- It seems to me that King is merely following literary/ mythological/ legendary precedences. The dead have been placated since ancient Egyptian times and probably before.
- Doesn’t the story mention one of the Elder Gods being involved? I think that would explain any type of evil. “Elder Gods” being number two on the list of Things To Avoid just after Ancient Indian Burial Grounds.
Off on a slight tangent: I recall in the foreword, Stephen King says that his wife read the manuscript, and told him to throw the book in a drawer – it was too creepy to publish. I think she was on the right track; but I think a parent will have a very different reaction to the book than a non-parent. I read it when my kids were toddlers, and thought it the most disturbing thing of his I’ve ever read.
Exactly. This discussion is probably more suited to another thread but, since it’s come this far, here’s a quote from King on the subject:
King may have his faults, but he certainly seems to have some self-awareness. :)He has a similar quote about that short story about FTL travel, where he says that the underlying scientific explanation was less-than-satisfactory. I think he said it was “kinda wonky”.
You obviously didn’t read King’s gripping novel, The People Whose Dead Pet Came Back To Life And Everything Was Completely Cool Because It Acted Just Like It Did Before It Died.
Satire.
King wrote “The 6th Day”? 
The Micmac (more properly Mi’kmaq) are not extinct as a people.
Big ass spoilers for the end of the novel follow:
It’s been years since I read the book, too, but one thing that stuck with me was the protagonists assumption, at the end, that his kid came back evil because he “waited too long” before burying him, and that if he buried his wife fast enough, she’d come back okay. This always struck me as kinda creepy, because I think the events of the story point to just the opposite: the longer you wait to bury the body, the closer to normal the returnee is, although it never gets all the way there. The kid who comes back is entirely malevolent. The cat’s actually pretty evil, too, as I recall, but limited in what it can do because it’s just a cat. Doesn’t it help the kid murder the wife somehow? But there’s the story of the guy whose son died in WWI and somehow got the body shipped back to him - which must have been months later - and buried him in the Semetary. When he came back, he was just “off,” not actually evil. Mean, uncomfortable to be around, generally creepy, but not monstrous. The end of the book was, in many ways, the scariest thing I’d ever read by King. The protagonist’s mind has snapped, he’s sitting in his kitchen with his ruined hands, waiting for his wife to come back, convinced that she’s going to be the same she used to be, but what’s actually going to stumble through his door is going to be the most twisted, depraved thing to claw its way out of that sour ground in the town’s history.
So does that explain why you think that Showgirls is such a WONDERFUL movie? Because you said so? Your answer is a non-answer.
If I recall aright, it was ol’ Jud who got double-teamed, not the wife. Gage came at him with the scalpel, and Church got between his ankles and tripped him. When Rachel arrived later, the cat was hanging around outside with blood on its lips. (“Foreshadowing-- your key to quality literature.”)
Unless there’s another version of the book floating around (always a possibility with King), I tend to disagree with this interpretation. The whole point of Jud telling Louis the story of Timmy Baterman was to emphasize just how horribly wrong the resurrection process can turn out. It seemed pretty clear from Jud’s account that whatever returned from the Micmac burial ground wasn’t really “Timmy” at all, but something else entirely. Whereas Timmy Baterman was described as an amiable if none-too-bright boy in life, the thing that came back wearing his body was a sly, cruel entity which somehow knew the darkest secrets of everyone in town. Eventually Timmy’s dad was driven to kill himself along with whatever demon he’d called up. I submit that this is not the best anecdote to share if you’re trying to establish that the Micmac burying ground doesn’t turn you evil.
Both Jud and Victor both cling to the belief that the Pet Sematary’s power only rarely leads to evil, and Victor later convinces himself that he can avoid the worst consequences if he can only resuscitate the dead quickly enough-- as if possession by supernatural evil were somehow comparable to oxygen deprivation. However, there’s actually nothing in the book to support these ideas, and it seems that King is making a point about the lies we tell ourselves in order to cope with truths too monstrous to bear. Even though Church was resurrected almost immediately, it’s fairly obvious that he still came back with an uncharacteristically bloodthirsty streak. Similarly Jud tries to convince Victor that his dog Spot, at least, was still a “good dog” after being resurrected, but the details of his account only serve to underscore how wrong the animal was – weirdly passive, cold to the touch, and reeking of grave dirt-- not to mention the terror the dog inspired in his parents. And this is the most “normal” of the returned animals we ever hear about. Yet, even knowing about the burying ground’s malign influence, Jud still shares the secret with Victor; in fact, he manages to justify his action by claiming that the inherent “wrongness” of the process will subtly teach Victor’s daughter to be more comfortable with the idea of death.
Yes, that sounds like such a *good * plan, Jud; teach the neighbor kid that “sometimes, dead is better” by secretly resurrecting her cat using blasphemous pagan magicks. I, for one, can’t imagine how such a scheme could possibly go wrong.
Terrifel, you mean LOUIS, not Victor. Victor was the kid who died on the operating table, who came back to warn Louis not to fuck around with the burial ground.
Damn, now I have to read that book again. Dammit, it scared the SHIT out of me and the movie still does. Especially the wife’s older sister, Zelda.
Please say this is a joke. There is no way anybody could think Showgirls was a WONDERFUL movie.
King doesn’t specifically say in the book, but there are clues that lead us to beleive that the revived dead are reanimated with evil spirits rather than the souls of the departed.
We hear the story of the kid who was brought back to life and would “say things” about other people that were true, facts that nobody could know, bad things.
Later when Gabe is brought back he tells the old man that his wife had affairs with other people and liked to have anal sex with his friends, and that now she was in hell having anal sex.
Sounds like demons to me.
I once had a bad experience with a demon named “Fuckrot,” but that’s another story.
In King’s new book, Cell he presents a diametrically opposite theory… mindless malevolence.
In the book there is a “pulse” (origins unknown- some speculation that it was a terrorist act.) broadcast to all cellphones, that in effect wipes the brain clean like a magnet to a harddrive. It is theorized that the zombie-like, mindlessly violent, “phoners” revert to the base, primitive, “kernel” that remains. Revealing our evolutionary success, not as intelligence, but a revelatory fact; that under all of the layers, at our core, we are the most instinctual and unhesitant killers.
However, Cell is an entirely different beast than Pet Sematary. It is a much starker, less nuanced, less moralistic, and less supernatural book. This is King in Unabomber mode. Not exactly anti-technology, but a horrific exposition of technology as a double edged sword.
Pretty good book, I recommend it. But in truth, it wasn’t quite as satisfying as I had hoped. As carnivorous as this book is, it left me wanting- it felt like a vegetarian meal… I kept wondering, “Where’s the MEAT!? (and NO DESSERT??)”
::: Moderator coughs for attention :::
First, there’s a very thin line here, and let’s be sure we stay on the correct side of it. It’s perfectly OK to be critical of an author (like King) and his work, that’s what Cafe Society is all about. It is not OK to be critical of another poster because of her/his taste about that work. The fine line is that criticizing an author (in an insulting way) can easily be viewed as insulting posters who like him. It is a fine line, and I want to be sure we stay on the correct side of it: no personal insults allowed in Cafe Society forum.
Second, on the question of “shitting on” a thread, again, I think there’s a fine line between saying, “It’s only fiction, and therefore doesn’t necessarily have an explanation” (acceptable) and saying, “It’s only fiction, why are you losers wasting time trying to think up an explanation” (unacceptable.) The former is a reasonable comment, especially when dealing with an author like Steven King who is on record as saying he doesn’t really care. I think that the line would be drawn at a different point for Tolkien (say) who is known to have spent lots and lots of time and effort at making his universe consistent. At a third level altogether is George Lucas, who obviously doesn’t care but pretends he does. Anyhow, it’s not necessarily shitting on a thread to comment that a particular author has made a statement about his work that implies that internal consistency is not on his agenda.
By the way, as I think about this more, I guess there’s very fuzzy patches. With Sherlock Holmes, for instance, Arthur Conan Doyle (as author) clearly didn’t care about internal consistency; but for Dr Watson (as author), inconsistencies indicate deliberate disguising the reality.
If anyone wants to open a thread in CS to discuss the question of when saying “it’s only fiction” is a fair comment and when it’s shitting on a thread, that’d probably be interesting.
I always just assumed it’s because they got woken up unexpectedly. That pisses me off too.
Sorry for the misapprehension: I didn’t write Showgirls, any more than I wrote Pet Sematary. The vastness of the differences between King vis-a-vis *Pet Sematary *and me vis-a-vis *Showgirls *is so, well, vast, that your question achieves a surreal level of nonsequitur that almost makes me dizzy. I kind of like it.
You, on the other hand, seem to be hunkered over* Pet Sematary* like a mother badger defending her young. Perhaps you think that *you *are Stephen King?
On preview, with CKDH’s posts in mind, I apologize for the tone of my previous post.
But seriously. How nonsequitur and personal and just bizarrely, surreally irrelevant was Xploder’s post?
Wait, don’t answer that. I’ll sleep on it, and see if I can find any sense in it at all. If I can, I’ll respond. If I don’t respond, you’ll know that the boggling continues.