“Is Zelda dead yet?”: Disability, Mortality, and Narratives of Appropriation in Pet Sematary

In Pet Sematary, a young Rachel watches her ten-year-old sister Zelda die from spinal meningitis. For Rachel, Zelda’s illness turns her into a hateful thing, othered by her family’s perception of the effects of the disease. In these unsettling descriptions of Zelda, King shows the dangers of conflating monstrosity with disability. Rachel’s response to her dying sister’s body blocks her ability to empathize. The crucial danger, though, is the proliferation of blocked empathy in social reality. Zelda’s death story forces King’s characters—and arguably his readers—into a very personal encounter with impairment and mortality that rejects narrative attempts at repression, while also engaging with the complicated relationship between disability, pain, and death within disability studies.