Pet Sematary
Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals is a novel by the writer Stephen King from 1983 and is considered the author's most commercially successful work. The novel was published by the Doubleday publishing house in 1983 under the original title Pet Sematary . The German translation by Christel Wiemken was first published in 1985 by the Hoffmann und Campe publishing house.
action
Louis Creed assumes the post of Medical Director of the University of Maine . Together with his wife Rachel and their children, five-year-old Ellie and two-year-old Gage, he moves into an idyllic single-family home in the small town of Ludlow near Route 15. He develops a friendship with his neighbor Jud Crandall, who has a lot to know about Ludlow and the family also shows the pet cemetery Pet Sematary (intentional misspellings of Pet Cematary ) in a forest clearing.
The small family quickly settles in Ludlow, but work in the infirmary begins with a shock for Louis Creed. The student Victor Pascow is thrown from a car against a tree while jogging and taken to the infirmary with a crushed head, where he dies. With his last words, Pascow gasps a warning at Louis, in which he mentions the animal cemetery. He appears to Louis the following night and leads him to the pet cemetery, but the next day Louis is convinced that he was only dreaming.
While Rachel and the children are visiting their parents, the family cat, Winston Churchill (short: Church), is run over by a truck on Route 15. Jud leads Louis to the pet cemetery that evening to bury the cat. To Louis' surprise, however, he leads him on, over a large windbreak and the "moor of the little gods", in which eerie noises can be heard, to a hidden rock plateau, the former burial place of the Mi'kmaq Indians. After Louis buried Church, the cat appears the next day at the Creed's house. But the cat's "rebirth" has its downsides: He smells penetratingly of earth and his being has changed in a disturbing way. Jud tells Louis that as a child he buried his dead dog in the Indian cemetery and that it was also returning. He also reports that the existence of the Indian cemetery and its special effect among the long-time residents of Ludlow is an open secret. As a motivation for his help with the "resuscitation" of the cat, Jud states that he wanted to help Louis because his wife and daughter could not deal with death, but grudgingly admits that knowing about the Indian cemetery brings the urge with it brings to tell other people about it. When Louis asks whether someone has ever buried someone up there, Jud reacts very violently - one shouldn't even think of that!
Louis' family, unaware of Church's death and resurrection, is only subconsciously aware of the changes in his character. The tomcat tends to sadistically kill smaller animals such as mice or rats, but also a larger raven. A short time later, Gage was run over by a truck on Route 15 and killed. After his funeral, Louis sends his wife and daughter to live with their grandparents in Chicago. Louis makes the momentous decision to bury his son on the rocky plateau as well, although Jud, suspected, warns him urgently: Jud tells that a Ludlow resident had buried his fallen son in the Indian cemetery during the Second World War and the dead man then returned as a vicious monster until his father killed it. So far he hadn't wanted to tell Louis this story, but it was necessary now to save him from the thought of burying his son up there.
Louis ignores this story, digs up the body of his beloved son, wanders to the Mi'kmaq Indian cemetery and buries him there. On the way there, he believes he has met the evil spirit Wendigo in the moor . Meanwhile, Rachel is warned by her daughter's dreams and fantasies in which Pascow prophesies that something terrible will happen to her father in the pet cemetery, as well as an uneasy feeling of her own, and makes her way back to Ludlow. After his strenuous activity, Louis lies down in pain in the marriage bed and falls asleep. Gage, like Church before, returns to the house. He takes his father's scalpel , walks over to Jud and cruelly kills him. Rachel had called Jud that night and he asked her to come and see him first when she got to Ludlow. So she goes to Jud's house and also becomes a victim of Gage, since she sees nothing bad in him, but still her little son.
A little later Louis wakes up from his sleep and notices the missing scalpel. He prepares several fatal injections of morphine and falls asleep with the first Church. When he goes into the next house and finds the bodies of Jud and Rachel, he kills Gage by giving him two injections. Then he burns the house down. Louis' assistant sees Louis and his dead wife make their way back to the rock plateau. Louis tells him that he "waited too long" at Gage and that was the only reason why he became angry. The novel ends with Rachel's return; whether their nature has also changed remains open.
Links with other works
- Jud Crandall tells of a mad Saint Bernard who cruelly killed four people in Maine years ago. This obviously means Cujo from the novel of the same name.
- When Rachel drives back to Louis in the car because of her premonitions, she passes a sign that indicates an exit to Jerusalem's Lot. When reading the place name, she has an uneasy feeling: “ What a strange name. It sounds kind of unpleasant. Come sleep in Jerusalem… ”This is a reference to the eerie events in King's novel Must Burn Salem .
- The murderous, undead baby is also mentioned by name in Sleepless , when Ralph Roberts breaks into a warehouse and finds Gage's missing sneaker.
- During the transport of Gage's coffin, it is mentioned that one of the coffins will be brought to Derry. King's novel It takes place there. In his novel 11-22-63 , too , parts of the plot take place in Derry.
- Thad Beaumont from Stark - The Dark Half also lives in Ludlow .
Reception and edits
Film adaptations
The book was made into a film in 1989 by the director Mary Lambert , also under the title Friedhof der Kuscheltiere . In 1992 the sequel, Friedhof der Kuscheltiere II, appeared .
In October 2017, Paramount announced another film version of the book. Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer were hired as directors. The remake was released in the cinemas at the beginning of April 2019 .
music
The punk rock - band Ramones , which is mentioned in the novel several times, wrote a song entitled Pet Sematary , which is based on the novel and the soundtrack for the film served. This song was nominated in 1989 for the Golden Raspberry in the category "Worst Song" . The NDH band Rammstein later covered the song with the band's permission. The Group E Nomine varied the theme in the song The Lullaby . The name of the German punk rock band Pascow goes back to the character Victor Pascow.
Trivia
The original title Pet Sematary is intentionally spelled incorrectly. In correct spelling it would be called Pet Cemetery . The wrong spelling appears in the story on a sign written by children at the "Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals" and was adopted for the original title of the book. In the German-language edition, the text is translated as "Pet Fritof".
The character Rachel had a traumatic childhood experience in which her sister died after a long illness while her parents left her at home alone. Similarly, Stephen King's grandmother died while he was left alone at home.
The author Stephen King personally considers the story of this book to be the most terrifying story he has ever written and speaks of having crossed a personal boundary with it.
expenditure
- Stephen King : Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals. (Original title: Pet Sematary ). Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1985, ISBN 3-455-03736-4 .
- Stephen King: Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals. (Original title: Pet Sematary ). Approved, unabridged paperback edition. Heyne, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-453-00786-7 .
- Stephen King: Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals. (Original title: Pet Sematary ). Unabridged edition. Ullstein, Berlin 2005, ISBN 978-3-548-26310-6 .
- Stephen King: Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals. (Original title: Pet Sematary ). Revised, complete German paperback edition. Heyne, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-453-43579-7 .
Web links
- Stuffed Animal Cemetery at StephenKing.com
- Pet Sematary in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (English)
- Cemetery of the Stuffed Animals in KingWiki
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cemetery of Stuffed Animals - Directors found for Stephen King remake . In: moviepilot.de . October 31, 2017 ( moviepilot.de [accessed November 1, 2017]).
- ↑ George Beahm: Stephen King from A to Z: An Encyclopedia of His Life and Work . Ed .: Andrews and McMeel Publishing. 1998, ISBN 0-8362-6914-4 , pp. 86 .
- ↑ Preface to the paperback