Des Moines

Des Moines enters the narrative of Pet Sematary not as a place of action but as a point in a grimly comic story of bureaucratic and logistical failure. The anecdote, related by a pathology clerk at the Eastern Maine Medical Center to Louis Creed, concerns the mishandled shipment of a corpse from a remote part of Aroostook County. The body, intended for Grand Falls, Minnesota, was instead routed through a series of cities, including Des Moines, as part of a catastrophic chain of errors that delayed its arrival by several days.

The Anecdote of the Misrouted Corpse

The story, told with a kind of professional gallows humor, describes how the body of a man who died on a fishing trip was sent to Des Moines after being initially misdirected to Miami. The clerk's account emphasizes the practical consequences of such delays: the embalming fluids, which he refers to as "Forever Goop," failed to take, and the body decomposed to the point where it "smelled like a spoiled pork roast." The anecdote serves to underscore the mundane yet horrifying realities of death and the handling of the dead, a theme that pervades the novel. It also provides a stark contrast to the supernatural events that will later consume Louis Creed, grounding the story's horror in a recognizable, if extreme, form of human error and decay.

Narrative Significance

The Des Moines anecdote functions as a piece of darkly comic relief and a thematic counterpoint. It reinforces the novel's preoccupation with the physical reality of death and the failure of systems—whether bureaucratic or supernatural—to manage it cleanly. The clerk's casual, almost cheerful recounting of the mishap highlights the professional detachment required to deal with death on a daily basis, a detachment that Louis himself will find impossible to maintain as the story progresses. The mention of Des Moines, along with Miami and Fargo, serves to map the absurd geography of failure, a journey that stands in ironic contrast to the purposeful, terrible journey Louis will later undertake into the woods beyond the Pet Sematary.