each horrific event bleeds into the others and however supernatural the elements of King’s novels skew, he pays close attention to the historicity of his interconnected communities and how material

5 Quoted from Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. p. 26. 6 ‘Salem’s Lot, IT, and Under the Dome respectively. 14

relationships have shaped the fears he preys upon. Barlow, the vampire that so quickly overtakes the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, informs his victims that he immigrated from

Austria and uses a proxy to open an antique shop and wield financial power over the citizens before he tastes their blood. While the rest of the Losers Club leave Maine in the novel IT, Mike Hanlon remains behind and extensively researches the impact that the horrific entity that so often takes the form of a clown named Pennywise has had on

Derry’s (and his own family’s) racially charged and violent history. King treats history carefully in both of these novels, and in several others in his canon7, and makes sure that, if it is not a first-person narrative, those recounting it have had some sort of stake in its becoming. In this sense, Pet Sematary is unique.

The events of Pet Sematary are driven by a plot of land that has seemingly emerged from a material history formed by colonist/Indigenous capital relationships, possession, and the Enlightenment era’s rationalized violence committed against

Indigenous persons and epistemologies. Not only that, but the Wendigo that inhabits the land beyond the pet cemetery – an Anishinaabe spirit commonly associated with greed and cannibalism – has, according to white observers such as Jud, ruined the land through its own use of the bodies buried there. This ruin, read essentially as meaning the land cannot be used and improved for any capitalistic gain, is referred to throughout the novel as being “soured” (142). However, unlike King’s other novels, the history of the cemetery and the land beyond are left obfuscated as they are recounted only by Jud

Crandall, acting as a white observer to the town’s past run-ins with the land and the

Wendigo. Although material relationships between colonists and the Micmac are referred

7 Dick Halloran in The Shining, Stuart Redman (or any other character) in The Stand etc. 15

to often by Jud, King leaves Indigenous characters materially underrepresented in the novel. This occlusion of the Micmac nation begs multiple questions that some readers and many scholars have been answering without enough consideration since the novel’s publication and are renewed with each new cinematic release: did King intend to appropriate Indigenous culture, commit violence against their beliefs, and pawn colonial actions off on the Micmac’s willing desertion of their own land.

Many literary and historical scholars have, fairly enough, sought to indict King and Pet Sematary with charges of appropriation or racism. However, many instances of this argument are from those who seem to have not read much of King’s work, especially the novel in question. Colleen Boyd and Coll Thrush, in the introduction to their anthology Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence, state that “As in any Stephen King novel, the lands in central Indiana and British Columbia are dotted with haunted burial grounds…” (xv). As far as I can tell, the Micmac Burial Ground is the only haunted burial ground central or present in a King novel. Renée Bergland’s The National

Uncanny also asserts the common claim that the novel is simply an intentional appropriation of Indigenous spirituality, thought, and culture. Interestingly, Bergland does take the material history of the region into account and asserts that Pet Sematary is

King’s direct response to “the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s” (162). The

Red Power Movement, run predominately by Native American youth and incorporated other activist groups such as American Indian Movement (AIM) and National Indian

Youth Council (NIYC), sought autonomy for Indigenous people in the United States. The group’s longstanding activism eventually helped lead to the Passamaquoddy Tribe

“declar[ing] their intention to claim nearly twelve million acres of Maine” (maine.gov)

and the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980, to which Bergland refers to as being the source of King’s novel. There are a few intonations of the Mi’kmaq nation wanting their land back and lawyers fighting over it but no source of hostility towards the proceedings from Jud or any other character in the novel. Bergland continues on to state that “the spirits that rise out of the disputed burying ground take possession of the Creed family” and that “Native Americans ‘aren’t invisible any longer,’ but, in the world of Pet

Sematary at least, their visibility shows simply that the ghosts that haunt the American imagination are growing powerful again” (166). While her consideration of the Red

Power Movement is significant, Bergland fails to notice that her theory of spectralization applies to Pet Sematary not because Indigenous spirits play any fundamental role in the novel’s “ghastly[iness]” (166), but is more clearly exemplified by the fact that any individual member of the Micmac tribe have been completely left out of the novel. The only ghost present in the novel may, in fact, be Indigenous. However, this particular spirit acts as a force of truth and benevolence, an allusion to the historical context through which the land beyond the pet cemetery is acting. Both of these analyses exemplify the scarcity with which Pet Sematary and King have been treated within academic circles up until this point, though not all of the critical presence is made up of those who seem to fundamentally misunderstand the novel. When not being considered as potentially racist appropriation, Pet Sematary has regularly drawn criticism grounded in topics traditionally associated with Gothicism such as psychoanalysis, family dynamics, death, and mourning.

This chapter seeks to challenge and interrogate the presupposed narrative of

King’s treatment of Indigenous epistemologies and historicity in Pet Sematary through a

full consideration of the material relationship between Indigenous peoples, colonists, and the land. When King’s past treatment of history and personal storytelling is taken into account, it is clear that a deliberate lack of Micmac experience with the Burial Ground allows for obfuscation of intentions by Ludlow residents, widespread and repetitious misuse of the land beyond the pet cemetery, and self-inflicted violence against all involved. Louis Creed’s shift away from empirically grounded theories of medicine and death to numerous overt critiques of such widely adopted western epistemologies furthers the potential for a critique regarding the occlusion of Micmac characters, such as when, after the spirit previously mentioned leads him on a dream visit to the pet cemetery, Louis wakes up with dirt on his feet, begins laughing hysterically, and thinks “Perhaps this is what people do…with the irrational that refuse[s] to be broken down into the normal causes and effects that run the Western world” (King 78). Rather than seek to understand how past acts of colonial violence against Indigenous peoples might have “soured” the land, or look past their own tentative understandings of the land beyond, King’s characters act with a form of colonial hubris and provide a potential critique for settler colonial ideologies that historically led to violent dispossession and displacement of

Native people in New England and beyond.

A World of Fields and Fences8

In order to enter into a conversation with King’s intentions in using the spirituality of the First Nations and dispossessed land to tell his horror tale, we must first understand how this particular plot of land came to be contested. Sara Ahmed, in

“Orientations Matter”, a chapter in the anthology New Materialisms, states that

8 Quoted from Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. p. 156. 18

“Husserl’s approach to the background as what is ‘unseen’ in its ‘thereness’ or

‘familiarity’ allows us to consider how the familiar takes shape by being unnoticed”

(239). According to Ahmed, “the background would be understood as that which must take place in order for something to arrive” (239). Arrival, for Ahmed, is vital to understanding how beings “co-incide,” which essentially expounds upon “a happening which brings things near to other beings, whereby the nearness shapes the shape of each thing” (240). Ludlow and the land beyond the pet cemetery are in co-incidence with each other and it is important to investigate the material contexts from which this relationship has arrived.

The British colonists quickly began reshaping the North American continent materially upon Jamestown’s inception in 16079. William Cronon’s ecological history of

New England, Changes in the Land, contextualizes these changes within historical records: “town and colony records address almost the entire range of ecological changes in colonial New England: deforestation, the keeping of livestock, conflicts between

Indians and colonists over property boundaries, the extermination of predators such as wolves, and similar matters” (7). Cronon grounds his history in material changes to the continent by both Indigenous people and colonists. He asserts that this sort of ecological history highlights that “the choice is not between two landscapes, one with and one without human influence; it is between two human ways of living, two ways of belonging to an ecosystem” (12); not wholly unlike Louis Creed’s embodiment of a western epistemological posture in direct conflict to an “other” way of living. Cronon analyzes two cultures’ relationship to the land in which they inhabit and attempts to dispel any

romanticism current historical contexts hold for either the perceived “mystic native’s”10 connection to the land or agrarian colonist treatment of the land by recognizing, to the full extent, the long lasting effects a new conception of personal property and the introduction of capital wealth has had on the material landscape of the continent.

Cronon foregrounds John Locke’s theory of property—and the consequent campaigns of enclosure and dispossession of the site herein—in his critique of settler land use. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government forever changed the economic growth of the world. Locke draws Indigenous Americans in stark contrast to European conceptions of progress by stating that “in the beginning all the world was America,” essentially asserting that the underdevelopment of the continent makes it prehistoric in nature.

Cronon expounds on this statement by saying that “in that original state, possession was directly related to the labor one spent in hunting and gathering: one could own whatever one could use before it spoiled” (78). Rather than abide by this putatively prehistoric treatment of land, Locke offered a new conception of land as capital to allow for the accumulation of wealth “beyond the limits of spoilage” (78). In this sense, “it was capital

– the expectation to store wealth in the expectation that one could increase its quantity – that set European societies apart from precolonial Indian ones” (Cronon 78). Prior to

Locke’s development of the concept of land as property,

Colonial theorists like John Winthrop posited two ways of owning land, one

natural and one civil. Natural right to the soil had existed ‘when men held the

10 The “Magical Native” is a trope in American fiction that aligns Indigenous cultures with a mysticism closely related to the land. This continues in cultural practices as white people often romanticize Indigenous relationships to nature as divine. According to tvtropes.org: “Often this involves stating that their power comes from innate spirituality or closeness to nature that "civilized" races don't have. Usually involves influence over nature, animals, or other spirit powers.” 20

earth in common every man sowing and feeding where he pleased.’ This natural

ownership had been superseded when individuals began to raise crops, keep

cattle, and improve the land by enclosing it; from such actions, Winthrop said,

came a superior, civil right of ownership. (Cronon 56)

However, central to Locke’s economy was the potentiality land and its spoils had in the accumulation of wealth, placing his theories in direct conflict with subsistence living:

“what would a Man value Ten Thousand or a Hundred Thousand Acres of excellent

Land, ready cultivated, and well stocked too with Cattle, in the middle of the in-land

Parts of America, where he had no hopes of Commerce with other Parts of the World, to draw Money to him by the Sale of the Product?” (78-9). To this end, Locke believed that

“because the Indians lacked the incentives of money and commerce,…, they failed to improve their land and so remained a people devoid of wealth and comfort” (79). Land and the commercialization of its products quickly became intricately embedded in the market of New England.11

Subsequent to Lockean developments, the land itself became a commodity to be developed and used. Following dispossessions and removals of Indigenous peoples, “land was allocated to inhabitants using the same biblical philosophy that had justified taking it from the Indians in the first place: individuals should only possess as much land as they were able to subdue and make productive” (Cronon 73). Improvement of owned land became central to New England townships, and “there was initially a requirement in

Massachusetts that all land be improved within three years or its owner would forfeit rights to it” (Cronon 73). Property lines and boundaries erected for the purpose of

11 For a glimpse at how land is still viewed as needing human improvement and maintenance, see the quote from Donald Trump at the beginning of this chapter. 21

ownership and improvement defined the landscape of New England12, and, according to

Cronon, “To define property is thus to represent boundaries between people; equally, it is to articulate at least one set of conscious ecological boundaries between people and things” (58). However, much like the novel in question, colonial accounts reportedly left

Indigenous peoples out of their records: “whether denying or defending Indians rights of land tenure, most English colonists displayed a remarkable indifference to what the

Indians themselves thought about the matter” (Cronon 58). Jean M. O’Brien argues similarly in her book, Firsting and Lasting, offering that colonial texts assume the role of

“first” when it comes to land ownership. Texts such as Enoch Sanford’s History of

Raynham, Massachusetts, from the First Settlement to the Present Time or Elias Nelson’s

A History of the Town of Dunstable, Massachusetts, from Its Earliest Settlement to the

Year of Our Lord 1873 highlight forms of colonial dispossession through omission of

Indigenous people’s very existence.

Material changes cross over into the political ideologies that shaped the British economy and continue to evolve through the infusion of capital into the

Indigenous/colonist economy in North America. According to Cronon, “the natural products which could be shipped to Europe and sold at a profit in order to provide a steady income for colonial settlements. Theoreticians of colonialism…had furnished a ready list of such commodities…: fish for salting, furs for clothing, timber for ships, sassafras for curing syphilis, and so on” (20). As colonists grew ever more stationary in their ways, constructing townships and borders that bounded land as a place for

12 Living in Southeastern Connecticut, I pass rock walls running through tracts of forests every single day. Growing up in Connecticut, I was taught that these were left by Indigenous peoples, not colonists. My friends and I used to be afraid of ghosts attacking us if we got too close to them. And so it goes. 22

improvement, they developed more efficient ways to accrue these shippable commodities. One such way was the manipulation of Wampum beads from ceremonial endowment to a form of currency into the Indigenous/colonist economy. Wampum beads

“w[ere] initially rare outside the coastal villages in which [they were] made” and “was exchanged mainly at well-circumscribed ritual moments: in the payment of tribute between sachems, as recompense for murder or other serious crimes, in the transfer of bride-wealth when proposing marriage, [etc.]” (95). Colonial tools such as “metal drills”

(95) ramped the production of wampum up and made the beads more widely accessible further away from the coast. Soon, the beads were being amassed by more than just sachems of the communities and used far more frequently. The recognition of wampum as a potential “to become what John Locke called ‘money’” (Cronon 95), and Indigenous peoples adopting the colonial practice of having “the merchant who transported goods between communities which, for cultural and ecological reasons, valued those goods differently” (Cronon 95), reshaped the trade drastically. Soon a booming economy relying solely on a precarious web of wampum supplies and shortsighted hunting practices emerged. The emergence of colonial-era market economies historically allowed for the development of personal wealth as well as creating a reliance of Indigenous peoples on this new economy, generating the impetus for the pre-dispossession sharing of connections, stories, and influences that brings the Micmac Burial Ground under the colonizer’s gaze in Pet Sematary.

Material Capitalism’s Lasting Effect on Ludlow

Land boundaries and the potential for ownership that evolved from the

Indigenous/colonial economy play a substantial role in Pet Sematary, whether it be

Ludlow’s conceptions of their town’s limits, the Creed’s understanding of their own property, or the deadfall that keeps the Wendigo’s material form in some sort of check.

The Creed family are newcomers to Ludlow, Maine. They are soon to be introduced to the terror that can come from relocating to King’s fictional landscape, in which the

Penobscot river flows through Ludlow and on to settings such as Derry (IT) or Castle

Rock (The Dead Zone). The land of Ludlow is especially important, and it soon becomes clear that the boundaries of its township and where the Micmac tribe’s land begins is in constant dispute. Upon Louis questioning the forest behind his newly acquired home, Jud notes that “The North Ludlow Woods they call it here, but it hits a little corner of

Orrington, then goes over to Rockford. Ends up going onto those state lands I told you about, the ones the Indians want back” (King 26). The property lines that attempt to contain the woods beyond the Creed house are difficult to define, and ownership is not quite on the table for Jud. When Rachel, Louis’s wife, asks “Honey, do we own this?”

Jud responds, “It’s part of the property, oh yes.” Which, as Louis notes, is not “quite the same thing” (King 26). Jud understands, to a certain extent, that what he is about to show the Creeds cannot be owned, claimed, or understood wholly in Locke’s construction of personal property.

Even though Jud and Louis seem to understand the land as fundamentally unknowable – and thus not ownable, the two men refer to the land and the things they bury in the pet sematary in capitalist terms. When Louis’s daughter Ellie’s cat dies, Jud brings him up to the Burial Ground without telling him what would happen. It isn’t until after the cat is buried that Louis finally turns to Jud and asks “what did we do tonight?”

(127). After expounding on the importance of keeping secrets, and the impenetrability of

a man’s heart, Jud says simply “The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis – like the soil up there in the old Micmac burying ground. Bedrock’s close. A man grows what he can…and he tends it” (128). Jud’s metaphor for a man’s heart echoes the assertations of

Locke, in Second Treatise on Government (1689): “As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property” (2002, 14).

Throughout the novel, Jud and Louis both refer to what they bury in the Burial Ground as being “paid for” or “bought” (242). Each time the newly resurrected cat enacts violence towards another animal Louis thinks that he “bought the fucker” (242). By aligning the land with the contents of a man’s heart, and by maintaining that whatever is buried there is paid for, and whatever damage that resurrected body does is owned, King’s plot is driven by colonial conceptions of land as capital and a hubristic disregard of the consequences that come from such a label. Colonial ideals are then aligned with the misuse of the Burial Ground and brought into focus through horrific consequences, providing a rather radical indictment of such settler colonial ideologies.

The presence and critique of colonial improvement continues when the relationship of Ludlow to the Burial Ground is inspected. The land that leads to the pet cemetery and the Burial Ground beyond is maintained by the children in Ludlow. When asked about this, Jud states that “the local kids around Route 15 and Middle Drive keep it nice because they use it” (King 15), indicating that even the children understand their relationship with the land in capitalistic terms. When they arrive at the cemetery, Louis observes that the same maintenance and care has been given there as well. Both Louis and his wife, Rachel, are not thrilled by the idea of children dealing so closely with death through the maintenance of the cemetery. Jud says that “it’s not as odd as it prob’ly

sounds […]. It’s the road. It uses up a lot of animals” (King 16). The children recognize the transactional nature of the land they use and seek to improve it by keeping it clean and giving it purpose. However, later in the novel, Louis notices that the graves made by the children, sporting such names as “Smucky the cat” and “Biffer, a helluva sniffer”

(30), are in rough concentric circles mimicking those cairns found in the Burial Ground apparently soured by the Wendigo. Louis remarks that “for a moment [he] saw the Pet

Sematary as a kind of advertisement…a come-on” and that “those graves in the Pet

Sematary mimed the most ancient religious symbol of all: diminishing circles indicating a spiral leading down, not to a point, but to infinity” (272). At this point it becomes clear that the Wendigo has an understanding of the colonial insistence on land improvement, possibly through Indigenous experience, and may be using this ideal to prey on colonial descendants, rather than the other way around.

The discovery of the land beyond the pet cemetery, and its insidious potentials, relies heavily on the fur trade. When Jud finally recounts the history of his personal relationship with the burial ground he says that he initially heard from Stanny B., who

“half the people in town thought…was soft, and the other half thought…might be dangerous” (142). Jud continues on to state that “[Stanny’s] grandfather was a big fur trapper and trader in the early 1800s. Stanny’s grandda would go all the way from the

Maritimes to Bangor and Derry, sometimes as far south as Skowhegan to buy pelts, or so

I’ve heard” and that “Stanny’s grandda bought from the Micmacs and did a good business with them long after most of the other trappers and traders had given up…because he traded with them at a fair price” (142). Stanny’s grandfather learned about the burial ground through his trading with the Micmac tribe, when “[they] told

[him] about the burying ground which they didn’t use anymore because the Wendigo had soured the ground, and about Little God Swamp, and the steps, and all the rest” (142).

King asserts that without the material relationship between Indigenous peoples of the region and colonists, Ludlow’s inhabitants may never have discovered the burial ground in the first place.

Jud’s account that the Micmac tribe willingly told Stanny’s grandfather that they have vacated their land, and warned him from use or simply stated that it was available, is another possible point of misinterpretation of the appropriation present in the novel.

Bergland’s study of Indigenous ghosts and hauntings in American literature discusses the potentiality for a purposeful erasure of the Other through literature. She states that “the people who were described and imagined as ghosts were those whose existence challenged developing structures of political and economic power. Ghostliness was closely related to oppression and to the hope of denying or repressing the memory of that oppression” (7). While the Micmac tribe recounted by Jud in this instance are embodied, they are disembodied through narrative space. They are also represented as devoid of any desire to claim the burial ground and, purportedly, the state woods also described by Jud.

A lack of desire to inhabit, use, and improve land in the 1800s can be seen as desirous for colonists interested in ownership, and King’s writing the Micmac tribe as not wanting their land can be seen as providing a more comforting narrative than the more realistic historical instances of violent colonial dispossession. A possible claim to make here is that this shift in narrative is an unconscious (or conscious) attempt to rewrite history and revise the existence of land claims by Indigenous peoples in Maine, especially during the height of the Red Power Movement. Later in the novel, after Louis’s son had died, Jud

makes an effort to fill in the narrative in a preventative fashion by discussing land ownership again. This time, he says that “now the Micmacs, the state of Maine, and the government of the United States are arguing in court about who owns that land” and asks

“who owns that land? No one really knows, Louis. Not anymore” and goes on to mention a long list of white names that have “the best claims” (244). Again, Jud attempts to account for the ownership of the Burial Ground and completely disregards any history of the violent dispossession perpetrated against Indigenous peoples in colonial America.

This constant occlusion of history could be seen as King intentionally or unconsciously spectralizing Indigenous desires or claims. However, the reader could also look at this history as being provided by a representative of settler colonialism (Jud) and read for what might be deliberately left out in a history written by the “victor.”

The Micmac tribe, according to Jud, told Stanny’s grandfather everything about their relationship with the Burial Ground. Everything, here, can be inferred to mean the effect the Wendigo has on members of the tribe, both alive and dead. This willingness to provide context and truth for the Burial Ground is a nicety that no one else in this novel provides. Jud continues to tell a story of how Stanny B. led him to the Burial Ground to inter Jud’s dog before ever telling him what his intentions were. As stated above, the initial death of Ellie’s cat, Church, drives Jud to bring Louis to the Burial Ground in a similar chain of events. Jud doesn’t inform Louis of his intentions, rather he simply asks

“do you love [your daughter]?” (King 112). It isn’t until the deed is done that Jud tells him his own story of burying a pet in the Burial Ground. Instead of past experience being told and heard by those directly involved, characters perform acts for each other without making their intentions clear and history is doled out retroactively. This reading of the

history Jud provides can be seen as one of many tessellated instances of colonial hubris, in which Stanny B.’s grandfather ignores the Micmac tribe’s stories and passes down its existence and purpose filtered through his own experience and desire. By Jud’s own admission,

The Micmacs knew that place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they made it

what it was…They stayed here in Maine for a thousand years…it’s hard to tell,

because they did not leave their mark deep. And now they are gone again…some

say we’ll be gone, someday, although I guess our mark will go deeper, for better

or worse. But the place will stay no matter who’s here, Louis. (260)

Rather than take the Micmac’s thousand years of experience with the Burial Ground into account, the settlers, both historic and modern, apparently ignore their good faith warnings. In turn, transactions involving the Burial Ground become more and more muddled and their results become more and more horrific the further away from the

Micmac tribe they get.

Renée Bergland interestingly attributes the inclusion of land disputes within the novel to the Red Power Movement that caused a stir in Northern Maine in the 1960s and

1970s. Jimmy Carter facilitated a bill that “settled the Maine Indian land claims for 81.5 million dollars. The money was deposited into a tribal account for the purpose of purchasing three hundred thousand acres of land in Maine” (165). This happened around the time of King’s writing Pet Sematary, so Bergland logically asserts that “as Andrew

Akins celebrated the rebirth of an Indian nation in the state of Maine, Stephen King fantasized about the waxing power of an Indian demon” (166). While it is true that these two events overlapped, and that fact might have fed King’s authorial imagination, to

claim that King was fantasizing about the Wendigo because of any sort of anxiety over an

Indigenous appropriations bill seems a stretch, especially when the full material and narrative context is taken into account.13 New understandings of the horror genre have also made opposite analyses possible. Rather than understand horror as an author depicting what the general population should be or are scared of for cheap thrills, horror scholars understand horror as shining a critical light on what people are afraid of and ask questions about why they might be frightened and even serve up possible remedies or solutions. Pet Sematary does not offer a way to overcome the Red Power Movement and its land claims, but instead offers an overall indictment of settler colonial ideologies leading to an unfair anxiety. Rather than read for the mere presence of Anishinaabe spirituality or Indigenous land claims in a novel written by a non-Anishinaabe author as negatively intended appropriation and xenophobia, a more careful reading of the intention and role the land claims play can give light to the nature of appropriation.

Occlusion of Native Dispossession and Violent Displacement

Much like Indigenous characters being materially occluded from the text, any history of material dispossession and violent displacement is also not present. Instead, as stated above, the Micmac tribe left of their own accord and offered a seemingly benevolent and cooperative warning against use of their land. The closest the reader gets to a material understanding of the circumstances of Indigenous displacement in New

13 If considering King’s inspiration for the novel’s events are vital, then we must give particular attention to the many interviews in which King has said that “Everything in the book up to the point of the supernatural stuff is true” (Entertainment Weekly). Not only did King’s own daughter Naomi’s cat get hit by a truck in the road and get buried in the pet cemetery behind their house while King worked at the local university, but King’s son, Owen, almost ran into the road and met a similar fate to Gage’s. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, King also states that That night, after we buried it, we heard her out in the garage. She was jumping up and down on those popper things that they wrap fragile stuff in. She was shouting, “God can’t have my cat. That cat is my cat!… Let him have his own cat.” And I put all that in the book, and yeah, we were in the field, and there really was a busy road there [when Owen wandered too close].” 30

England is in regard to Stanny B.’s grandfather’s colonial experience with fur trading. As discussed earlier, Jud states that he “did a good business with them long after most of the other trappers and traders had given up or gone west because he traded with them at a fair price” (142). Jud, or Stanny B., comes close to disclosing how the collapse of the fur market caused colonists to move West in search of more wealth and caused a decline in trading relationships with the Indigenous peoples of northern New England. After this,

Indigenous people became more or less useless to the colonists that remained and settlers instead sought to claim land to improve.14 Jud doesn’t speak about these events, either because it was not recounted to him or he is purposefully denying it because “for white people who drove the indigenous population of New England off their lands, it’s a comforting counter narrative to be told that the land was so evil that the Wabanaki people didn’t want it” (Dickey).15

Jud trivializes Indigenous beliefs surrounding the Wendigo by uniting it with his own disregard for Catholic belief. Jud states that

The Wendigo story…was a story they had to have, the same way I guess we have

to have some of our Christian stories. Norma would damn me for a profaner if she

heard me say that, but Louis, it’s true. Sometimes, if the winter was long and hard

and the food was short, there were north country Indians who would finally get

down to the bad place where it was starve or…or do something else. (143)

14 See Cronon’s chapters on land claims, “Bounding of the Land” and “A World of Fields and Fences,” available in Changes in the Land, for a more in-depth analysis on conflicts surround capital dispossession after the fur-trade. 15 Quoted from an article written by Colin Dickey on newrepublic.com, titled “Why Pet Sematary Refuses to Die.” 31

Jud’s insistence that Indigenous beliefs are metaphorical in nature is nothing new, and his inclusion of his own beliefs surrounding a more “enlightened” religion is a gateway into a possible understanding of Jud’s intentions. However, a lack of Indigenous characters to speak to the cultural impacts of this belief is troublesome.

The entire town of Ludlow engages in a constant misguided use of the Burial

Ground, despite warnings from the tribe. Rather than heeding Indigenous belief and shying away from the draw to bend the Burial Ground to their will, the residents continue to take over and exploit the land that does not belong to them. Instead of simply removing Indigenous characters and appropriating their culture for the use of terror, King enters into a conversation of what it means to disregard Indigenous history and the hubris of the Enlightenment era settler colonial ideologies that fed the violent need and justification to acquire Indigenous lands. When taken as a part of a larger indictment of settler colonial practices and shining a light on the terror and guilt that Americans feel towards past and present treatment of Indigenous peoples, Louis’s shifting from empirically grounded conceptions of land and death towards the potential of a non-

Western epistemology (and his cyclical disregard of Indigenous experience) becomes a powerful critique of colonial dispossessions and violent displacements of Indigenous peoples. Pushing even further, King renders this a critique through an assertion of reciprocal consequences for those colonial characters that participate in the cycle of occluding Indigenous experience from the American consciousness.

Enlightenment Violence Against Indigenous Histories and Epistemes

The Enlightenment of the long eighteenth century marked a shift towards rational and empirical belief systems that sparked both the American and French Revolutions, as

well as played a large role in the violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the colonist directive to improve the land. Thinkers began working towards a new understanding of epistemology that required the amassing of fact and individual experience to acquire knowledge, rather than tapping into some sort of divine Other.

Operating around the same time as John Locke, René Descartes broke the world into a binary of matter: living and brute. According to Stacey Balkan, “René Descartes’s

Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) presented an epistemological argument for the separation of mind and matter, subject and object. Severing human society from nature engendered a particular worldview that would accommodate an unsustainable and environmentally exploitative development mode.” Colonists often united Indigenous peoples with nature, thus aligning them with their conception of the land as a brute object to be separate from and dominated.

The physical violence and material dispossession enacted by colonists against

Indigenous peoples was bolstered by Enlightenment driven rationality and empirically founded beliefs that, since they lacked any sort of Lockean conception of wealth,

Indigenous peoples were lesser than and thus separable from colonists on an ontological level. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in “Climate of History”, states that according to early

Enlightenment thinkers such as Vico and Hobbes “we, humans, could have proper knowledge of only civil and political institutions because we made them, while nature remains God’s work and ultimately inscrutable to man” (201). Chakrabarty also quotes

Collingwood’s furthering of the idea that “nature…has no ‘inside’” and that when interpreting nature’s historicity, “’this distinction between the outside and the inside of an event does not arise. The events of nature are mere events, not the acts of agents whose

thought the scientist endeavors to trace’” (202-03). While Collingsworth is speaking from a different moment, he is condoning Cartesian conceptions of nature, and further fulfills our retroactive understanding of how the colonist viewed Indigenous peoples more in line with brute matter than human: lacking an interior and, thus, lacking a traceable history worth understanding. In Violence Over the Land, Ned Blackhawk highlights how this treatment and understanding of Indigenous culture by empirically guided individuals continued well past the long eighteenth century: “Because of their sparse technologies and migratory economies, anthropologists, including the influential ethnographer Julian

Stewart, have represented Great Basin Indians as the quintessential ‘peoples without history,’ the most ‘primitive’ peoples in the world” (4). Chakrabarty also calls for the decentering of “the colonial man” as a symbol of all we consider “pure and upright.”16

The characters in Pet Sematary provide a critique for settler colonial ideals and hubris.

Furthermore, the move of Louis from a doctor clinging to empirically verifiable and observable evidence to grasping at his once cemented beliefs can be seen as an assertion that dismantling violent and occlusive Western epistemologies could provide a potential escape from the horrific end so many in Ludlow have met.

Empirically Grounded Belief

Louis Creed is an empirically minded doctor that moves to Ludlow to take over as

Director of Medicine at the local university. Like one might expect from a physician,

Louis puts a lot of stock in Western medicine being able to solve problems. Promptly upon arrival at their new home in Ludlow, his young daughter Ellie cuts herself when falling from a swing and Louis immediately pulls out his first aid kit. When his daughter

16 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Discourse, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1999. 34

screams at the prospect of being sprayed by “the stingy stuff” Louis responds with

“Eileen, it’s just Mercurochrome, and it doesn’t sting” (6). For Louis, the hard classification and simple fact that it does not, in fact, sting is meant to bring comfort to his young daughter. After his son Gage’s death, Louis’s co-worker Steve Masterton prohibited Rachel from going to the morning viewing and “gave Rachel the shot she needed” (217). Louis recognizes that he was too grief stricken to give “his wife a shot to mute her deep grief” and is thankful for Steve’s decision (216). Steve also “forbade Ellie to go [to the viewing] at all” and gave her “a colorless liquid to drink” (217). Rather than understand the necessity of emotions after a son passing tragically, Louis and Steve conspire to keep Rachel and Ellie drugged with medicine and away from the burial process. Rachel made it to the afternoon viewing but had to witness Louis get into a physical altercation with her father that ended up knocking their son’s coffin over. Rather than let her be upset, Louis “dazed but sane and in control, sedated her” (234). At home, when the initial dose wore off, Louis “led her up to bed and gave her another shot” (234).

Later, after Gage’s burial, Louis continues to give Rachel Valium to suppress her anxiety and make her more susceptible to leaving Maine, ultimately allowing him to bury their son in the Micmac burial ground (277). Louis constantly uses medicine to solve what he views as irrational and emotional issues throughout the novel, especially pertaining to grief. This use asserts an Enlightenment response to irrational belief by burying emotion and grief in empiricism in practice.

Louis also uses medicine and medical instruments to directly combat that which resurrects from the Burial Ground. Through Louis’s use of sedation to deal with irrational grief or emotions we can see that he clearly places a heavy importance upon its power.

When Church returns from the dead, the Creed family immediately recognizes that he has changed in both smell and overall personality. After Gage is buried in the cemetery, and

Louis leaves the house to find his similarly resurrected son, he comes face to face with

Church in the driveway and sets down a can of food. While Church is distracted, Louis

“took a syringe from his pocket. He stripped the paper covering from it and filled it with

75 milligrams of morphine” and “seized [the cat] around its stinking guts and sank the needle deep into its haunch” (381). Church is killed again through use of Louis’s own medicinal Excalibur. Louis then proceeds into the house and finds that his son has killed and eaten parts of his own mother and confronts his son in much the same way; by grabbing a hypodermic needle filled with morphine and “jamm[ing] it straight down into the small of Gage’s back” (385). Soon after this final altercation, Louis ignores any consequences of his hubristic use of Indigenous land until this point and brings his wife’s body to the Burial Ground. While Louis’s reliance on medication is vital to understanding his stance as an empirically grounded hero, his wielding of morphine as a sword against the entity emerging from the Burial Ground instantiates a final turn away from non-Western epistemology and a securing of his fate as another colonist in the long cycle of hubristic dispossession.

It is also important to consider how Louis’s beliefs surrounding death begin as grounded in verifiable fact not wholly unlike his conceptions of the necessity of medicine. After Jud brings the Creed family up to the pet cemetery, Ellie has a minor meltdown when considering what would happen if her cat were to die. Ellie screams at

Louis that “[She] doesn’t want Church to be like all those dead pets!...He’s [her] cat!

He’s not God’s cat! Let God have His own cat!” (38). Louis considers that Ellie “wept

for the intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears” and thinks that “it would be easy to lie at this point” (38-9). Instead, Louis simply says

“’Honey…it happens. It’s a part of life” (39). After putting Ellie to bed, Rachel expresses concern about telling their daughter about death so early. Louis responds with more logical reasoning, saying that “Ellie has known where babies come from since last year” and Rachel says that being born has nothing to do with death. Louis doubles down on logic, stating that “She knows about babies; that place up in the woods just made her want to know something about the other end of things. It’s perfectly natural. In fact, it’s the most natural thing in the w-“ (43). When Rachel screams for him to “stop saying that”

Louis “recoil[s], startled” (43). In this moment, Louis is unable to connect his wife’s perception of death to her traumatic experience dealing with the tragic death of her sister and can only continue the fight, later going as far as to think “as a doctor, he knew that death was, except perhaps for childbirth, the most natural thing in the world” (44) and only later is able to say “Christ, that must have been hard for her” after finally connecting his wife’s response to the tragic loss of her sister (44).

A similar discussion occurs after Ellie witnesses Jud’s wife, Norma, collapse on

Halloween night. Louis stays to perform CPR, call an ambulance, and ultimately save her life. When he relays this news to Rachel, she says “it’s lucky you were there. Almost

God’s providence,” to which Louis responds, “I’ll settle for luck” (97). When alone with his daughter, Louis tries to explain the concept of luck as it pertained to Norma’s heart attack. Ellie responds with “But she’ll probably die anyway…People who have heart attacks usually die. Even if they live, pretty soon they have another one and another one and another one until…boom” (98). Louis is floored by this quick turnaround after his

matter of fact discussion about death with his daughter. Louis meets his daughter’s pragmatism with more, saying “It doesn’t necessarily work that way, Ellie. Norma’s heart attack was a very small one, and I was able to administer the treatment right away” and

Ellie responds immediately with “oh, I know…but she’s old and she’ll die pretty soon anyway. Mr. Crandall too” (99). Louis is surprised at how effective dealing facts to a child had been, but internally revels in the glory a little bit. The transference of medically grounded beliefs to his daughter is a matter of celebration, and further proof that, for

Louis, an Enlightened and empirical sense of ownership over land brings comfort and stability.

Grasping at Empirical Straws

As Louis comes into contact with the power of the Burial Ground periodically throughout the novel, he becomes increasingly jaded in his beliefs about the finality of death and the seemingly permanent foundations of Western epistemology that he has established his career and life on. Jud’s simple family hike up to the pet cemetery proved to be a long and troubling affair: Ellie’s meltdown about death and Rachel’s disagreement with Louis’s treatment of death as natural caused a weeklong argument.

However, Louis is able to use his scientifically grounded belief system to teach his daughter the traditionally Western beliefs about death and to finally understand Rachel’s past relationship with tragic death has affected her current relationship to what he has deemed natural death. When Jud leads Louis past the pet cemetery and into the land beyond for the first time, Louis comes face to face with a transactionality that is not simply capitalist interchange but that calls for a new orientation to life and death that shakes his understanding of fatality and ownership.

When Church is run over Louis initially plans to bury him in the pet cemetery maintained by the children of Ludlow and possibly not tell Ellie at all. Jud instead decides to lead Louis beyond the cemetery and into the Burial Ground with intentions that he obfuscates: “Twice – maybe three times – on the walk up to the Pet Sematary that night Louis tried to talk to Jud, but Jud didn’t answer” (112). When they arrive at the deadfall; a series of fallen trees that Louis previously recognized as seemingly impenetrable, Jud finally turns and says “follow me and don’t look down. Don’t hesitate and don’t look down. I know the way through, but it has to be done quick and sure”

(114). Louis remarks that this must be a dream, which is quite indicative of his predilection for factual consideration rather than intuitive action. As he watches Jud climb the branches swiftly and easily, Louis follows suit. Upon arrival on the other side of the deadfall Louis feels exhilaration to which Jud responds: “did you think we wouldn’t [make it]?” (116). Louis wants to respond with something like “we’re damn lucky we didn’t kill ourselves!” (116), but quickly realizes that he had not questioned their ability to make it through at all.

After the deadfall, Jud leads Louis through a series of material barriers that require some sort of accepting of non-western explanations. First, Jud explains that

“there’s a lot of funny things down this way” like “St. Elmo’s fire – what the sailors call foo-lights. It makes funny shapes, but it’s nothing” and “you may hear sounds like voices, but they are the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries. It’s funny”

(117). Both of these seemingly supernatural events are explained away by Jud in order to bring some sort of comfort to Louis as he holds tight to his ties with the empirically grounded Western world. Foo-lights are equated to nothing, a non-issue that shouldn’t

even be paid attention to. Voices in the woods are attributed to loons that Louis questions, asking “this time of year?” (117). Jud replies in the affirmative to this question and simply moves forward for Louis to follow without asking any more questions. Soon after, Louis and Jud actually run into something potentially unexplainable: “something was moving [in the woods] – something big” (119). Louis thinks that maybe it’s a moose or a bear, and finally falls upon the reassurance that Jud provided: “The sound carries”

(119). As whatever is causing such noise gets closer, Louis acknowledges to himself that

“Bear was no longer what he was thinking of. Now he didn’t know just what he was thinking of” (119). The sound devolves into “maniacal laughter” and “Louis began to shudder all over” (119). After Louis buries the cat, and they return back home, he turns to question Jud about what they had just accomplished. Jud meets him with a judgement on his need for factual information: “You’re a good man, Louis, but you ask too many questions. Sometimes people have to do things that just seem right. That seem right in their hearts, I mean” (127). Jud indicts Louis’s need for knowledge and pushes him towards radical acceptance of his intuitive actions.

When Church returns to life after being buried in the Burial Ground, Louis lifts him and searches for signs that he is, in fact, the same cat. When Louis discovers bits of hefty bag caught in the cat’s whiskers and “dried blood caked on Church’s muzzle” he drops the cat immediately and “cover[s] his face with one hand, his eyes shut. The whole world was swimming now, and his head was full of tottery, sick vertigo” (137). Church’s presence shakes Louis down to his core and initially dislodges his conceptions of death.

Louis grasps at fact, thinking “the cat came back, like the nursery rhyme, all right, so what, big deal” (138) and wondering if “it had all been a mistake…Church had been

struck hard and stunned. The cat he had carried up to Jud’s old Micmac burying ground had been unconscious, not dead” (138). Finally, he arrives at his medical expertise, thinking “he was a doctor, not a vet. He had made a misdiagnosis” (138).

After Louis’s beliefs about death come under fire through his experiences with the

Burial Ground, he is stuck in a cycle of transactions with the denial of death. Life, rather than being a force that naturally ends when its time, becomes a material possession that is possible to regain through burial in a specific plot of land. When Gage dies, Louis enters into a fruitless debate with himself, and with Jud, on whether or not he should bury a person in the Burial Ground. At this point, Louis has followed Jud’s lead on how to use the plot of land. However, when his son dies, Louis decides that he knows better than Jud when it comes to burying a person in the Burial Ground. During this internal struggle

Louis’s shifting beliefs about death come into focus through yet another discussion with his daughter. Ellie says she is “going to wish really hard…and pray to God for Gage to come back” and that “God can take it back if He wants to…He can do anything he wants to” (236). Louis tries to refute his daughter’s belief, saying that “God doesn’t do things like that” even as he thinks about Church’s resurrection (236). Ellie replies with “He does so…in Sunday School the teacher told us about this guy Lazarus. He was dead, and Jesus brought him back to life” (236). Instead of responding with how death is final and natural, or even responding with his newfound understanding of the transactional nature of life and death, “an absurdity popped out of his mind: that happened a long time ago,

Ellie” (236). Rather than assert his dominance over the nature and understanding of death, Louis’s experiences with the Burial Ground skew him toward a non-Western understanding of the porousness of death.

Omission as Resistance

Renée Bergland describes the pervasive writing away of Indigenous peoples in

American literature as

present[ing] us with a host of doubts about America and American ideology. The

entire dynamic of ghosts and hauntings, as we understand it today, is a dynamic of

unsuccessful repression. Ghosts are things that we try to bury, but that refuse to

stay buried. They are our fears and our horrors, disembodied, but made

inescapable by their very bodilessness. (5).

In addition to this stance, Bergland states that she will also analyze “many examples of works that try to resist narratives of nationalization, and to use Native American ghosts as figures of such resistance” (3). At first glance, Pet Sematary may seem like the former, especially if Bergland’s conclusion is to be believed. However, the decisions the characters make to evade previous experiences with the Burial Ground as possible opportunities for dissuasion and flight away from their use of the land complicates this interpretation and potentially brings the novel more in line with ghosts as figures of resistance. Not only does Stanny B.’s grandfather, Stanny B., Jud, a whole host of non- named residents in Ludlow, and Louis ignore the Micmac tribe’s experiences with the

Burial Ground (and, for that matter, any affirming experience that follows), but Louis’s faith in Western epistemologies leads him to discount a ghostly visit from a group of spirits that, if heeded, could have stopped the tragic deaths of his daughter’s cat, Jud, his son, and his wife. If this dream visitor is taken to be the souls of the Indigenous people lost to the burial ground, and Louis denies their authority on the subject because of his

Western empiricism, then Pet Sematary seems to be offering the lack of Indigenous

characters as an intentional omission by the white settler storytellers. The characters’ blatant disregard for Indigenous warnings indicts hubristic colonial conceptions of their own Cartesian supremacy – viewing themselves as a superior form of matter and

Indigenous peoples as brutish and unworthy of attention and historical consideration.

On Louis’s first day as Director of Medicine at the local university, a student named Victor Pascow is hit by a car while running and dies in the Student Medical

Center. On Louis’s own admission, “looking back on it,…the nightmare really began when they brought the dying boy…into the infirmary” (57). Louis sees that part of

Pascow’s head had been crushed and made the diagnosis that he would most certainly die. When he is brought to a private room and Louis is left alone with him, however,

Pascow begins to speak: “’In the Pet Sematary,’ the young man croaked…and he began to grin” (61). Louis attributes the words to a hallucination because “he was a man with…no bent toward the superstitious or the occult” (61) but leans down to ask him to continue anyway. Pascow continues: “It’s not the real cemetery…The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis…A man grows what he can…and tends it” (61). Louis recognizes that the dying man had used his name even though they had not met previously and asks who he really is, to which Pascow responds “Injun bring my fish” then, “keep clear, us”

(62). The identity of whoever is speaking through Pascow isn’t made clear in this moment or at all throughout the novel. The reader could take the spirit as Indigenous peoples who have been buried in the burial ground or who have been made victim of the

Wendigo. In that reading, “Injun bring my fish” seems to be an offensive signifier of an

Indigenous speaker. However, “Injun bring my fish” and “keep clear, us” is separated by

Louis asking how they would have known his name. The separation leaves open the

possibility that these are potentially two different entities battling to speak through

Pascow’s body, especially because an insidious grin seems to subside right before the second warning is uttered. It is possible that the racial slur is uttered by the Wendigo as an order to the Micmac tribe to bring its “fish”, or food, or dead bodies. Whether this is racism on the author’s part or if the offense is uttered by the Wendigo would matter if it was at all possible to make a decision on the matter with the text given, but it is not made clear. However, what does matter is that Louis is haunted and terrified by this occurrence and recognizes it for a possible premonition: “the room is first conveniently cleared so the dying Sibyl can speak a few lines of oblique prophecy to me and me alone” (63).

Later that night Louis is once again warned off of using the Burial Ground. He awakes in the middle of the night to Pascow “standing in the doorway” to his bedroom saying “Come on, Doctor…We got places to go” (70). Louis rises to follow while musing in his head that “it’s a dream…the dead do not return; it is physiologically impossible.

This young man is in an autopsy drawer in Bangor with the pathologist’s tattoo…And he is most certainly not wearing those red jogging shorts in there” (70). Louis clings to his empirically grounded belief, even after the events he experienced while awake earlier that day. Pascow leads Louis up to the pet cemetery and points him towards the deadfall that

“had become a heap of bones. The bones were moving. They writhed and clicked together, mandibles and femurs and ulnas and molars and incisors; he saw the grinning skulls of humans and animals” (73). As Louis tries to wake himself from the dream,

Pascow leans down and, with “a dreadful kind of patience,” speaks to him: “The door must not be opened…Don’t go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to,

Doctor. The barrier was not made to be broken. Remember this: there is more power here

than you know. It is old and always restless. Remember” (73). Pascow continues to say that “[he] come[s] as a friend…Your destruction and the destruction of all you love is very near, Doctor” (74). The only clue that Pascow is, in fact, Indigenous spirits wishing to guide Louis is that when he says he comes as a friend Louis thinks “but was friend actually the word Pascow had used?...It was as if Pascow had spoken in a foreign language which Louis could understand through some dream magic…and ‘friend’ was as close to whatever word Pascow had actually used that Louis’s struggling mind could come” (74). If Pascow is taken as being embodied by Indigenous spirits, then this particular possession becomes a symbol of continued resistance to the Wendigo’s destruction and Louis’s refusal to believe becomes an intentional act of burying his head in empirical sand.

When Louis wakes up and realizes that “his feet were filthy with dirt and pine needles” (76) he begins questioning his sanity. He feels like screaming, and recognizes that “then [he’ll] go crazy and [he] won’t have to worry about it anymore” (76). When he devolves into hysterical laughter and removes all evidence of dirt or needles from his body and bedsheets, Louis thinks that

Perhaps this is what people do with the inexplicable…This is what they do with

the irrational that refuses to be broken down into the normal causes and effects

that run the Western world. Maybe this is how your mind coped with…the hand

from under the bed that stroked your bare foot in the dead of night. There was a

giggling fit or a crying fit…and since it was its own inviolable self and would not

break down, you simply passed terror intact, like a kidney stone. (78)

Louis comes into full contact with supernatural experiences that he could have converted into grounded fact and taken into consideration when, in the near future, Jud leads him to the Burial Ground for the first time. However, instead, Louis removes all evidence of it ever happening and relates the experience to passing a kidney stone; a medical procedure largely tamed by technological advancements. Just before crossing the barrier with Jud,

Louis thinks about what Pascow said, remembering it as an “episode of somnambulism”

(113). However, “tonight, that dream or warning or whatever it had been seemed years rather than months distant. He felt fine” (114) and Louis hubristically uses the land anyway. When Church returns smelling like dirt and with more malicious tendencies, he continues to misuse the land because he trusts his ability to “make a diagnosis” of his son’s reincarnated condition (295). Rather than allow his Western epistemology to be shaken, even when he purports that his experience does not fit into a Western category,

Louis ignores the spirit’s guidance and uses the land anyway, leading to disastrous consequences.

Victor Pascow returns later in the novel as a last-ditch effort to help the family stop the vicious cycle that has become a constant metaphor for colonial hubris and violent dispossession and displacement. Soon after Gage is buried in a regular cemetery, Louis sends Rachel and Ellie to Chicago so that he can exhume and rebury him in the Burial

Ground without their intervention. On the flight to Chicago, Ellie awakes screaming and finally says that “something was wrong ever since Daddy told [her] about the trip” and

“It was a dream. Something about Gage. Or maybe it was Church” (299). When Rachel asks what the dream was about, Ellie says: “I dreamed I was in the Pet

Sematary…[Pascow] took me to the Pet Sematary and said Daddy was going to go there

and something terrible was going to happen…[Pascow] said that he was sent to warn but that he couldn’t interfere. He said that he was…that he was near Daddy because they were together when his soul was dis-dis-I can’t remember!” (299-300). Rachel finishes the puzzle, thinking that Ellie meant to say “discorporated” (300). Pascow’s soul became immaterial and joined the others that have been dispossessed of their bodies and land by the Wendigo and settler colonial residents of Ludlow. Rachel and Ellie heed Pascow’s warning, unlike Louis, and Rachel attempts to get back to Ludlow before Louis buries

Gage in the Burial Ground. The novel parallels Rachel’s journey with Louis’s decision- making process and proves that if Louis had heeded the collective of discorporate souls of Ludlow’s traumatic history then he would not have misused the land and his family would not have died for his hubris.

Experience of the Other as Potential Revelation

Clearly, Pet Sematary could be viewed as just another work of American fiction on a long list of intentional dispossessions, displacement, and discorporation of

Indigenous bodies. However, after close consideration of the historical and material relationships between Indigenous peoples and colonists of the region, it is far more likely that King indicts settler colonial ideals through Louis’s hubristic use of the Burial Ground while not romanticizing Indigenous practices and relationships to the land as mystical; a habit most common in liberal appropriation. Rather than heed the collective of discorporate spirits made immaterial by the Wendigo’s influence over violent historical and modern colonial practices, Louis decides to trust Jud, his new white friend, with all of the answers concerning the historicity of Ludlow, the Micmac tribe, and the Burial

Ground. In this sense, the transactional nature of life and death as made possible by the

Wendigo mirrors violent deals made between Indigenous peoples and colonists during

New England’s initial settlement. However problematic Pet Sematary seems to be as posited by scholars, and problematic at times it certainly can be, King uses a potentially intentional erasure of Indigenous bodies in order to resist and punish colonial hubris throughout the novel.

In Tony Magistrale’s 1988 attempt to legitimize Stephen King’s work through academic analysis, Landscape of Fear, he states that “Pet Sematary is a novel about secrets” (59). Magistrale continues on to state that “Creed fails to acknowledge […] the inviolable distinction separating human idealism from the limitations of reality” and insinuates that “Creed’s quest to circumvent the design of Fate succeeds only in perverting life” (59). The secret in Pet Sematary is less the obfuscation of small events and thoughts, but the Bergland style erasure of violent dispossession and displacement in the stories told by the white settlers of Ludlow that continue to use the Burial Ground despite a similarly violent history. King never narrates the problematic undertones of erasure in the novel but allows Jud to spin yarn in an insidious way, leaving the reader to gather their own understanding. King rends the voice of Indigenous people from their material history, much like colonists removed them from their land and bodies, and gives their narrative only through white settler storytellers. Ultimately, King punishes these settlers and their descendants for their problematic colonial ideology, cavalier misguidance, and violent dispossession with cannibalism and death.

Chapter Two:

A Potent Nonhuman Agency

“How could we ignore the power of matter and the ways it materializes our ordinary experiences

or fail to acknowledge the primacy of matter in our theories?”

Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms

“We are walking, talking minerals”

Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter

In the previous chapter I discussed the material history of Pet Sematary and the portrayal of specific white characters as being aligned with Western epistemologies operate in the novel. The occlusion of Indigenous persons, geographies, and epistemologies can be clearly seen as a larger critique of settler colonial dispossession and Western rationalism, rather than appropriation. By tracing the storytelling in Ludlow from the Micmac tribe, the original inhabitants of the land beyond the pet sematary, to the white traders and settlers of the town and those settlers’ fervent denial of any warnings regarding use of the burial ground we can see a possible point of contention for

Renée Bergland and other’s critiques of the novel as being a racial caricature of xenophobic reactions to The Red Power Movement in northern Maine during the years

King wrote the novel. As readers, we grasp for any added understanding the Micmac

tribe might have about the Wendigo and the Burial Ground, relishing every bit of information provided throughout the novel. However, the history is always recounted by white settlers – namely Jud Crandall – and we are never given any of the Indigenous perspective we need to better understand the plot of land in question. Rather than read the novel as needlessly lacking Indigenous characters, it is possible to understand that lack as an intentional reflection of negative settler colonial ghosting – as Bergland has theorized

– and a potential critique of the colonial hubris that led to the violent dispossession of

Indigenous peoples so characteristic of the region. Ultimately, a critique of this nature paints the Wendigo as a metaphor for said dispossession and offers this nonhuman as a mere consequence of human actions and further denigrates the image of nonhuman intelligence and agency in literature and the popular consciousness. Fully interrogating the violent material relationships in through a Native studies and Marxist sense – between humans, property, and labor practices of the region – allows us to acknowledge the significant consequence of settler-colonial history in New England and gives us the opportunity to move past this type of anthropocentric thinking and dive deeper into the material relationships of the human and nonhuman in Pet Sematary. Through this lens,

King offers the Wendigo and the Burial Ground as potentially disrupting forces that reinforces a potent agency and intelligence for the nonhuman and critiques a traditional discourse heavily framed by a dualistic and hierarchal Cartesian understanding of materiality.

Up until this point, extant critiques of Pet Sematary (including my own) have been made up of readings that fail to recognize the role the nonhuman plays in the plot of the novel. As stated in the previous chapter, Tony Magistrale provides a rather

anthropocentric misreading of protagonist Louis Creed’s agency within the novel, claiming multiple times that the plot that drives the narrative is a direct result of the doctor’s own rational misgivings and ultimately irrational decisions to deny death.

Magistrale states that “Creed fails to acknowledge […] the inviolable distinction separating human idealism from the limitations of reality” and insinuates that “Creed’s quest to circumvent the design of Fate succeeds only in perverting life” (59). In this sense, Magistrale’s critique instantiates popular reception of the novel—as a work largely about a father’s attempts to deny the tragic death of his family through resurrection.

Despite existing critiques that the action of the novel runs through the putatively myopic lens of King’s protagonist, Pet Sematary in fact offers productive insight into the categories of life and nonlife. However, the anthropocentric track Pet Sematary has been placed upon in its admittedly small critical presence should be reexamined and acknowledged. As Jud Crandall, neighbor and friend to the newly moved in Creed family, says “The Micmac [tribe] knew that place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they made it what it was” (King 260). Jud’s insistence that something other than human predates the Micmac tribe’s interaction encourages a reading that does not argue for a purposeful denial of death; or continue a conversation of occlusion and appropriation

(which is quite merited as seen in the first chapter); or ground us wholly in the psychology of the family. Instead, we must acknowledge the power of the Wendigo and the Burial Ground that seemingly control the events in the novel to decenter and destabilize anthropocentricity. Pet Sematary obsessively interrogates the mysteries of death not by allowing characters the choice of denying it, but by obfuscating the

relationship between life and nonlife through a decentralization of the human in favor of a more geontological understanding of matter’s ubiquity.

Anthropocentric critiques are not simply a Pet Sematary problem. Michel

Foucault’s biopolitics have infected discourse with a needless dismissal of nonhumans for decades. Biopolitics, as defined by Foucault in Security, Territory, Population, consists of “a set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power.”

The conventional critical practices developed from Foucault’s fundamental misunderstanding of matter have spawned critiques of novels spanning all genres that are consequential in the human’s continued understanding of the nonhuman as antagonist.

Moby Dick, or The Whale and The Old Man and the Sea are just two examples of great literary novels in which the nonhuman is demoted to antagonist in favor of a standard human protagonist. This blatant disregard for the nonhuman within the realm of political power is only now being assuaged by a rigorous re-examination of the relationship between life and nonlife. One such theorist, Elizabeth Povinelli, seeks to complicate and dismantle Foucault’s persistent assertion of Cartesian thought; or the primacy of human matter in his understanding of a political power that governs the distinction between life and death but does not account for matter previously categorized as non-living or inert.

Rather, Povinelli asserts that geontopower “does not operate through the governance of life and the tactics of death but is rather a set of discourse, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife” (4). Povinelli saw the current moment as an opportunity to understand matter as taking many forms but remaining the same building block and, thus,

necessitating a better critical approach to its distinction and an eschewing of “governance through life and death” sustained by a better understanding of the difference between

“lively and inert” (5). She states that while “the statement ‘clearly, x humans are more important than y rocks’” can halt political discourse but “what interests [her]…is the slight hesitation, the pause, the intake of breath that now can interrupt an immediate assent” (9). Critical analysis taking an approach more in the footsteps of Povinelli’s geontological politics than Foucault’s biopolitics has emerged in the humanities as being in line with the pursuit of new theories of materiality that better elucidate these relationships and takes all forms of matter into equal account. Povinelli and other new materialist thinkers such as Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennet, and Donna Haraway recognize the shift away from Cartesian thought as an opportunity to enhance our understanding of the ecologies humans and nonhumans are entangled in through an acknowledgement of the agency and intelligence of nonhumans previously thought of as lesser-than or wholly brute.

While Povinelli paves the way for a new consideration of life and nonlife in politics, other new materialists join the charge in a variety of ways that further the humanities in positive and progressive ways that foster a better understanding of the nonhuman. Ahmed, as previously discussed in Chapter One, uses Husserl’s phenomenology to understand objects previously seen as inert as having arrived. This theory essentially furthers the discrepancy Povinelli has by asserting that objects have histories that affect one object’s relationship to another. Jane Bennet takes this consideration even further in her “notion of thing-power” (3) by discussing the agency of nonhuman matter previously thought of as holding no power. These things – or actants –

range from “a dead rat” (3) to “electricity” (10). In Vibrant Matter, Bennet fiercely interrogates the relationships between all human and nonhuman actants that, together, caused a power outage. Bennet borrows the term “assemblage” from Deleuze and

Guattari to denote that “the locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman working group” (xvii). By illustrating political histories previously thought of as being caused by humans alone as being an assemblage made up of what Bruno Latour calls “actants”,

Bennet posits that things have distributive power but also asserts there is a power “alien” to humans.

King’s fictional Maine is a terrifying place filled with many nonhuman monsters, critters, and land formations that cause equal amounts of dread and awe. These intelligent nonhumans often drive the plots of his novels, or at the very least cause the humans to act in response to their presence. These nonhumans, of course, can be read simply as tools of the horror genre. However, this supposition of purpose further denigrates not only King’s prowess as a writer of literature but the horror genre’s ability to convey meaningful discourse surrounding the intelligence and agency of the nonhuman. As discussed in the

Introduction to this project, King’s oeuvre often follows the typified arc of horror and

“details the outbreak of some Dionysian madness in an Apollonian existence, and

[suggests] that the horror will continue until the Dionysian forces have been repelled and the Apollonian norm [is] restored again” (King 422). King deconstructs this sort of narrative in Pet Sematary by denying the Creed family reprieve and suggesting that the

Wendigo and the Burial Ground will continue to operate in Ludlow unabated. King’s characters often call the land evil, but, as discussed in the previous chapter, these characters are white settlers consciously deciding to discount Indigenous epistemologies

and recount their limited understanding of them in order to continue their use of this so- called by them evil plot of land. Not only do the characters disregard these Indigenous epistemes, they do not take into consideration the nonhuman ontologies and epistemologies present in Ludlow. Rather than have the forces of “good” triumph over the forces of “evil”, King furthers his indictment of settler colonial ideals by leaving these forces ambiguously entangled (both historically and presently) in an ecological assemblage in which nonhuman actants claim similar, if not more, agency as humans.

King’s treatment of the human and nonhuman history and agency is different from extant horror novels of the 1970s and 1980s in which nature simply fights back or critters and

Others are monsters to overcome, creating a rather politically progressive critique of settler colonial ideals that allows for further consideration of the potency of nonhuman agency in Ludlow and beyond.

Towards a Neutral Consideration of Matter

In the first chapter, I briefly noted Sara Ahmed’s interpretation of the arrival of an object as being important to our understanding of phenomenology and, ultimately, the ontology and purpose of matter. My previous discussion of the arrival of the Burial

Ground in the historically material contexts through which the Micmac tribe, the colonists, modern inhabitants of Ludlow, and the plot of land itself came to be in co- incidence allowed for a better understanding of King’s critique of settler colonial ideals.

However, my historically driven intervention largely left out his assertion of the potency of nonhuman agency through his treating the Wendigo and the Burial Ground as having a history, ontology, and a large amount of control over human and nonhuman materialities in Ludlow. The human role in the Burial Ground’s arrival, orientation, and occupation

has been discussed at length in this project, but the influence of the nonhuman on the current state of affairs in Ludlow will be fully considered. Unlike typical horror novels,

King’s story is less about being able to physically fight back against a nonhuman in a show of the violent and exultant primacy of the human, and more about the neutrality of matter, as posited by Sara Ahmed. The Wendigo, an entity from Anishinaabe faith occupies a place and orientation within the Burial Ground’s arrival, and asserts a consequential role for the nonhuman in histories and agencies previously thought of as being shaped by humans alone.

Ahmed posits that matter “is affected by orientations, by the ways in which bodies are directed toward things,…that matter is dynamic, unstable, and contingent. What matters is itself an effect of proximities: we are touched by what comes near, just as what comes near is affected by directions we have already taken” (234). Here, Ahmed swivels the privileged Cartesian hierarchal understanding of matter being made from two different types (living and brute) to a neutral plane where any form of matter has an orientation that, when contact with another form of matter is made, can change its own or the other’s orientation. Ahmed goes further to state that “to sustain such an orientation would mean certain objects must be available to me… Orientations shape how the world coheres around me. Orientations affect what is near or proximate to the body, those objects that we do things with” (234-35). For Ahmed, co-incidence is how things get done, or how objects get things done with another objects’ influence. King’s novel upholds this neutral reading of matter through a deconstruction of good versus evil and his decision to not simply assign antagonist status to the Wendigo. Rather, King breaks his own theories of the conventional horror novel by withholding a return to “the

Appolonian norm” and thus argues for the neutrality of material characters. For King, each human and nonhuman have their orientation and are in co-incidence with each other and, through a series of coming into contact, change each other’s orientations without any moral intentions.

In regard to the analysis of orientations, Ahmed states that “orientations are about how we begin, how we proceed from ‘here’” (236). Pet Sematary begins with the Creed family arriving in Ludlow so that Louis Creed can become the Director of Medicine at the local university. On their first day at their new house, Jud Crandall crosses the street and introduces himself by pulling a bee’s stinger out of Gage’s hand. Louis, having written Jud off due to anger and frustration with losing the keys to his new house, sees

Jud’s worth and decides to trust him implicitly from that point forward. This relationship builds quickly, and Jud offers to show the Creed family to the Pet Sematary at the end of the trail in their back yard. Soon after, when Louis’s daughter’s cat Church gets hit by a truck in the street, Louis lets Jud lead him to the Burial Ground without asking any questions. Later in the novel, Jud laments his decision as having been avoidable and waxes poetic on the idea that without his guidance, which he thinks has been influenced by the “place”, Church and Louis’s son Gage may never have died. Ahmed states that

“Orientations are about the direction we take that puts some things and not others in our reach” (245). Without the bee stinging Gage, then Louis may never have trusted Jud to the extent that he did. While not the most prominent example of nonhuman agency present in King’s novel, the bee’s simple involvement in the chain of events that eventually leads to the death of Louis Creed’s cat, son, friend, and wife argues for the vital potency of the nonhuman within King’s Maine and the necessity of new materialist

critiques. The bee’s orientation impacted the orientation of the bodies around it and, in this sense, is a vital body in the novel’s events by then orienting Jud towards Gage and

Louis towards Jud in a significant way.

Ahmed also opens up the importance of space in the orientation of matter:

“Spaces too are oriented in the sense that certain bodies are ‘in place’ in this or that place…To say spaces are oriented around certain bodies is to show how some bodies will be more ‘in place’ than others” (235). In this regard, the analysis of material relationships of colonists and Indigenous peoples in New England plays a large role in the Burial

Ground’s arrival and its orientation as a space. The trauma over land ownership and violent dispossession of Indigenous peoples contributes to the arrival of a space in which colonists have settled the region, constructed borders around their land, and dispossessed

Indigenous bodies. However, Ahmed also posits that

one problem with this model is that the dynamism of ‘making form’ is located in

the transformation of nature into use-value: we could also suggest that…‘wood’

(nature/matter) has acquired its form over time. Nature then would not simply be

‘there’ waiting to be formed or to take form…[an object] is given only through

these multiple histories of labor, redefined as matter taking form. (242)

King affirms this issue through the novel’s ambiguity and Jud’s grasping at an understanding of the Burial Ground’s arrival as having deep history that they can’t possibly wholly know. Jud refers to it as the Micmac Burial Ground, but clearly states that “that doesn’t necessarily mean they made it what it was” (King 260). Jud traces human history back but finally lands on the idea that “the place will stay no matter who’s here…It isn’t as though someone owned it and could take its secret when they moved on.

It’s an evil, curdled place…It has a power” (260). King asserts the Burial Ground’s current orientation as matter taking form divorced from anthropocentric conflicts and posits that it will remain long after human interaction. In order to fully understand how this space arrived and how its current orientation operates, an expanded attentiveness to how human and nonhuman bodies, and their joint traumas, have played a fundamental role in the land’s formation is vital.

King’s America is a living vibrant landscape with entangled ecologies of human and nonhuman systems and histories that bleed into each other and create a patchwork of townships, cities, and worlds that together illustrate the potency of the nonhuman in all forms. Mostly based in Maine, towns like Derry, Ludlow, Castle Rock, and Jerusalem’s

Lot are connected by the Penobscot river, its tributaries, and the thick forests that surround them. The river is mighty and factors into many of King’s fictional narratives but is also historically important to colonists, Indigenous peoples, and nonhumans alike.

In IT, the Penobscot is filled with the sewer run-off under Derry and provides Pennywise unlimited routes for hunting children around the town. In The Girl Who Loved Tom

Gordon, young Trisha gets lost in the thickly wooded state forests alluded to by Jud in

Pet Sematary and these shared landforms, rivers, and other potent nonhumans lead her astray or towards safety depending on their orientation to her and vice versa. The interconnectivity of King’s landscape and the agency nonhuman bodies possess throughout his narratives calls for a radical approach attending to the understanding of nonhuman intelligence, language, and intentions. Eduardo Kohn, having spent three years with the Runa in Ecuador’s Upper Rainforest, sought to cultivate an understanding for the thoughts, agencies, and languages that nonhumans use to communicate and effect the

world around them. Kohn developed what he coined a form of sylvan thinking that is available to both humans and nonhumans and is based off of attentiveness to other bodies of matter and their orientations to each other in ecological co-incidence. Kohn argues for a new way of understanding semiotic relationships “in which how humans represent jaguars and how jaguars represent humans can be understood as integral, though not interchangeable, parts of a single, open-ended story” (9). For Kohn, a large part in the human mistreatment of the nonhuman is due to “excess conceptual baggage that has accumulated as a result of our exclusive attention…to that which makes us humans exceptional” (22). King’s Maine and America meaningfully strip away that burden through a portrayal of semiotic relationships where humans and nonhumans live, fight, communicate, help, and struggle together. King’s story world then “develop[s] [an opportunity for a better understanding of] how the human is both distinct from and continuous with that which lies beyond it” (9) and can be understood as a sprawling, vibrant, sylvatic realm.

Within this realm, it is possible to discuss the formation of the land through the lens of both human and nonhuman traumas, enlightenment rationalities, and taxonomies.

As discussed in the first chapter, property lines were an incredibly important part of colonial life and allowed for the bounding, ownership, and improvement of land in a

Lockean sense. King further critiques colonial ideals by portraying the landscape’s vital opposition to such a Lockean view of nonhuman bodies. When discussing property lines,

Jud tells Louis that “the original grant for your land goes like this… ‘From the great old maple which stands atop Quinceberry Ridge to the verge of Orrington Stream; thus runneth the tract from north until south’” (245). These “bears for recording deeds,” as Jud

calls the Ludlow colonists, used their Cartesian understanding of nonhuman matter as brute and stable to assert their dominance over the future of their property distinctions.

However, as Jud continues on,

the great maple fell down in 1882, let’s say, and was rotted to moss by the year

1900, and Orrington Stream silted up and turned to marsh in the ten years

between the end of the Great War and the crash of the stock market….There’s lots

of places where the history of ownership is so tangled it never gets unraveled”

(245).

King entangles human and nonhuman history and paints a beautifully muddled picture of a vital landscape and a neutral orientation of matter. Not only does King critique

Enlightenment-inflected categorization here, but he bolsters nonhuman agency in denying the brute and permanent tag placed upon it. Trees fall, rivers dry up, and property lines constructed by humans are dissolved and confused by nonhuman shifts in orientation.

Whereas nonhuman matter confused colonial documents explaining where

Louis’s property lines are drawn, the line between the Pet Sematary and the Burial

Ground is made quite clear by a nonhuman body. Where the Burial Ground begins and ends is marked by a mass of fallen trees that apparently protect its borders from unwanted intruders. Referred to as the deadfall, Louis observes that “on both sides the underbrush closed in so thickly as to be impenetrable. Nor was it the kind of brush you’d try to push your way through – not if you were smart…There were lush masses of poison ivy growing close to the ground…and farther in were some of the biggest, most wicked- looking thorns he had ever seen” (85). He dwells on the pile of dead trees, thinking that

“there was something too convenient about that blowdown and the way it stood between

the pet cemetery and the depths of woods beyond…Its very randomness seemed too artful, too perfect for a work of nature” (King 34). Later, Louis tries to climb the deadfall and “he felt it shift under his feet with a peculiar creaking sound” (85). The deadfall seems to communicate its impenetrability through thorns, poison ivy, and roughly broken branches. When Louis tries to climb over, it creaks at him and he decides to stop. Human curiosity and ingenuity is not enough to conquer this particular nonhuman. However, later in the novel, when Jud is leading Louis to bury Church in the Burial Ground,

“without the slightest pause…Jud started [to climb the deadfall]. ...He simply mounted, as if climbing a set of stairs. He walked like a man who knows exactly where his next step is coming from. Louis followed in the same way” (114). During this, Louis calls the deadfall a barrier, saying “yes, that’s what it was – why try to pretend it wasn’t? The barrier” (115). The stack of dead trees does not, in fact, prove to be totally impenetrable.

Humans, such as Louis and Jud, are allowed up and over the deadfall seemingly contingent on nonhuman agency. In this sense, the deadfall can be read as a porous division between life and nonlife that further strengthens a critique of this sort of

Cartesian distinction.

King provides insight into the ways in which potent nonhuman critters, plants, and landforms communicate by painting Ludlow as a sylvatic realm whose neutral plane is deeply non-anthropocentric and is best understood through a new materialist understanding of the nonhuman. Ahmed muses that “we could say that the history

‘happens’ in the very repetition of gestures, which is what gives bodies their dispositions or tendencies” (246). History, to include both human and nonhuman, can be further understood as the formation of matter. Together, humans and nonhumans in Ludlow are

locked in a cyclical formation of matter and space. The Burial Ground, long before human interaction and tentatively long after, has arrived and oriented itself towards other material bodies. This formation is inferred to be developed through colonial, Indigenous, and nonhuman conflicts, dispossessions, and traumas and is experienced first-hand only through Louis’s continued use of the Burial Ground. According to Ahmed, “our body takes the shape of this repetition; we get stuck in certain alignments as an effect of this work” (247). Within King’s sylvatic realm, we must open up the term bios to serve both human and nonhuman matter. Throughout the novel, Louis comments on how easy his decision to bury loved ones in the Burial Ground is to make, even though the results are known to be horrific for him and others. For example, when visiting the Burial Ground to bury his daughter’s cat, Louis remarks that “[he] feel[s] better than [he has] in maybe six years” (113). Jud responds, saying “Yeah, I know […]. You don’t pick your times for feeling good, any more than you do for the other. And the place has something to do with it too” (113). To contrast this, Louis’s thoughts after hiking to the Pet Sematary the first time, without Jud’s secret intention of burying the cat, are far more negative: “’I’m fine,’

[Louis] called back a little aggressively. Pride probably would have led him to say the same thing even if he had felt the onset of a coronary” and “sweat poured down [his] face” (28-29). It isn’t limited to Louis, either. When Church returns from the dead, Louis thinks back to the evening Jud brought him to the Burial Ground and recalls “thinking that Jud’s decision to take [him] and Ellie’s cat on that particular night journey had not entirely been Jud’s own” (147). The potency of the nonhuman’s agency over other humans and nonhumans in Ludlow must be taken into account when analyzing the continued and seemingly cyclical use of the Burial Ground. King’s portrayal of

nonhuman agency as potent and real is far reaching, often deconstructing Cartesian dualism to its core by shirking the boundaries of traditional protagonist vs antagonist story forms in favor of more ambiguous placements in this strata-less plane. The

Wendigo, derived from Anishinaabe myth, has filled such an antagonist position in traditional stories such as Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo.” However, King’s sylvatic realm is truly neutral and, even though Jud and Louis refer to the Burial Ground and The Wendigo as being evil, he offers no true judgement on the rights and wrongs of any material bodies. Rather, King depicts a single story that takes place within a collectively formed ecology of human and nonhumans in co-incidence with one another that has no overall conclusion.

Actants and Assemblages

Ahmed paves the way for understanding how all forms of matter have arrivals, orientations, occupations, and are in co-incidence with each other on a neutral plane of existence. Bennet, in her book Vibrant Matter, expounds upon co-incidence and matter by utilizing Bruno Latour’s ‘actants’ and Deleuze and Guatarri’s ‘assemblages’ to give their collective orientations form and, ultimately, offer a way to more fully analyze the distributive agency of human and nonhuman forms of matter. Similarly to Ahmed,

Bennet argues for an ideology where “matter is an active principal” but offers a vital distinction that “though [matter] inhabits us and our inventions, [it] also acts as an outside or alien power” (47). Bennet asserts that bodies of matter are not entirely given their power through relation to other bodies of matter: “an actant is a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events” (viii).

However, actants are bound to one another in an assemblage: “The locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman working group” (xvii). Essentially, whereas a nonhuman actant can have some form of power, “an actant can never really act alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many [human and nonhuman] bodies and forces” (21). However, Bennet also asserts that electricity, as a single actant, has some sort of power to produce a result totally alienated from human intentions. Bennet is careful to eschew Cartesian dualism by stressing that she is not arguing for a divine vitalism – matter being animated by some separate spirituality – but a vital materialism. Nonetheless, whole events can be understood as being produced by a confederacy of actants, or an agentic assemblage (21). As I’ve stated previously, Ludlow can be seen as a sylvatic realm in which maple trees, riverbeds, and fallen trees have a potent and collective form of agency. However, when we analyze the events of Pet Sematary as being acted out by an assemblage made up of many human and nonhuman actants, the true potency of nonhuman agency can be more wholly recognized.

Looming large amongst the rest of the actants in Ludlow is the Wendigo that inhabits the Burial Ground beyond the Pet Sematary. According to Brady DeSanti, the

Ojibwe

Underst[and the Windigo] to be a giant monster with an insatiable appetite for

human flesh, … possesses hideous features and immense physical and spiritual

power. The windigo can also be understood as a representation of the freezing

temperatures of the northeastern and Great Lakes regions and the resource

scarcity that occasionally ensues during harsh winters. (188)

As discussed in the previous chapter, any Indigenous epistemology represented in Pet

Sematary is filtered through colonial Jud and as such put into conversation with his own beliefs. Jud places the Wendigo in the same category of his own Christian God: “the

Wendigo story, now, that was something you could hear in those days all over the north country. It was a story they had to have, the same way I guess we have to have some of our Christian stories” (143). Jud’s epistemological violence against Indigenous faith is palpable, but by critiquing both faiths’ purposes equally creates a world in which hegemonic and non-hegemonic religions are cast in the same critical light. Desanti fulfills

King’s assertion of the symbolic importance of the Wendigo “story” by stating that

“while the Ojibwe never practiced cannibalism, the windigo’s appearance can in part be seen as a symbolic projection of the absolute horror at the prospect of, and, at times, instances of, famine cannibalism that took place as a result of food shortages” (188). An important distinction when understanding the Ojibwe’s relationship with the Wendigo.

However, Desanti also states that

more in line with many Ojibwe stories of the windigo giant and windigo

possession, Basil Johnston (1995, 247.) claims that the term windigo refers to

gluttony and selfishness. Not surprisingly, some windigo stories stress the

importance of not over-indulging in any aspect of individual life that might prove

detrimental to the community at large. (188)

The Wendigo’s representation for Anishinaabe people is neutral in nature, even though it has come to signify evil in many popular culture representations. In Pet Sematary, however much the Burial Ground is referred to as evil and curdled, the Wendigo remains a symbolic story used, according to Jud, to understand seasonal food scarcity.

Louis comes into contact with the Wendigo on two separate occasions. On his first trip to the Burial Ground, carrying the body of his daughter’s dead cat, Louis and Jud hear something crashing in the woods. Louis first pictures a moose, then a bear, and then

“he didn’t know what he was picturing” (119). After this, Louis almost opens his mouth to comment but instead is met with “a shrill maniacal laugh [that] came out of the darkness, rising and falling in hysterical cycles, loud, piercing, chilling” (119). After the laughter turns to sobs, he asks Jud “What in Christ’s name” that was, to which Jud responds, “Just a loon” (120). The second time, alone, Louis comes closer to seeing the

Wendigo’s material presence in the Little God Swamp. First, it comes in as a hazy face

“hanging in the air ahead of him, leering and gibbering. Its eyes, tilted up like the eyes in a classical Chinese painting, were a rich yellowish-gray, sunken, gleaming” (346). Louis grasps for some way to perceive, categorize, and understand the Wendigo. However, a moment later, Louis heard

a sound like nothing he had ever heard in his life – a living sound, a big sound.

Somewhere nearby, growing closer, branches were snapping off. […]. The

jellylike ground under Louis’s feet began to shake in sympathetic vibration. He

became aware that he was moaning. (oh my God oh my dear God what is that

what is coming through this fog?). (347)

Interestingly, the Wendigo never shows its own material form to the humans in Ludlow but is forced to possess bodies buried in the Burial Ground. Louis tries to comprehend what he is hearing and seeing in the land beyond the pet sematary but ultimately falls short. King asserts the fundamental unknowable nonhuman by only portraying the

Wendigo through possession of pets and humans buried in the Burial Ground. Its purpose

is never made wholly clear and thus King also cleverly denotes the symbolic representation of the Wendigo “story” while making the Wendigo itself a present and material body in Ludlow with potent agency.

The land, and the Wendigo, assert their distributive agency over the humans and nonhumans that surround it. The cat is the Wendigo’s first victim in the Creed family, but nowhere near its first from Ludlow. Louis had just gotten Church neutered in an attempt to stop him from crossing the street “that used up” pets (16). When Church is hit by a truck on the road, Louis wonders why he was crossing the street. A seemingly innocuous question turns into an ontological interrogation of the Wendigo and the extent of its control. While Church choosing to cross the street is within his own agential choice, the

Wendigo’s ability to embolden the agency of other forms of matter within the Ludlow assemblage causes Louis to begin questioning the cat, Jud, and his own choices. Later, when Gage is killed in the same way as Church, Louis’s wife Rachel relays that the driver killed himself soon after and that “he wasn’t drunk. He wasn’t on drugs. He didn’t have any previous speeding violations. He said that when he got to Ludlow, he just felt like putting the pedal to the metal. He said he didn’t even know why” (King 279). The

Wendigo’s agential power is far-reaching and ever present in Ludlow, as it seems to be able to sway human and nonhuman actants alike. Later in the novel, when Rachel tries to stop Louis from burying their son in the Burial Ground, her car breaks down and she has the thought that “something is trying to keep [her] away from [Louis]” (352). When she finally sees a mechanic, he says that he’d “never seen something like that go wrong on such a new car” (367). While she’s stalled, Louis buries their son in the Burial Ground.

Jud is similarly halted from helping. Rachel calls Jud when it’s clear that she won’t make

it back to Ludlow in time and Jud decides to wait up to watch across the street for when

Louis returns. When she calls, Jud thinks “Power’s growing. I can feel it” (337). Jud is barely able to maintain his watch, constantly drowsing off. To this, he thinks “It’s puttin me to sleep…hypnotizin me…somethin. It doesn’t want me awake. Because he’ll be comin back pretty soon. Yeah, I feel that. And it wants me out of the way” (339). Jud falls asleep just before Louis comes home to bury his son in the Burial Ground. Jud only wakes back up when it is too late and Louis’s son, returned from the dead, kills him. The

Wendigo exerts its potent agency within its assemblage to orient humans and nonhumans towards the Burial Ground for its own purposes.

The Wendigo’s potent agency does not begin or end with the events depicted in

Pet Sematary. Jud relays a number of stories in which himself and others in town have used the Burial Ground for their own personal gain despite knowing the results are not in their favor. As previously discussed in Chapter One, Jud is told by Stanny B. how to resurrect his dog Spot. Jud recounts another story where Lester Morgan’s bull Henratty dies and is buried in the Burial Ground. Jud states that “that bull turned mean, really mean” and “Lester shot him dead two weeks later” (153). Then, he says that Morgan

“took Linda Lavesque up there after her dog got run over in the road. He took her up there even though he had to put his goddamn bull out of its misery for chasing kids through its pasture like it was mad. …He did it anyway, Louis…and what the Christ do you make of that!” (154). Jud goes on to say that “animals…got a little nasty” after they are resurrected (155). It doesn’t seem as if the Wendigo can get much done through the bodies of nonhumans, if it is indeed the Wendigo possessing them. It could be that the animals return from the dead haunted by the knowledge of how fragile the schism

between life and nonlife truly is. King leaves the whims of the Wendigo and other nonhumans ambiguous, without any semblance of a conclusion, and bolsters the potency of these nonhuman’s agency in the process.

Some semblance of the Wendigo’s goals in the novel come into relief when the

Anishinaabe “story” is understood as having to do with cannibalism and what it does when it finally possesses a human body that is capable of communicating on a level more comfortable for the humans in Ludlow. Just after Gage dies, while Louis is contemplating a trip to the Burial Ground for his son, Jud arrives to tell the story of Timmy Baterman.

Baterman was a young WW2 veteran who “[came] back in a box with a flag on the top of it in 1943. He died in Italy” (245). His father, Bill, decided to bury him in the Burial

Ground. Baterman returns resembling a zombie in a film, shambling around the road and house, and is seen by a number of Ludlow residents. Baterman seems to know much about the humans in Ludlow and provides a great many tales of adultery and hate that only the men present should have known. Comparably, when Gage is resurrected he seems to remember Jud from when he met the resurrected Timmy Baterman. When Louis finds his wife’s corpse he notes that she “had not just been killed. Something had been…something had been at her” (384). The resurrected Gage had fed on his own mother for some sort of sustenance. It is not made clear if this is the goal of the Wendigo, and it is quite possible that we can never really know the true intentions of this nonhuman subject on human terms. In Kohn’s explanation of sylvan thinking, nonhumans may be exhibiting other forms of intention – possibly more in line with instinct – as well as cognition. Similarly, when Jud met Baterman he noticed that “there was somethin more.

There was somethin goin on behind his eyes, and sometimes you could see it and

sometimes you couldn’t see it. Somethin behind his eyes, Louis. I don’t think that thinkin is what I want to call it. I don’t know what in the hell I want to call it. It was sly, that was one thing” (252). Even though the Wendigo possesses the body of a human, Jud still grasps to fully comprehend the nonhuman body within, that spark that apparently makes other forms of matter unknowable. The Wendigo, in line with the Anishinaabe story, seems to desire flesh for consumption. This may be a part of its necessary diet for survival. It could be that although the Wendigo seems to hold a large amount of sway over the humans and nonhumans of Ludlow and beyond, this nonhuman simply exists within the ecological assemblage as it is. King certainly does not offer any indictment of its actions as being right or wrong through the traditional trial by combat offered in horror fiction. While the Wendigo in King’s novel commits heinous acts, they are always seen through the lens of the human. This nonhuman’s subsistence becomes horrific when the prey is material bodies cared for by humans. Whatever its goals, the Wendigo doesn’t seem to be able to accomplish any of them without the Burial Ground itself.

What is perhaps most interesting about King’s sylvatic Ludlow is the muddled relationship of the Wendigo and the Burial Ground itself. It is never made expressly clear which came first, or which is driving much of the assemblage’s actions. Although I have asserted that the Wendigo’s actions can be seen as a nonhuman subsisting within an existing ecological system through no real fault of its own, it is unclear whether or not the

Wendigo or the Burial Ground hold the intentionality the humans of Ludlow call evil.

Similarly to the maple trees, riverbeds, and the deadfall, the Burial Ground is a vital landscape that seems to be ordered intelligently. King highlights this sort of nonhuman incomprehensibility through alignment with the failures of ancient epistemologies to

attain a full understanding of the universe and the meaning of life and nonlife. Louis regards the graves in a cemetery as being in “rough rows” and looking “sanely divided” and being “real estate for sale” (271). Then, he thinks back to the Pet Sematary and realizes that the graves made by the children were “rough, concentric circles moving inward to the center…in their almost Druidic circles” (272). This is bizarre for him, but then he realizes that

the graves in the Pet Sematary mimed the most ancient religious symbol of all:

diminishing circles indicating a spiral leading down, not to a point, but to infinity;

order from chaos or chaos from order, depending on which way your mind

worked. It was a symbol the Egyptians had chiseled on the tombs of the Pharaohs,

a symbol the Phoenicians had drawn on the barrows of their fallen kings; it was

found on cave walls in ancient Mycenae; the guild-kings of Stonehenge had

created it as a clock to time the universe; it appeared in the Judeo-Christian Bible

as the whirlwind from which God had spoken to Job. The spiral was the oldest

sign of power in the world, man’s oldest symbol of that twisty bridge which may

exist between the world and the Gulf. (272)

Later, when Louis finally brings Gage up to the Burial Ground, he realizes

It was just like the Pet Sematary…here on the top of this rock table, Its face

turned up to cold starlight and to the black distances between the stars, was a

gigantic spiral. Made by what the Oldtimers would have called Various

Hands….Louis wondered randomly and thought of those desert drawings that one

tribe of Indians or another had made in South America. (350)

King posits the Burial Ground itself as possessing the knowledge that humans have been trying to attach symbolic meaning to through ancient epistemologies and religion. Louis grasps at what the spiral might mean; whether it is a clock, a bridge, chaos, or order. It could be possible that the Burial Ground, having the ability to restore life in some regard, has attained a better understanding of the relationship between life and nonlife.

The Wendigo operates for itself, but it is unclear whether or not it came before or after the land. It could be very possible that the potency of this nonhuman’s agency is bolstered by the more potent agency of the vital Burial Ground. Jud, even though he clearly knows about the Wendigo story, and has communicated with it in some way, refers to the place as having power or the land as being curdled, evil, or sour. He does not say the Wendigo has soured it, and he expressly says it was not the Micmac tribe or any other group of humans. In fact, he posits that it has been there long before and will be there long after any sort of human interaction. After bringing Louis to bury Church, Jud says “That place…all at once it gets hold of you…and you make up the sweetest-smelling reasons in the world” (155). When thinking about the Burial Ground after Gage’s death,

Louis thinks that “It’s your place, a secret place, and it belongs to you, and you belong to it” (242), citing a mutual relationship of sorts. However, when discussing the death of

Gage, Louis says “You’re saying the place knew Gage was going to die, I think” to which

Jud responds “No, I am saying the place might have made Gage die because I introduced you to the power in the place” (261). This is a rare spot in the novel where King dissolves some of the ambiguity. At other times, Jud and Louis refer to what is pushing them along as it. Here, they refer to the place itself as having made a human die, utterly divorcing any sort of responsibility from the Wendigo. Instead, Jud insists that the Burial Ground is

vital, is epistemologically and ontologically organized, and holds a potent agency over the other actants in the assemblage.

Within this assemblage, located in King’s sylvatic realm, the Burial Ground and the Wendigo are able to act. As Bennet asserts, analyzing distributive agency through an understanding of assemblages is not about placing blame or positing right and wrong.

Even though Jud calls the Burial Ground evil, the events of the novel do not necessarily assert that in its conclusion. In fact, there is no return to Apollonian normalcy or a continuance of Dionysian chaos in Ludlow because King has constructed a world divorced from anthropocentric conceptions of order and chaos; in which the ecological relationships simply are what they are. After all is said and done, and Gage has been resurrected and killed again, Louis brings his dead wife to the Burial Ground and the novel ends with all actants in the assemblage continuing along, being oriented one way or another by each other, doing what they do, and fundamentally bringing about no change to the overall ecology. Sara Ahmed and Jane Bennet have given us what we need to understand a novel perceived as horrific and overtly negative as not only asserting a potent nonhuman agency but advocating for a neutral view and non-anthropocentric understanding of how these material bodies are oriented towards each other and how their agency is distributed evenly along a plane devoid of judgment and humans assigning moralities to nonhuman subjects.

It certainly could be that the Burial Ground and the Wendigo are inextricably linked in a collective relationship within Ludlow’s ecological assemblage made up of human and nonhuman actants. Through distributive agency, both of these nonhumans are able to work together to act upon the other actants within the assemblage and exact their

own goals, even though those goals are left ambiguous. We are able to grasp at what these two nonhumans may want but, in the end, it is impossible to completely comprehend exactly what they desire. What is possible, however, is recognizing the epistemology, agency, and ontology that King posits they hold over humans and nonhumans alike. King supplants a Cartesian framework, instead illustrating the potency of nonhuman agency, intelligence, and vitality through the exploration of present events in Ludlow as being the result of distributive agency. King also provides historical incidents of humans reviving other humans and nonhumans through use of the Burial

Ground despite them knowing the results will be less than ideal. In the end, King offers no judgements or conclusions. Rather, he opts for an ambiguous ending that illustrates not only the cyclical nature of life but the vital role that bodies historically understood as nonlife play in said cycle.

Conclusion:

Reclaiming Tentacularity in Horror

“Why is it that the epochal name of the Anthropos imposed itself at just the time when

understandings and knowledge practices about and within symbiogenesis and sympoietics are

wildly and wonderfully available and generative in all the humusities, including noncolonizing arts, sciences, and politics? What if the doleful doings of the Anthropocene and the unworldings of the Capitalocene are the last gasps of the sky gods, not guarantors of the finished future, game

over? It matters which thoughts think thoughts.

We must think!”

– Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble

It has been made quite clear, through rigorous examination of the historical and material relations of Indigenous peoples, colonists, and nonhumans in New England, that

Stephen King’s Pet Sematary has much to offer. The development of capitalism in the

British colonies gives way to a fur trade that allows for the passing of information and the taking advantage of Indigenous peoples by Ludlow’s original colonial residents. Even though Pet Sematary has been charged for perceived racism, appropriation, and occlusion of Indigenous peoples, the novel clearly indicts settler colonial ideals by assigning consequences for the cyclical misuse of the Burial Ground and neglect for Indigenous bodies. King’s characters disregard Indigenous experiences with the Burial Ground and further obfuscate any violent history of dispossession or displacement by telling 76

Indigenous stories through their own settler filters, omitting any sort of conflicts in the process. King’s novel not only critiques the anthropocentric historical relationships of the region but also illustrates the potency of nonhuman agency through references to the

Burial Ground’s power over humans and nonhumans in Ludlow and beyond. The

Wendigo seems to take part in a subsistence ecology in which it feeds on human bodies.

The Burial Ground is working in sympoesis with the Wendigo to provide it with what it needs by bending human and nonhuman actants towards its power of resurrection. King certainly asserts that these two nonhuman actants are fear inducing but does not offer any overall moral critique regarding their perceived goals. The novel ends not in resolution, but in an unrelenting cycle of use and misuse, subsistence for one nonhuman at the sacrifice of all other humans and nonhumans. The importance of settler colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in the Northeast is not to be belittled or ignored in this critique. Rather, King seems to enhance this history with the inclusion of a potent nonhuman agency in the traumatic formation of the region. In King’s sylvatic Maine, humans and nonhumans are equal in importance, and their distributive agency through ecological entanglement in Ludlow is a powerful model for viewing the current predicament of the planet.

Pet Sematary is often referred to, both by readers and King himself, as his most horrific and upsetting novel.17 There’s plenty to be afraid of, whether it be the traumatic death of loved ones or them coming back to kill and consume others. However, what is most powerfully anxiety-provoking in the novel is the very real fear of relinquishing human agency or authority to the nonhuman. Viewing such a horrific novel in this light

17 King, in an interview with EW, said he disliked the novel because ““There’s such grief in this book.’ Just awful” (EW), and only published it to get out of a contract deal. 77

gives way to the importance of understanding where that fear comes from, why it might be felt, and considering the necessity of a demotion of Anthropos in extant histories of the environment and climate. The Wendigo and the Burial Ground are able to act by directly manipulating human and nonhuman bodies within their assemblage. The Ludlow assemblage is an accurate representation of non-anthropocentric assemblages and their importance for more well-rounded critiques of existing power dynamics between humans and nonhumans. While the individual moralities of the actants are neutral, the power differential certainly is not. As proposed by Jud, the Burial Ground itself might have killed Church, Gage, and all the other domesticated pets that died in the road. The intentions of the Burial Ground and the Wendigo are never made fully clear in the novel, but if we understand their need to subsist requires human sacrifice, then the novel’s horror becomes apparent in the nonhuman supplanting the human as not only an apex predator, but as being the colonial owner and improver of all forms of matter. Rather than humans acting as the central force in the assemblage, the Wendigo and the Burial Ground exert potent control over all actants in the assemblage to serve its purposes alone, no matter the cost to its prey. When Ludlow is examined as a vast assemblage of human and nonhuman actants whose wills are being bent towards serving the Wendigo and the

Burial Ground (rather than the human), Pet Sematary becomes a vivid representation of anthropocentric assemblages, the anxiety it must cause in companion species, and the need for learning to live-with as opposed to simply manipulating our connections for human capitalist gain.

Haraway and Horror

In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway advocates for the composting and entanglement of humans and companion species in present earth. Haraway uses string figures to symbolize the web of connections “in which multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation” (Haraway

10). Her assertion is not that everything is connected to everything at any given moment, but that everything is connected to something and that the best way of “getting on together” is to recognize these ties and work together in a sympoetic fashion of living- with, or storytelling, or worlding, rather than manipulate connections for our own selfish productions.18 These connections exist, and an expanded knowledge of them may help us learn to understand how to live better in our current situation. String figures, for

Haraway, represent the entanglement of human and nonhumans as a practice for living and dying together as a necessary means of learning to stay with the apocalyptic trouble we have together caused our planet. As stated previously, we have come to understand the Ludlow assemblage and the actions of both humans and nonhumans on a neutral plane rather than a Cartesian one in which actants are good or evil. Rather, human and nonhuman actants in Ludlow’s ecological assemblage are both vital members of a sympoetic landscape.

Haraway’s theories are fiercely optimistic, loving, and hopeful; her ideas may seem counter intuitive to analyzing horror fiction. However, not only have I already established that the ecology of Ludlow is lacking moral distinctions for nonhuman subsistence requiring human sacrifice, but Haraway implores “It matters what matters we

18 For a more in-depth exploration and possible understanding of Haraway’s ideas, seek her careful words in chapters 1-3 of Staying with the Trouble. 79

use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds; what worlds make stories” (12). Haraway is insisting on coming up with new ways to think, act, and story tell so that we might construct a better world together. I assert that thinking through old stories – whether considered horrific, negative, or not – with new thoughts is just as imperative for learning to live with. King’s novel, while deeply upsetting, clearly teaches us that not only are there consequences for the unmitigated past and present violence committed against Indigenous peoples. In addition, King simultaneously asserts the potency of nonhuman agency, vitality, and entanglement in affairs historically thought of as human only. As stated previously, Pet Sematary is not about overcoming a monster in a gruesome battle so often utilized in the horror genre. Instead, the novel portrays a story of dread felt for the persistence of an ecological model where some get a better deal than others. This sort of interrogation into the Burial Ground and the Wendigo’s agency over human and nonhumans in Ludlow, and the fear that it instills in readers and viewers, is imperative to understanding the significance of learning how to better live with companion species in a Haraway-esque manner through a full recognition of why such a narrative frightens us.

The Ecophobic Response to Loss of Power

The agential power that the Burial Ground and the Wendigo possess in Pet

Sematary is a source of extended anxiety in the human conscious and unconscious mind.

Donna Haraway asserts the need for recognizing the entanglement of humans with companion species as a way of learning to better live-with all the critters of earth (9).

Haraway engages in a kind of tentacular thinking that illuminates for us the existence of these connections between critters and encourages us to better understand the human’s current place and role in the string figure’s maintenance and function. Taking a step back allows us to think through human manipulation of connections for the most convenient material gain. In doing so, Haraway provides us with a foundation to depart from, a vast ecological web that the colonial Anthropos thinks serves them wholly and individually.

In order to learn about our world and the place of the human, we must seek to muddle ourselves amongst companion critters, rather than think we occupy the middle and continue to manipulate our connections at the peril of companion species and our planet.

The colonial relationship to the environment was created by thousands of years of evolution, bolstered by Enlightenment era philosophers such as Descartes, and continued by the insidious biopolitics theorized by Foucault. Bounding the land and improving it to a human perceived perfection is not only a continuance of a fear of the Other or Outside, but an extension of the lack of recognition of all forms of matter being equal. Simon

Estok, in his article “Theorising the EcoGothic”, explains the ecophobia that pervades an anthropocentric world:

The ecophobic condition exists on a spectrum and can embody fear, contempt,

indifference, or lack of mindfulness (or some combination of these) towards the

natural environment. While its genetic origins have functioned, in part, to

preserve our species, the ecophobic condition has also greatly serviced growth

economies and ideological interests. Often a product of behaviors serviceable in

the past but destructive in the present, it is also sometimes a product of the

perceived requirements of our seemingly exponential growth. (35)

Ecophobic ideologies and world views have fueled material violence and the results of those mistreatments are only now coming into full realization through our planet’s current predicament. As discussed in Chapter One, material violence was committed against not only Indigenous peoples in colonial New England but against the landscape itself. Colonists bound it, improved it, bent it to their own will, and dominated it. As

Estok notes, our genetic origins, as well as Descartes’ relegation of the nonhuman to brute matter, pervaded the human’s established relationship with the nonhuman and the environment. In Chapter Two, Foucault’s biopolitics were put in contrast with newer calls for a shirking of Cartesian dualism and a recategorization of Life and Nonlife by

Povinelli. Horror, as supposed by Estok, can be seen as a powerful gaze into the human fear of the historically thought of as separate and unattainable nonhuman. However, as discussed previously, horror has the ability to not only scare but to shine a light on what frightens us and why. Pet Sematary, through its bolstering of nonhuman agency over the humans in Ludlow, provides an unmitigated look into how humans have treated other humans (thought of as nonhumans) and continue to extort nonhuman connections for personal gain. Understanding why such a narrative frightens us and, perhaps more importantly, feeling that fear, is a sizeable step toward learning to live with companion species in a fashion pace Haraway that horror can provide. Calls for positivity in the midst of the discourse surrounding the dignifying of an Anthropocene denote a necessity of interrogation into the material relationships that have played a fundamental role in the human’s need for control over the planet and the subsequent rising climate. Whether it is capitalism, plantation agriculture, or the mighty imperial Anthropos, fear of the environment has cast the human against the nonhuman and resulted in the shifting of the

planet’s climate. Shouldn’t an understanding of that phobic response play an equally fundamental role in the resolution of planetary catastrophe?

The fear of supplanted supremacy does not just disappear when theorized optimism is mandated. Horror, as King himself has stated, is a genre where fears are put on full display, interrogated, faced, and solved. Pet Sematary, a text largely disregarded as appalling and ghastly, provides us with the opportunity to feel the fear that companion species might feel when humans use them, similarly to how the Wendigo and the Burial

Ground subsist on humans. When these two nonhumans use their agency to manipulate and orient human bodies for their own gain, an ecophobic response over a total lack of agency and secession of control to something historically distinguished as Nonlife is felt and fretted. The terror the Wendigo and the Burial Ground’s ecological assemblage brings to the humans who read Pet Sematary might be felt by all critters of earth. In this novel, human becomes companion species and, when that connection requires an unfair sacrifice, a sympoetic relationship seems vital. Haraway rightly calls for a flight away from anthropocentric and inherently destructive games played by the human in favor of a rich compost with companion species. King’s reasoning behind not offering a resolution to the events derived from the entanglement of human and nonhumans in Ludlow could be perceived as a similar call for flight through illustration that paints the Dionysian chaos in Ludlow as the Apollonian norm. In reading Pet Sematary, the allegorical nature of human’s only tangential relation to something other than themselves is a necessary horror to be felt if we are to learn how anthropocentric manipulation might cause a similar phobic response in companion species, and ultimately learn how to better live- with companion species.

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