This is a story about how you can have a relationship with someone beyond the grave by reading the books they loved.
My father died unexpectedly when I was 16. He was, at that time, the love of my life. His death was my greatest fear from a very young age, and that fear came true one summer in the middle of the night, a lightning bolt straight down the sky and through the roof of my parents’ bedroom in the form of a massive heart attack.
My father and I were very close and shared a deep love, but there is only so much you can share when your sense of self has not fully developed. When a parent dies when you are young, you never have the privilege of getting to know them as your true self. In turn, you never get to see them as their true self, because your capacity to see has not fully developed either. Your relationship is forever robbed of that level of depth. There are questions you never get to ask, conversations you never get to have, because you haven’t yet become the person who thinks those thoughts and asks those questions.
My father was a big Stephen King fan, and I relished gifting him the occasional Stephen King hardback over the course of my childhood, too young to be able to share it with him beyond the level of “my Daddy is cool and likes to read scary books,” but feeling like it was our special thing all the same. On the weekends, we’d often enjoy a comfortably silent lunch at home in our kitchen, him with a sandwich in one hand, and the latest Stephen King hardcover in the other, happily immersed in his book, but not so immersed that he couldn’t tip the occasional love-filled glance to his daughter, dancing light in his blue green eyes.
The summer I turned 16, it seemed I was finally old enough to take on my first Stephen King book. It was the night my father died.
I was up late, about 20 pages into my father’s copy of The Shining, reading about Jack Torrance chewing Excedrin tablets in a phone booth, when I began to hear terrible sounds drifting down the hallway from my parents’ bedroom: the rasping, snore-like death rattles of his heart attack. By the time I reached the bedroom, his skin was turning blue. He died almost instantly.
I never wanted to finish reading The Shining after that. I thought the book was cursed. If I read it, someone I loved would die.
Except I did want to read it. I knew it was a book that had struck a chord with my father, and it felt like, somehow, if I read it, I would get to know a deeper part of him that I was never able to know in life. 22 years later, my husband, the other love of my life, gently encouraged me that it would be ok. He would not die if I tried to finish The Shining. He’s a horror writer himself, and knowing me well, knew that I would love the book. So I started it again. With childish superstition, I asked him to lay in bed with me until I got past the chapter I was reading when my Dad died, just in case.
Everything was fine. I finished the book, no one died, and it became one of my favorites.
Reading for pleasure is a luxury that I’m not very good about allowing myself. As such, I haven’t read a lot of Stephen King. Just The Shining, a short story called Graveyard Shift, and most recently, Pet Sematary. Something all these stories have in common is a lower middle class male protagonist struggling to survive in modern American society, and crumbling under the pressure. The Shining’s Jack Torrance was a writer who moved his family into a haunted hotel because he was desperate. Pet Sematary’s Louis Creed, albeit a doctor, was still struggling, fretting about mortgage payments after moving his family across the country to take a lesser paying, less draining job as a doctor at the clinic of a small college. Despite financial anxieties he still gives his wife an expensive necklace for Christmas.
These depictions of working class Dads struggling to give their families the American Dream must have resonated with my father. And what Stephen King does so well is capture the manipulation, resentment, and dysfunction that comes with that struggle. He explores what happens when the energetic buildup of all that negative emotion finds a host, turns sour, and manifests in a dark and fantastical way. His horror comes not so much from thrills and chills but from the horror of who we are as human beings, how we relate to and treat the people we love, and the darkness of which the ego is capable. I think that must have resonated with my father too.
My father literally worked himself to death. He had 2 jobs. He woke up at 2:30am to deliver a complicated newspaper route through winding country roads, often obscured by dense tule fog. And then he made a 140 mile round-trip commute in prolonged rush hour traffic to work at a paint factory. My mother wanted a big house with nice furniture and all the pretty things to go with it, and my father wanted to give it to her. So we sold the small house where I would eat lunch with him while he read Stephen King, and moved far away.
But it was more than the socially conditioned American narrative of the man as the provider that motivated him: my mother was violent and our entire family was held hostage by her rage. His strategy to diffusing her explosive episodes and protecting his children eventually became doing whatever was necessary to keep her calm. New furnishings appeared in every room, new sofas, new lamps, new tables, new end tables, new beds, new dishes, new silverware, gold plated silverware for the dining room, fine china, wallpaper, custom drapery, new everything. Now that I’m an adult, I know how exponentially expensive that must have been, and that our working class family could not have possibly afforded it. But my sister and I were along for the ride, young and oblivious to where money comes from and the suffering that goes into earning it. By the time he was 43, he was dead. I think reading Stephen King must have offered him some level of catharsis.
BURYING MY FATHER IN THE PET SEMATARY
A short time after my father died, I dreamt that he returned to the house my family couldn’t afford to buy, the house that killed him. He rang the doorbell, wearing the suit he was buried in. He looked just as he did in life, smiling softly, dancing light in his eyes. I still remember what he smelled like when I threw my arms around him. He did not smell of the grave. He smelled as he smelled in life. Some mixture of dry cleaned clothing, dove soap, and him. The father smell. He said he was here for now but didn’t know how much time he had. My sister told me she had the same dream.
In Pet Sematary, whoever you bury in the enchanted Micmac burial ground comes back to life. The book is more than a gothic tale about the resurrection of the dead. It’s about how we relate to death. How we run from death. How we try to cheat death. It’s about the horror and pain of grief.
Through reading Stephen King, I resurrected my father. I came to understand the secret parts of him I never knew in life, and connect with them. They are parts that exist in me, too. And somewhere beyond the dark side of the moon, we are sharing them.
I know my father would have loved that I love Pet Sematary. So I’ve set a place for him here, where we can finally have a conversation about Stephen King over lunch, because now I’m old enough to do more than smile across the table. Dad, this one’s for you.
RECIPE: PET SEMATARY CHILI
There’s a small, seemingly throw away scene in Pet Sematary that references Louis Creed’s pot of chili waiting on the stove to welcome his family home from the airport. It reminded me of sharing cans of Stagg chili with my father in the 80s, and our special Stephen King lunches together. I found myself craving chili, and by the time the weekend came around, I was making a big batch.
Everyone has “their chili” recipe, and this one’s mine. I developed the recipe 5 years ago and I’ve been tweaking and perfecting it ever since. I’m intolerant of most legumes, so this chili is an all-meat, bean-free version that gets its starch from sweet potatoes, and its kick from a well measured dose of chipotle. It’s a delicious combination of sweet, spicy, meaty, juicy, and zesty, and it’s one of those things you can throw into the oven and forget about for hours on end while the flavors melt together, reduce, and thicken into magic. What to do with all the spare time? Perhaps you might like to curl up with a copy of Pet Sematary. Or if you’re feeling brave, you could take a hike out beyond the deadfall to the Micmac burial ground. Just make sure there aren’t any muddy footprints following you back . . .
RECIPE NOTES
This makes a huge batch. The good news: lots of leftovers, and an excuse to write “Pet Sematary” on any portions you might want to store in your freezer. The bad news: this recipe calls for so much meat that you need to brown it in two separate pans to get a good sear. Hang in there. It’s just one extra dish to wash. The other tricky thing about this recipe is that I recommend that you make it in a cast iron dutch oven. It imparts a depth of flavor that makes a HUGE difference, and I can’t guarantee the recipe will be as good without one.
Prep time: 45 mins
Cook time: 4-5 hrs
Servings: 9
Special Equipment: 7-quart cast iron dutch oven
INGREDIENTS
2 ⅔ lbs/1.2 kg grass-fed organic ground beef
2 medium sized red onions
3 tbsp apple cider vinegar
1 tbsp ghee
¼ tsp allspice
½ tsp thyme
½ tsp oregano
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp ginger
2 tsp Himalayan pink salt
3 tsp chipotle pepper flakes
1 tbsp cumin
2 tbsp chili powder
8 oz/227 g carrots
24 oz/680 g sweet potatoes
Two 29.5 oz/ Two 800 g cans diced tomatoes
6 oz/170 g tomato paste
1 qt/1 liter beef stock
3 bay leaves
3 cinnamon sticks
Flakey sea salt, such as Celtic Sea Salt or Maldon, to finish
INSTRUCTIONS
Preheat oven to 300F/150C
Over medium/high heat, brown half of the ground beef in a 7-quart dutch oven, and the other half in a large skillet (at least 11 inches – cast iron is best). Because there is so much meat, this will take time: approximately 15-20 minutes. Good things come to those who wait for their meat to brown.
While the meat is browning, measure out the spices and place them in a small bowl. Then prep your onions, chopping them to a fine dice.
Once the meat has been nicely browned, pour off the grease, and then deglaze the skillet with 3 tbsp apple cider vinegar, scraping up all the browned bits, and pour the contents into your dutch oven. Reduce the heat to medium/low, add 1 tbsp ghee, the onions, and all the spices except for the bay leaves and cinnamon sticks. Let the onions, spices and beef sweat together until fragrant (about 10 minutes) stirring occasionally to keep things nice and moist.
While the onions, spices, and meat are sweating, prep your carrots and sweet potatoes. You don’t need to be too fussy about it, a rustic and chunky texture is nice for this comforting dish. 1-1.5 inch/2.5-3.5cm cubes is a good shape to aim for.
Add all the remaining ingredients to the dutch oven, mix well, and bring to a gentle boil. Maintain the gentle boil for a couple minutes, stir well, then place the dutch oven inside your preheated oven, with the lid slightly ajar so steam can escape. It’s important to get the angle of the lid just right: if you leave too much of a gap, the chili will dry out, too little, and it won’t reduce. You only to need to nudge it over a little bit.
Let the chili cook in the oven for 4 to 5 hours, until the contents have reduced by a few inches, and the sweet potatoes break down and turn to goo when you work the chili with a big spoon. You can give them a little help by smashing them against the side of the pot. When ready to serve, remove the bay leaves, and repeatedly scrape a metal spoon along the inside of the dutch oven where the liquid reduced. Scrape, scrape, srcape! Scrape up all those flakey bits! Pet Sematary fans: you might like to imagine your are using a scalpel. Stir all those magic bits into the chili and serve, garnishing with a few jagged flecks of sea salt.
A BRIEF TRIBUTE TO TWO OF MY FAVORITE PETS
It didn’t seem right to finish this project without pouring one out for Mina and Loki, beloved pets to me and my husband, whose ashes and fur clippings remain with us at our apartment in San Francisco. Mina was a silky black Maine Coon mix, and I began my adult life with her, adopting her the day after I moved into my very first single ladies apartment upon graduating college. She was my best girlfriend, sitting upright and across the table from me for all of my meals, like a little date, and sleeping alongside me at night, spooning me, like a little lover. She would greet me at the door with her leg rubs and sweet mews every time I came home and I would scoop her up and hug her. Loki was a German Shepherd and the most soulful dog I have ever known. He was extremely intelligent, expressive, and loving, and as such my husband and I were able to have a relationship with him that seemed far more complex than the kind of relationship you’d think would be possible with a dog. He would literally hold your hand and stare into your eyes. Mina and Loki, you will forever remain in our hearts, surrounded by love.
