The Cat Came Back

I'm reading Stephen King's Pet Sematary for the second time. (I am a habitual re-reader.) While I am not consistantly excited about King's novels, there are a few that earn him the reputation as the master of horror writing (IT, The Shining, Pet Sematary).

Pet Sematary takes a look at death and desperation, not in a broad brush stroke, but up close, under a microscope where only then can you see the distinguishing details and variations. It is intelligent and powerful and the terror, once it begins, is consistant as a heart beat.

The novel explores resurrection and the repercussions of, well, not letting a sleeping dog -or in this case cat- lay. While Jesus' resurrection is probably the most famous of these stories, the idea actually pre-dates his life. Resurrection stories can be found in Greek Mythology and early eastern religions.

While it doesn't appear that there is any concrete clinical evidence of a person resurrecting from the dead, I suppose that if you are a believer that a person possesses a soul, and a soul can be trapped, upon death, in an in-between state (i.e. a ghost), then it could be logically assumed that a soul could likewise return to its original vessel gaining a second life.

This string of logic is pretty terrifying considering the possibility that one day I might wake to find my psychotic, and very much dead cat Azrael, pawing at my back door!

118 Days until Halloween,

JL

The Cat Came Back

By Harry S. Miller