A Materialist Critique of the Settler Occupation of Maine in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

This project seeks to give Stephen King and Pet Sematary full consideration through applying a multi-faceted ecocritical approach to a novel so clearly founded on the relationship between the land and its inhabitants. Through my analysis of the environment’s role in Pet Sematary, I will engage with important questions asked by both Historical and New Materialists in order to examine as completely as possible the relationship between Indigenous peoples and colonist conceptions of property, land use, and nonhuman agency present in the pages. Study of this sort engages in a critique of settler colonial ideals through a thorough examination of one of popular culture’s most successful and apparently errant offenders of intentional appropriation of Indigenous belief. Ultimately, this project seeks to reclaim not only Pet Sematary or King’s oeuvre, but the horror genre more broadly. Given the genre’s affordances for critiquing material histories, this project asserts horror’s utility for the development of new understandings of old fears and particularly as a means of asserting nonhuman agency.