I’m particularly uneasy about the book’s most resonant line, spoken by Louis Creed’s elderly neighbor, Jud. “Sometimes, Louis,” Jud says, “dead is better.” I hope with all my heart that that is not true, and yet within the nightmarish context of Pet Sematary, it seems to be. And it may be okay. Perhaps “sometimes dead is better” is grief’s last lesson, the one we get to when we finally tire of jumping up and down on the plastic blisters and crying out for God to get his own cat (or his own child) and leave ours alone. That lesson suggests that in the end, we can only find peace in our human
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