A Materialist Critique of the Settler Occupation of Maine in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary by 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 Copyright 2020 by Nathan Cleaver ii A Materialist Critique of the Settler Occupation of Maine in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary by 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. iv 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. v 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 vi 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 1 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 2 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