"Sometimes Dead Is Better": Pet Sematary And Revival

"Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning . . . but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe."

--Stephen King, Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary and Revival by Stephen King, written a little over 30 years apart, have some major similarities.  Both deal with death and the philosophical issue of an afterlife, the former touching more on mind-body dualism than the latter, albeit without actual focusing a lot on logically necessary, absolutely certain truths about the matter.  Each of them mentions the location Jerusalem's Lot, with the former also referencing Derry, the same place terrorized by It, in a way that exemplifies the connections between various King stories.  Even with some overlapping themes, the types of horror differ.  Pet Sematary is about how grief drives an already-irrational medical professional (Louis Creed made lots of philosophical assumptions and ignores many necessary truths) to resurrect family members using a cursed burial ground even after seeing or hearing examples of how the process can be dangerous.  Revival is about abandoning Christianity and discovering that it seems like there is an everlasting, universal hell of sorts called the Null waiting for every dead human on the whims of Lovecraftian monsters.

Since both novels explore death and the concept of an afterlife in sometimes varying ways, they have similarities that are not shared to such an extent with many other Stephen King works.  Thanks to the same locations appearing in both, even aside from how the Dark Tower unifies various stories that are otherwise not directly related, they are presented as taking place in the same world.  Do the characters who die in Pet Sematary go to the Null, the perhaps eternal slaves of a being called Mother and others like her?  There are actually many reasons why the collective dead characters in Pet Sematary are almost certainly not in the Null--events would have to have been hallucinated otherwise.  At the very least, Victor Pascow, the student whose death leads to Louis Creed being contacted by his spirit, is not appearing in a non-theological hell.  He is one of the most blatant things that makes Mother's images of the Null glimpsed in Revival either the fate of only some people or total fabrications used to frighten a protagonist seemingly near death.

In Pet Sematary (70), what is repeatedly treated as the ghost of Pascow tells Louis that the door between life and death must not be opened, no matter how tempting it will be.  Here, some parallels to Revival do show up.  Revival does feature multiple references to an ivy door through which Mother speaks to Astrid and Jamie, a "door" past which lies the the Null, a supposedly eternal dimension of decay and suffering where dead humans are enslaved so that they exist as long as the Null does (as with the Biblical hell, people often overlook that even eternal fire or an eternal Null would not mean that any or every being in it also exists forever).  Whether everyone who goes to the Null, if anyone goes at all--Mother could be projecting an illusion like It and Jamie only assumes that everyone goes there upon death--would pass through an actual door is unclear, but in either case, the more significant door is biological death.  Pascow only passed through a metaphorical door to become a benevolent spirit.

After death, Pascow does not say anything at all about or appear in the Null when he engaged in supernatural communication with Louis and later his daughter Ellie.  Another character who dies in Pet Sematary is Norma, of whom the Wendigo that reanimates corpses in an ancient Micmac burial site speaks of through the resurrected body of a very young boy.  The child Gage Creed's body, a conduit for the Wendigo's own consciousness just as the "revived" Mary Fay becomes a tool for Mother at the end of Revival, says that Norma is burning in hell, "arthritis and all."  According to Norma's husband Jud, the Wendigo that possesses the reanimated dead has never lied although it only verbalizes the more negative traits about people.  Perhaps Norma goes to hell after her death.  This would not be the Biblical hell, which no one could be in before the eschatological judgment, not that Stephen King is remotely philosophically competent enough as a thinker to realize this.  If Norma is in "hell," though, she is also not in the Null, or at least what Revival describes of it since it did not have burning.

Other parallels are present in the two stories regardless.  When he first follows his friend Jud to the human burial ground behind the titular Pet Sematary, Louis looks to the night sky, the stars making him feel small and meaningless as he wonders about whether other intelligent life exists, and the Wendigo is visually revealed later on as a superhuman kind of life; ant-like creatures of the Null as seen in Revival, themselves slaves to Mother and the Great Ones, are described as having eyes that the narrator Jamie perceives to have intelligence behind them, though by intelligence, he almost certainly did not mean rationalistic philosophical competence and awareness, but merely the ability to passively grasp reason enough to go along with the mandates of the Great Ones.  They would lack true intelligence even though they seemingly have the capacity for it if so, but they would match the lesser category of "intelligence" that Louis is thinking of.  If the Null is real at all in this cosmos (yes, if an afterlife, it would transcend the mere physical cosmos), then the subject Louis dwells on is more terrifying than many would think.

Still other similarities and contrasts are there in the books.  The Wendigo of Pet Sematary and Mother of Revival are both supernatural, eldritch beings that are spoken of as if they have the ability to influence certain humans for their own ends.  The Wendigo is directly portrayed as having this power.  The opening of Revival touches on this for Mother, without referring to her by name, and the protagonist's experiences with his periods of mind control providing more details.  Death and the possibility of some fork of conscious existence beyond biological death are explored in part using the context of these supernatural entities.  Pascow was still not in the Null, and neither was Norma, according to the Wendigo, but they were (supposedly in Norma's case) in two of the many different afterlives that have been mentioned or hinted at across different, interconnected Stephen King stories.  No one knows what happens to the mind after death as Louis Creed comes to acknowledge, and the afterlife might be different for different people (not just in the sense of heaven and hell being different).  Jud says that "sometimes dead is better" and that death is when the pain stops.  If the alleged afterlife of Revival was true, this would never be the case for any person who goes there!  The alternate afterlives in King's horror require that even among these hopefully fictional metaphysics, there is more optimism than Jamie's vision of the Null alone would imply.