Their elderly neighbor, Jud Crandall, warns Louis and Rachel about the highway that runs past their house, which is frequented by speeding trucks.

A well-tended path leads to a pet cemetery (misspelled "sematary" on the sign), where the children of the town bury their deceased animals.

Victor Pascow, a student fatally injured in an automobile accident, addresses his dying words to Louis personally, though they are strangers.

Louis wakes up in bed the next morning to find his feet and bedsheets covered with dried mud and pine needles.

The next afternoon, Church returns home; the usually vibrant and lively cat now acts ornery and, in Louis's words, "a little dead".

He concludes that "sometimes, dead is better" and states that "the place has a power... its own evil purpose", and that it may have caused Gage's death because Jud introduced Louis to it.

Despite Jud's warning and his own reservations, Louis's grief and guilt spur him to exhume Gage's body from his grave and inter him in the burial ground.

Louis, driven insane by grief, burns the Crandall house down before returning to the burial ground with his wife's corpse, thinking that if he buries the body faster than he did Gage's, there will be a different result.

Louis sits indoors alone, playing solitaire, when Rachel's reanimated corpse walks up behind him and drops a cold hand on his shoulder, while its voice rasps, "Darling."

[3] Three days later, King imagined what would happen if a family suffered the same tragedy but the cat came back to life "fundamentally wrong".

[5] In June 1983, King published a short story, "The Return of Timmy Baterman", in the program for the event "Satyricon II" (also known as "DeepSouthCon 21"); this was incorporated into Pet Sematary.

Male actor Andrew Hubatsek portrayed Zelda because the filmmakers felt that a grown man playing a disabled, deformed teenage girl would make the character more hideous and frightening.

Taking place fifty years prior, the film follows a young Jud Crandall played by Jackson White.

"For me, the best scene in that book is when [Louis] opens Gage's coffin, and for a second he thinks the head is gone, because this black fungi from the grave has grown like a fuzz over the kid's face.