Cats are reoccurring motifs in literary works. They are clever independent animals which carry variety of symbols and connotations. Due to their flexible body, naughty behavior and curiosity, it is assumed that they have nine lives. As a result, they are associated with resurrection and rebirth. (Clifford) Moreover, cats are nocturnal creatures, their eyes are adapted to see in the dark and they spend much time roaming at night, so they are linked with underworld and darkness. (Howey III) And since darkness usually arouses fear and anxiety, they are portrayed in literary works as a symbol of witchcraft, mystery, magic and obscurity [1].

Some historians claim that the number of the cat’s spirits is nine. This claim springs from the Egyptian Mythology that the god of sun “Atum-Ra” who takes the shape of a cat gives birth to eight gods. So, people often associate this myth with the nine lives of the cat. However, the more realistic reason behind this designation is that cats have a high flexibility which makes them able to twist around fast in the air when they fall down from high places, so that they can land safely on the ground. (Broad)

Still, what increases the doubt that the felines are mortal is their suspicious ability to move away from the disasters like explosions or fires. Accordingly, comes up the English proverb “A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays and for the last three he stays” [2].

As for the cats' status throughout centuries, they are preferred by the ancient Egyptian civilizations where cats spread everywhere. Their paintings are engraved on stones, printed on dishes and on the walls of burial rooms. Cats are considered holy creatures and anyone hurt them would be punished by death [3].

According to Christianity, cats take the form of the devil, or the devil is disguised as a cat. The mythological goddess of the underworld, Isis, is usually accompanied by a black cat, that way the black cat becomes a representative of magic, witchcraft and devilish acts. Besides, it is assumed that Satan’s spirit can communicate with humans through cats [4].

Resurrection and Rebirth in Literature

The return from death is one of the oldest interests of humanity. People have been wondering since the beginning of creation about the life after death and what are the secrets of the hereafter life and how could people live forever or reborn after their death. Furthermore, a question is often raised about the consequences of resurrection whether it is good or bad.

Resurrection is mentioned earlier in religious texts such as the Mahabharata; a religious epic in ancient India, in which a group of people return to life from their graves with new powers [5]. However, the most influential resurrection is mentioned in the Bible. The resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion is an everlasting effective motif in life and in literature as well [6].

In literature, Resurrection is one of the most frequently used devices. It could take two dimensions, negative and positive. For instance, in Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, the lion is murdered by the witch and then returns to life with a new power that allows him to defeat his enemies. 

(Johnson) On the other side, resurrection is viewed as a miserable curse for the resurrected person or the people around him such as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [7], in which Victor Frankenstein loses all his friends and family and eventually his life because of the curse of resurrection. 

However, resurrection is often presented as a curse and is almost associated with gothic atmosphere. Cats are overwhelmingly portrayed in a negative way in literature; Accordingly, a resurrected cat might act as a suitable motif for gothic horror.

The Resurrected Cat “Church” In Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

Stephen King's Pet Sematary [8], opens up with the movement of a small family from Chicago to a town named Ludlow in Maine. They soon establish a friendship with their neighbor who is an old man called Jud Crandell. This neighbor shows them a deserted place where pets are buried in, known as pet Sematary. (Bookstldr)

The novel’s protagonist, Louis Creed is a doctor at the University of Maine. The events rise when Churchill; the cat of Ellie, Louis’s daughter, is killed by a passing truck. Jud, the strange neighbor, advices Louis to bury the dead cat in the “pet Sematary”. Louis feels weird and questions whether a human was ever buried in the pet Sematary. Jud claims that it didn’t happen. The cat, Church, returns home; however, he is not the same, his appearance is devilish, his smell is terrible and his behavior is aggressive. The cat’s existence annoys Louis; besides, it attacks him several times. (Bookstldr)

One day, Louis’s young son, Gage, is playing on the same road where that cat dies and he is hit by a truck and dies instantly. Louis tells Jud that he is thinking of burying Gage in the pet Sematary. But Jud warns him not to do so and narrates to him the story of a man who buries the corpse of his son in the pet Sematary and his son is reborn again but as an evil entity. All the towns’ people are terrified and he attacks his father and they die together in a miserable way. Louis does not listen to Jud’s advice. He sends his family to Chicago and takes his son’s dead body to the pet Sematary and buries it there. At midnight, the same that has happened with the cat happens with the boy: Gage is resurrected form his grave. However, he is evil and dangerous, just like the cat. (Bookstldr)

Later, Gage heads to Jud's house and murders him while the cat is observing the scene in ecstasy. When Rachel, Louis’s wife returns home, she is surprised by her son’s existence, but is murdered by him as well. At morning, Louis discovers that Gage returns to life and kills both Jud and his wife. So, he takes his gun and moves to kill his son. He is distracted by church, but he shoots it with the gun. Then, he moves to his son and kills him as well. He takes the corpse of his wife and buries it in the pet Sematary regardless of all what happened. At midnight, the resurrected wife comes home and embraces her husband, during which she grabs knife and stabs her husband while hugging each other. (Bookstldr)

Churchill is depicted as a cute and nice cat that is preferred by his owner, Ellie and the other family members. When Ellie has a bad dream about her cat being dead, she is terrified and asked her dad whether cats live long, he answers positively, however, the narrator states that his answer is a lie and states “Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths” [8]. This foreshadows Churchill’s destiny. Later, the cat is run over by a truck. When Louis buries Church, with the help of his neighbor, Jud Crandall, in Pet Sematary he opens the doors of hell on himself and his family. Churchill returns from death as a different cat that brings curse on Louis’s family. The first appearance of the cat makes Louis feel uncomfortable and disgusted by the cat’s look and behavior. He is terrified to hold the cat and when he tries to do so, he drops her instantly out of fear: 

He held Church up and looked at the cat’s muzzle closely. What he saw there caused him to drop the cat onto the grass quickly and to cover his face with one hand, his eyes shut. The whole world was swimming now and his head was full of a tottery, sick vertigo it was the sort of feeling he could remember from the bitter end of long drunks, just before the puking started. (P.S. 187)

Louis notices that the resurrected cat is behaving differently even in the simplest details. He watches the cat while eating and instead of enjoying the scene as before, he feels disgusted and about to vomit, “He stood back, watching the cat eat. He could hear him smacking had Church smacked over his food that way before? Perhaps he had and Louis had just never noticed. Either way, it was a disgusting sound” (P.S. 188) The way the cat looks and walks is changed, “Church was swaying slowly back and forth as if drunk. Louis watched, his body crawling with revulsion, a scream barely held back in his mouth by his clamped teeth. Church had never looked like this had never swayed, like a snake trying to hypnotize its prey not before he was fixed and not afterward.” (P.S. 189) His movement is described as a movement of snake, which is an obvious hint that the cat turns to an evil creature, even his eyes are malicious as if he is trying to throw a spell on Louis.

Churchill’s transformation is not confined by his appearance and attitude but even his actions. The next day of the resurrection, Louis is surprised by finding Church in the garage, he smells stings. He “saw Church slink along one wall, tail up, strange eyes fixed on the car. It disappeared into the dying glow of the day and a moment later Louis saw a disemboweled mouse lying beside a stack of four summer tires” (P.S. 218) He doesn’t remember that church eats rats before the resurrection, Louis feels that the cat turns to a monster, or may be a zombie because he is well fed by the family and he does not need to eat a rat. This behavior proves to him that the cat cuts the rat into pieces not because it is hungry, but because of its evil instinct. 

Louis and his family are fed up with Churchill’s monstrous behaviors. they try to avoid him or kick him out, however, he finds a way to get in again like a curse upon them. They cannot get rid of him in any way, he is even described as a ghost that enters in without the need for doors “Maybe there was no bolthole. Maybe it had just passed through the door, like a ghost.” (P.S. 224) Louis develops a serious obsession with the cat, he is analyzing every act and step it makes. Moreover, he starts to think that the cat can read his mind “Louis became suddenly sure that the cat would begin to struggle in his arms, that it would scratch him. But Church lay totally still, radiating that stupid heat and that dirty stink, looking at Louis’s face as if it could read the thoughts going on behind Louis’s eyes.” (P.S. 224)

Louis is no more able to control his constant thinking about the cat, he even begins to have some nightmares, one day he dreams that he kills the cat and he takes its dead body to the pet Sematary and buries it again but deeper this time, then he “could hear the cat crying somewhere under the earth, making a sound like a weeping child. The sound came up through the pores of the ground, through its stony flesh the sound and the smell, that awful sickish-sweet smell of rot and decay.” (P.S. 226) When he wakes up “The cat was on his chest, neatly curled up there like something from the old wives’ tale of breath-stealing. The stink came off it in slow, noxious waves. It was purring. Louis uttered a cry of disgust and surprise.” (P.S. 228) This scene describes how the cat is affecting Louis’s mentality as if driving him to madness, it has an influence even on his subconscious, that the cat appears in his dreams.

The tragedy of this curse is crowned when Gage, Louis’s son, dies, despite the miserable state of the resurrected cat, Louis does not hesitate to bury his son in the pet Sematary. He knows very well that his son will turn to a monster, but he feels he must do it as if the cat were pushing him to do so, telling him that what has happened to it is going to happen to his son. The curse of resurrection is going to move on to his family gradually one by one. 

Gage returns to life, but is turned to a monstrous, violent creature, like Churchill, “it was not Louis’s son returned from the grave but some hideous monster” (P.S. 500) his appearance and behavior is changed and he tries to kill his neighbor, Jud. At the crime scene the cat is present and is moving around Jud’s legs. The appearance and description of the cat states that Churchill is a partner with Jud in the murder.

It was Church, crouched in the hall doorway, making that sound. The cat’s eyes flared like dirty lamps. Then his eyes moved in the other direction and fixed on the thing which had come in with the cat. Jud began to back up, trying to catch at his thoughts, trying to hold on to his reason in the face of that smell. Oh, it was cold in here the thing had brought its chill with it. Jud rocked unsteadily on his feet it was the cat, twining around his legs, making him totter. It was purring. Jud kicked at it, driving it away. It bared its teeth at him and hissed. (P.S. 501)

Even when Gage proceeds to jump over Jud in order to stab him, Churchill is with him and when Jud tries to protect himself with a knife, Church jumps on him, forces him to drop it and lies on his legs. Moreover, the description of the cat’s face states the evil inside it and it resembles the facial expression of Gage as well. Both of them are enjoying the murder, “The cat was on his legs, mouth open, eyes blazing, hissing like a teakettle. And then Gage was on him, grinning a happy black grin, eyes moon-shaped, rimmed with red,” (P.S. 502)

When Rachel, Louis’s wife, discovers the crime, the cat is there and full of blood, roaming around the dead body of Jud. The cat is celebrating the murder as if he were the one who has committed it. 

Church, is that you?” Waow! Rachel tried the door. It was unlocked. Church was there, sitting in the hallway with its tail coiled neatly around its feet. The cat’s fur was streaked with something dark. Mud, Rachel thought and then saw that the beads of liquid caught in Church’s whispers were red. He raised one paw and began to lick it, his eyes never leaving her face. (P.S. 504)

The curse of the cat comes upon Louis and his family. Gage is not satisfied by killing Jud. He continues his violent bloodshed and kills his mother, Rachel. The core of the curse is that Louis keeps repeating the same mistakes: burying his wife in the pet Sematary despite the evil consequences of his act. The novel ends with the resurrected wife trying to kill Louis, which is an open end of the curse that never ends, because Rachel might bury her husband as well and so on. Because of Churchill all the family turns to zombies. 

The Resurrected cat “Pluto” in Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Black Cat"

In "The Black Cat" [9], Pluto is described by the narrator as a beautiful, clever creature. However, it is going to bring curse upon her sponsors, the narrator and his wife. The narrator is foreshadowing the disaster that is to come because when he states that “my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusions to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.” [9], From the beginning, the cat is associated with magic and evil, it stands as a bad omen that will lead to the family's tragic end. 

Because of the narrator’s drinking habit, he cuts one of the cat’s eyes with his knife and hangs the cat on the tree, the cat brings curse upon him. He is punished severely after killing the cat. He kills his wife and is then hanged because of the cat’s curse. 

The resurrection of the cat is not stated frankly by the author or the narrator, however, the events and the symbols clarify that Pluto returns to life. The first sign is when the narrator’s house is burned and all the walls have fallen except one wall which the people are gathering around and examining carefully because of what is drawn on it, “the figure of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvelous. There was a rope about the animal’s neck.” (B.C. 678) This drawing represents a warning to the narrator that he is cursed and the rope around the cat’s neck foreshadows the destiny of the narrator himself. However, the real representation of the resurrected cat appears few days later when he finds a cat on the street that resembles Pluto:

I approached it and touched it with my hand. It was a black cat a very large one fully as large as Pluto and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast…What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes.” (B.C. 679-680)

It is obvious from the description of the new cat that it is Pluto himself, the black color, the big size and even the missing eye, the only difference is the white spot on the chest which refers to the rope that the cat is hanged by. This spot proves to the narrator and the readers that this cat is the resurrected Pluto: 

It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name and for this, above all, I loathed and dreaded and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared it was now, I say, the image of a hideous of a ghastly thing of the GALLOWS! oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime of Agony and of Death! (B.C. 681)

The narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that the new cat is Pluto itself coming back to life to curse him and his family. He senses that it is going to bring harm to him, so he cannot stand it anymore, He feels that it is deliberately following him everywhere:

It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast. (B.C. 680)

Even more, the cat has a control over his subconscious, he starts to have nightmares, “For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat” (B.C. 679) One day, he has a bad dream and when he wakes up, he founds the cat lying on his chest and her breath is hitting his face, he panics and feels that it is heavy on his heart not only physically but psychologically as well, “I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face and its vast weight an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off incumbent eternally upon my heart!”(B.C. 681)

The cat becomes a reason that pushes the narrator to kill his wife un-purposely. He tries to hit the cat with an axe, but the hit goes to his wife and she dies instantly. He becomes a murderer because of the cat, as if it plans for everything and its presence brings evil to him. 

The last scene of the story is full of horror. When the narrator kills his wife, he turns to find out where the cat is, but it disappears. He hides his wife’s body in the walls and closes it tightly with wallpapers. However, when the police come, the cat is the one who leads them to the wife’s corpse in a very horrifying way. The narrator and even the reader, are shocked and wonder how does the cat enter the walls like a ghost:

I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child and then quickly swelling into one long, loud and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman a howl a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation. (B.C. 684)

The narrator is damned by the resurrected cat which stands as an evil force behind the scenes that lead to the miserable end for him and his wife.

Cats are a highly symbolic, they are associated with evil, magic and mystery because of their manipulative character and being active at night. They are portrayed in literature in many works. The cats are central figures in both King’s Pet Sematary and Poe’s "The Black Cat." The central events are based around Pluto and Churchill. Both of them are described as beasts or monsters because of the evil they brought with them. Besides, the two cats are resurrected, they return to life after death and accompany their masters as if they were their shadows giving the sense that they are going to drag them to their miserable fate. 

From the beginning, both cats are described as a bad omen and foreshadowing a curse and blood shedding. Pluto is described by the wife as a witch in disguise and the narrator in Pet Sematary gives a hint that Churchill is going to have a bloody death. The resemblance of the two resurrected cats is obvious throughout the two stories. Both Pluto and Churchill have a huge control on their sponsors, to the extent that they appear in their dreams. Louis has a nightmare and when he wakes up, he finds the cat on his chest. The same scene exactly happens with the narrator in "The Black Cat." In both scenes, cat’s position around the neck explains the idea that the two cats are responsible for the nightmares. 

Moreover, both cats arouse the feeling of the uncanny, an experience of something that is mysterious but strangely familiar. Pluto and Churchill are roaming around their masters all the time which is something normal for cats, however, both Louis in Pets Sematary and the narrator in "The Black Cat" are annoyed by their cats' behaviors. Louis feels that Churchill is reading his mind and making fun of him. And the narrator is annoyed by the attachment of the cat to him and feels it is doing that to tease him. 

One more resemblance is that both resurrected cats find their ways in a mysterious way like ghosts or witches. When Churchill is buried in pet Sematary, he is able to return home alone. Louis claims that whenever he lets the cat out and closes the doors, it finds a way in, like a ghost. Pluto also in the final scene, when the police discover the scene, he is inside the wall even though the narrator has closed it tightly. 

Most importantly is that the two cats are present in the crime scenes and they pave the way in an indirect way to the crimes. Churchill prevents the victim, Jud, to drag something to defend himself and cause him to fall down. He is full of blood when Rachal meets him after the crime. Pluto, as well, jumps over the narrator which causes him to feel angry and tries to hit the cat with an axe, that goes on his wife’s head.

1. Byrne, Barbara. “Cats in literature.” Elementary English, Vol. 51, No. 7, 1974, pp. 955-958.

2. O'Mara, Lesley. Cats' Miscellany. Michael O’Mara Book Limited, 2005.

3. Steffler, Alva William. Symbols of the Christian Faith. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002.

4. Bateson, Patrick and Dennis C. Turner‏.‏ The Domestic Cat: The Biology of its Behaviour. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

5. Fitzgerald, James L. “The great epic of India as religious rhetoric: A fresh look at the "Mahābhārata".” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 51, No. 4, 1983, pp. 611-630.

6. Loke, Andrew. Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2020.

7. “The Resurrection of Frankenstein” William and Mary 29, 2018/https://libraries.wm.edu/blog/post/resurrection-frankenstein

8. King, Stephen. Pet Sematary. New York: Pocket Books, 1983. (All the subsequent quotations to this novel are to this edition will be incorporated within the text with the abbreviation: (P.S. p.no).

9. Poe, Edgar Allan. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. The Black Cat in Adgar Allan Poe: Poetry and prose. The Library of America E-Book Classics, 1984. (All the subsequent quotations to this novel are to this edition will be incorporated within the text with the abbreviation: (B.C. p.no).