Death is more certain than taxes and human conflict and economic cycles, Louis Creed believes. The protagonist of the novel Pet Sematary is right in the sense that, as social constructs, the likes of taxes and monetary cycles are not as fundamental as biological life and death, with their overlap with scientific phenomena that could occur without human inventions. As an initial adherent of scientism who confuses science for reason, evidence for proof, and supernaturalism for an impossibility or unlikelihood, Louis is nonetheless personally comfortable with death, especially as a university doctor. When his wife lashes out at the very mention of death as something natural, he maintains his worldview with all of its mixture of partial correctness, outright logical falsities, and mere assumptions.
Zelda, the deformed but abusive sister of his wife Rachel, died when she was young, and Rachel has allowed the trauma to make her emotionalistic even as Louis makes assumptions about death and the afterlife. Their daughter Ellie comes to realize that the family cat Church could die at any time no matter how unexpected it is. Is there an afterlife for animal consciousness? For human minds? These are some of the issues that these characters dwell on or discuss as the novel unfolds. Church is eventually killed on a road near the Creed home, and a fatherly neighbor named Jud secretly brings Louis to a Native American burial ground behind the "Pet Sematary," a place where local children have buried their animals for decades.
Jud warns him that he might hear strange voices or sounds or see bizarre lights and to dismiss it all as some relatively ordinary event. The death of a university student named Pascow who, in the moments before his death, warned Louis not to go to the more dangerous cemetery, and subsequent, seeming experiences with Pascow's ghost have already softened Louis toward the possibility of supernaturalism, not that there are not supernatural (literally just nonphysical) things that are knowable with absolute logical certainly, like the necessary truths of reason themselves or the uncaused cause. Sensory experiences would not prove the supernatural exists except for that sensory perceptions cannot exist without a consciousness, and consciousness is immaterial no matter its causal relationship to the body. Still, Louis has already started to shift his worldview.
Jud indeed brings him to a Micmac burial site after an abnormal presence stalks the duo. He does not clarify why, only that Louis needs to bury Church there. Before long, Church has been resurrected, albeit changed. As the events happen, the multiple references in the "act" divisions of the book and by the characters to the resurrection of Lazarus by Jesus in John 11 hold up one of the most famous Biblical stories of resurrection. All people who die, the Bible says, will be resurrected, some to face the justice of annihilation (Ezekiel 18:4, Mathew 10:28, 2 Peter 2:6, Romans 6:23) and some to eternal life (Daniel 12:2), but Louis finds a different sort of resurrection. The Micmac site distorts the nonhuman animal or even the person that is returned to life. A Wendigo associated with the area and with cannibalism has "turned the ground sour," offering intended or unwitting resurrection at the cost of the creature's former self. The reanimated bodies become tainted or possessed by the Wendigo. According to Jud's stories of his youth and the experiences of Louis, this resurrection has never been a fully positive one or in some cases positive at all.
So great is the cosmic horror of death, of the loss of a fellow person whom one loves, that the still-irrationalistic Louis buries his son Gage when one of his own children is killed on the same road as Church. Ellie wants God to resurrect Gage. She has heard that if Jesus had not specified that Lazarus should come forth, all of the dead nearby would have come to life again. Louis is more open to theism and to twisted versions of Christianity he is familiar with in particular. He has also seen the power of the unusual burial site, and he hopes that Gage will not come "back" a lesser shell of himself. Yes, what has happened once from the same activity might not happen again: anything but logical necessities could change at any time, and even scientific laws could fluctuate from one occasion to another even if they never do. Church's altered status after his resurrection would not by necessity be the fate of Gage.
The evidence short of logical proof still suggested otherwise, and Louis buries Gage. The very young child returns as a conduit for the Wendigo to conduct murder. Pascow's warning was made in vain. This Micmac burial ground that Jud says will outlast modern societies is tied to an eldritch entity of sorts that can influence people to have urges to sleep or act as fits its will. However, the sheer intensity of grief and despair play a role. Louis hopes against probability that Gage would not also be corrupted. It is not the hope itself that is irrational. It is that he never stopped when all available evidences, as based in perception and thus potential illusion as they were, pointed to the opposite. Louis has to kill his resurrected baby's body when the possessed vessel kills Jud and then Rachel.
It is not just the Wendigo and the nature of supernaturalism and the laws of the natural world (which the characters frequently make errors or assumptions about) that contribute to the horror of Pet Sematary. Loss and sadness are enemies of the protagonist just like the Wendigo. Desperately hoping that if he buries Rachel in the Wendigo's land faster than he did with Gage, he drags her corpse, places her in the ground, and waits. Even a rational person can be seized by grief (though simple experience of emotions does not make someone rational or irrational). For an irrational person like Louis, handling not just one death but two could be excruciating and overwhelming. In a way, the more central cosmic horror of Pet Sematary is not the Wendigo or the possibility of unwanted supernatural beings at all.
It is rooted in how death can claim any creature at any time, how death means survivors must live with an absence, and how sadness can be so crushing that people might, avoidably but tragically, yield to whatever irrational beliefs or actions they think will make the pain disappear. Many who have lost a friend or family member might relate to at least the temptation to become lost in false worldviews, assumptions, emotionalism, addiction, or isolation in the wake of death. Death, after all, is not just the natural end of the body. Either the mind of a person vanishes forever or at some point, in some way lives on, but those still living are left without them in either case. What happens to the mind is an even greater concern. The loss of a loved one can be a penetrating horror indeed.
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