Pet Sematary

I don't typically write reviews about books. I've read close to 20 SK books in the last year and a half and over more in my life...this is so unlike his normal character as a writer that it's unnerving. I've read IT, the Stand, 'Salem's Lot, Carrie, Dark Tower series 1-7.5(?) - everything chronologically before this book and tons of newer stuff (I'm working back through his catalogue from start to finish). Nothing compares to this. Prepare for the darkest form of horror. I can't with good conscience recommend anyone to read this book. It gave me nightmares every night that I read it. I woke up thinking about it, and couldn't get it out of my head. I'm reading something else as fast as I can...can't wait to get back to the basic SK. Nothing else holds a candle to this.

Pet Sematary has always been one of my favorite Stephen King stories. I’m still terrified just thinking about certain scenes from the movie. I hadn’t read the book since I was a kid so I figured I was long overdue for a re-read.

This is, famously, the book that King himself considers the most frightening he has ever written. He has expressed regret over publishing it, claiming that it’s too dark, too bleak, that it goes too far.

I understand why he feels that way. Reading Pet Sematary as an adult has been a horrifying experience. I’m now at a point in my life where I have an acute fear of mortality—both my own and that of those I love. Pet Sematary exploits that very fear.

We all know what it’s like to lose a loved one. What if there was a way to bring them back? Would you do it, even if it meant opening a door into the depths of darkness and terror? We all want to feel like we have some semblance of control, like we’re not at the whim of an indifferent universe where death can strike at any time. But at what cost?

As Pet Sematary’s Louis Creed grapples with these very questions, we feel an overwhelming sense of dread. We know tragedy and horror await he and his family, and all we can do is sit back and watch it unfold, secretly hoping that if given the chance, we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. After all, as Louis’s neighbor Jud warns, “sometimes dead is better.”

Pet Sematary had me in its grip from the first few pages and never let up. It’s a masterful story about death, love, grief and the hopelessness of trying to escape the will of the universe.

PET SEMATARY is a book that will stand the test of time. It is, of course, one of King's early novels, and we can see the author at his peek. The horrors he reveals (from family dynamics to supernatural burial grounds) are chilling enough to scare the bejesus out of the sternest of hearts!

The story revolves around the Creed family and their move from a bustling Chicago suburb to quiet Bangor, Maine, where the father (Louis) starts work as a physician. He brings with him his wife and two children (Ellie, a preteen daughter, and Gauge, a preschool boy still in diapers). The house they move into is beautiful with plenty of land for the children to play on, and a nice old neighbor couple across the "road", the Crandalls. It is this "road" that causes some immediate concern to Louis as Judd Crandall tells him about the deaths of animals caused by the big semi-trucks that blaze down its blacktop.

Judd becomes friends with the family and eventually takes them (or rather is drawn into taking them) on a small path behind the Creed's house that leads to a very special place: the PET SEMATARY. This is the place where most of the animals that'd been killed on the "road" are buried. It's a strange place with concentric circles, the shape the multiple graves make as they are laid out against the well-kept grounds. Louis and Ellie notice a large deadfall tree and Judd warns them not to climb it because it is too dangerous. But there's more to the story than that. What lay beyond the deadfall tree?

Ellie's cat, Church, is eventually killed on the "road", and Judd and Louis decide to bury the cat, but not in the PET SEMATARY; they go beyond, over the deadfall, and into a very special place known as the Micmac burial grounds, a place that has existed since the Earth began, and has the power in its soil to bring back the dead. But at what cost?

"Has anyone ever buried a human being back there?" Louis asks Judd.

"Don't even think such a thing, Louis!" Judd replies.

Church returns to the living, but is much changed. The cat smells foul, and has a very cold and evil manner about it. But at least Ellie has her cat back, right?

Eventually the "road" takes more than just an animal of the Creed's. In a horrific set of narratives, Mr. King draws us into what might happen if humans were brought back from the dead. What happens to our soul if we're brought back? Does it come with us? Or does it stay on the Micmac grounds? Or perhaps something in-between?

This book will, in every sense of the word, "freak" you out! It's terrifyingly terrific, as were many of King's earlier novels. A must read for the horror afficionado.

This novel follows doctor Louis Creed, his wife Rachel, and their two children, who move into an old house in Maine near a haunted patch of ground that feeds on human grief and insanity, which it elicits by resurrecting any dead thing interred in its stony grip. The spirit or spirits of the place have a magnetic draw on the human mind that has led to a long, secret local tradition of this very act--mostly involving children's pets, but once in a while, something human. First the family cat gets run over, and then the family's young son. You see where this is going. When summarized, it's far-out, even laughable stuff.

Yet Stephen King was afraid to re-read the finished book, his wife afraid to finish reading it the first time, and both of them afraid to see it published. They considered it too disturbing. I can even feel a faint anxiety as I write my review. That a mere book can have such effect is as disturbing as anything else about it--it seems threatening that mere printed matter should exert such power over our nerves. King later

called it "a dirty, nasty book."

He's absolutely right. Besides being utterly merciless towards its characters and its readers, the novel contains ideas so unwholesome, so unnatural, and such a fixation on uncanny evil, that some fundamental part of us rebels. This sets up a psychological paradox, for while our brain wants to reject what has been put before us, it also wants to accept it,due to the novel's beguiling realism (another King trademark). What this means is that a thoughtful reader will end up turning over the novel's proposals in his or her brain, and if left to obsess, could wind up very disturbed indeed. There's a reason this book scared even Stephen King.

You don't become the world's bestselling novelist by chance. King fills a niche--and it's not just about horror. There is, after all, no shortage of shlocky horror novels whose plots follow storylines similar to those of King's. So what sets his work apart?

For one thing, as with the work of Dickens, God is in the details. King disarms us with evocative details from everyday life long before he asks us to believe the unbelievable. He displays a unique talent in this area, and his skill is absolutely one-in-a-million. You read certain passages and think, "Yes--it is like that, and no one else has articulated it!"

This holds true for his meditations on family life, too. "He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together... was their respect of the mystery--the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down... there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, and that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality... And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all... And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another." It's also clear that King writes from experience when Louis meditates on the inner life of his children and wonders tenderly, musingly, and "not for the first time, if childhood was more a period of forgetting than of learning."

His work is designed to convince. Even when Louis realizes that his son has come back from the dead, he finds out in broad daylight, while on the phone with his father-in-law. It's then that he sees the mud tracks on the kitchen floor. The way this is described is utterly convincing, and by the time King's done with us, we're in Louis's shoes and we're all too sure that if this could happen, it would happen exactly the way it does here.

Another of King's disarming tactics is the pre-emptive strike. We can't laugh the horror away: his characters have already tried to do it for us. We can't rationalize it away: we watch them attempt and fail. One of King's masterstrokes in Pet Sematary is the choice of a doctor for his protagonist--someone whose clinical sense of science and reason resists every assertion of the supernatural, the uncanny, the improbable. Louis Creed does our doubting and our disbelieving for us. The passage where Louis, finally having come round, matter-of-factly calculates the various possibilities that the return of his young son might entail, as though he were working out an algebraic formula, is a subtle example of King's brand of literary achievement.

Nor can we wish away the terror by re-situating ourselves in daylight and in modernized, technological settings. Some of the most harrowing passages of the novel take place in an airport. His characters are at home in pop culture. King also has a great feel for the way that simple phrases ("It's only the loons. The sound carries. It's funny.") or even simple words like resurrection or abomination can take on uncanny meanings under the right circumstances and repeat themselves obsessively in one's mind, with cumulative ominousness. Writers will especially appreciate this effect.

Throughout Pet Sematary, but especially in the book's last third, there are passages where the narrative becomes so specific, so coldly vivid in timing and detail, as to approach hallucination. The effect this has is unsettling, to say the least. For my money, the most harrowing passages aren't those involving the resurrections, but those that put us in Louis's shoes as he robs a graveyard and then carries his dead son

through the haunted woods at two in the morning. It was these passages that kept me awake much later, because they are the most realistic. "This place was thick with spirits; it was tenebrous with them," Louis finally has to admit to himself. "The reality of what he was doing--standing out here in the dark calling his dead son--suddenly hit him and set his scalp crawling." I paraphrase, but you get the idea. There is reality in this book: the reality of marriage; of work; of parenthood; of extended family relations; of neighborhoods; of death; and of evil. As after a particularly lucid dream, there is a part of us that believes what we have just experienced. It takes a little while to recover.

Pet Sematary builds to a tense moment and leaves you there: it wants to stay with you. It could have been a modern literary classic if King didn't give in to his temptation to show us too much, simply because his talent at rendering the unbelievable believably entices him to do so. It should have retained the spare, taut, harrowing quality of the night-in-the-woods sequences, but it loses a little steam when we confront the monster.

Stephen King has been embraced as a sort of cultural campfire yarn-spinner in the popular imagination. He's given us Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me and the Green Mile, not to mention the campily enjoyable miniseries The Stand and the scare-with-a-wink Creepshow series. What's easy to forget about is the dark bite his actual novels have, and not one of them has more bite than Pet Sematary.

This novel follows doctor Louis Creed, his wife Rachel, and their two children, who move into an old house in Maine near a haunted patch of ground that feeds on human grief and insanity, which it elicits by resurrecting any dead thing interred in its stony grip. The spirit or spirits of the place have a magnetic draw on the human mind that has led to a long, secret local tradition of this very act--mostly involving children's pets, but once in a while, something human. First the family cat gets run over, and then the family's young son. You see where this is going. When summarized, it's far-out, even laughable stuff.

Yet Stephen King was afraid to re-read the finished book, his wife afraid to finish reading it the first time, and both of them afraid to see it published. They considered it too disturbing. I can even feel a faint anxiety as I write my review. That a mere book can have such effect is as disturbing as anything else about it--it seems threatening that mere printed matter should exert such power over our nerves. King later

called it "a dirty, nasty book."

He's absolutely right. Besides being utterly merciless towards its characters and its readers, the novel contains ideas so unwholesome, so unnatural, and such a fixation on uncanny evil, that some fundamental part of us rebels. This sets up a psychological paradox, for while our brain wants to reject what has been put before us, it also wants to accept it,due to the novel's beguiling realism (another King trademark). What this means is that a thoughtful reader will end up turning over the novel's proposals in his or her brain, and if left to obsess, could wind up very disturbed indeed. There's a reason this book scared even Stephen King.

You don't become the world's bestselling novelist by chance. King fills a niche--and it's not just about horror. There is, after all, no shortage of shlocky horror novels whose plots follow storylines similar to those of King's. So what sets his work apart?

For one thing, as with the work of Dickens, God is in the details. King disarms us with evocative details from everyday life long before he asks us to believe the unbelievable. He displays a unique talent in this area, and his skill is absolutely one-in-a-million. You read certain passages and think, "Yes--it is like that, and no one else has articulated it!"

This holds true for his meditations on family life, too. "He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together... was their respect of the mystery--the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down... there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, and that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality... And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all... And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another." It's also clear that King writes from experience when Louis meditates on the inner life of his children and wonders tenderly, musingly, and "not for the first time, if childhood was more a period of forgetting than of learning."

His work is designed to convince. Even when Louis realizes that his son has come back from the dead, he finds out in broad daylight, while on the phone with his father-in-law. It's then that he sees the mud tracks on the kitchen floor. The way this is described is utterly convincing, and by the time King's done with us, we're in Louis's shoes and we're all too sure that if this could happen, it would happen exactly the way it does here.

Another of King's disarming tactics is the pre-emptive strike. We can't laugh the horror away: his characters have already tried to do it for us. We can't rationalize it away: we watch them attempt and fail. One of King's masterstrokes in Pet Sematary is the choice of a doctor for his protagonist--someone whose clinical sense of science and reason resists every assertion of the supernatural, the uncanny, the improbable. Louis Creed does our doubting and our disbelieving for us. The passage where Louis, finally having come round, matter-of-factly calculates the various possibilities that the return of his young son might entail, as though he were working out an algebraic formula, is a subtle example of King's brand of literary achievement.

Nor can we wish away the terror by re-situating ourselves in daylight and in modernized, technological settings. Some of the most harrowing passages of the novel take place in an airport. His characters are at home in pop culture. King also has a great feel for the way that simple phrases ("It's only the loons. The sound carries. It's funny.") or even simple words like resurrection or abomination can take on uncanny meanings under the right circumstances and repeat themselves obsessively in one's mind, with cumulative ominousness. Writers will especially appreciate this effect.

Throughout Pet Sematary, but especially in the book's last third, there are passages where the narrative becomes so specific, so coldly vivid in timing and detail, as to approach hallucination. The effect this has is unsettling, to say the least. For my money, the most harrowing passages aren't those involving the resurrections, but those that put us in Louis's shoes as he robs a graveyard and then carries his dead son

through the haunted woods at two in the morning. It was these passages that kept me awake much later, because they are the most realistic. "This place was thick with spirits; it was tenebrous with them," Louis finally has to admit to himself. "The reality of what he was doing--standing out here in the dark calling his dead son--suddenly hit him and set his scalp crawling." I paraphrase, but you get the idea. There is reality in this book: the reality of marriage; of work; of parenthood; of extended family relations; of neighborhoods; of death; and of evil. As after a particularly lucid dream, there is a part of us that believes what we have just experienced. It takes a little while to recover.

Pet Sematary builds to a tense moment and leaves you there: it wants to stay with you. It could have been a modern literary classic if King didn't give in to his temptation to show us too much, simply because his talent at rendering the unbelievable believably entices him to do so. It should have retained the spare, taut, harrowing quality of the night-in-the-woods sequences, but it loses a little steam when we confront the monster.

Stephen King has been embraced as a sort of cultural campfire yarn-spinner in the popular imagination. He's given us Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me and the Green Mile, not to mention the campily enjoyable miniseries The Stand and the scare-with-a-wink Creepshow series. What's easy to forget about is the dark bite his actual novels have, and not one of them has more bite than Pet Sematary.

Early publicity for Pet Sematary stated that the novel, which King had written but not allowed to be released, was his scariest novel ever. King and his wife, Tabitha, agreed that this was no mere hyperbole. In a Fangoria interview conducted around the time of Pet Sematary's release, King said that he showed the manuscript to his wife, and she couldn't finish it. "It was too... effective." Eventually, in 1983, the novel did see print. Was it as horrifying, as gruesome, as dark as all the hype purported it to be?
Thankfully, yes. This book is a runner-up for King's scariest novel (losing only marginally to The Shining), and it really is his darkest. It is a book about loss, and greif, and, simply put, death. Death, the great unknown; death, the all-encroaching. But, as the characters of Pet Sematary discover, there are things worse than death.
King himself has said that Pet Semetary is in his opinion his most frightening novel. While I may not agree with that entirely, it certainly is a story that's as creepy as they come. First the cat dies, and then the story of the old Indian cemetery comes out, and next thing you know, the dead cat is alive - if not a bit odd. Voila - the big can of worms is open. It's a can of worms that ultimately plummets this likeable family into the depths of Hell. The cemetery, against all laws of nature (but in keeping with the laws of Stephen King) appears to be able to resurrect dead animals. Could it also work on humans? Dr Louis Creed tries to postpone death by prolonging life. This is the story of a man who forgets that he can't play God. It is a disturbing novel, the kind of subversive, realistic scary story that exemplifies great horror fiction.
Despite a slow start, Pet Semetary picks up speed and pulls the reader into a terrifying conclusion. It is a dark, unforgiving novel dealing with the very nature of death and greif. It never gives up, just hacks away at sanity and rationality until nothing is left. In the world of Pet Sematary, death begets death, lunacy begets lunacy, and the examination of terror is an exercise in darkness, in which no light can be seen.

Completely not scary. Boring, dull, and monotonous from end to end. Supremely disappointing. Never saw the movie, so I came into reading this fresh. I hated it. I forced myself to finish it. All the action was in the last 5% of the book, and it was NOT worth the buildup.

Pet Cemetery is, in every sense of the word, "electrifyingly terrifying." I read this book for the first time back in 1983 when it had just hit the book shelves. After just finishing Christine and hungry for some more "KING", I purchased a hardcover version of Pet Cemetery. I got into reading novels pretty early and it was Pet Cemetery that kept me "hooked" into reading for a long time. It still remains to this day one of the few books that kept me awake late at night and, on several occasions, I made a mad dash for home right off the school bus just to get to the scene where Louis Creed discovers what is "beyond the Pet Cemetery."

This is one of King's earlier books, but it stands the test of time in the modern age. You don't need technology or High Digital TV to get the full effect of what what it means to be truly frightened. In pet Cemetery the fear is on the pages, in every sense of the word and, as the story moves on, even though you don't want the Creed family to find out what lies beyond the Pet Sematery that lurks just beyond their backdoor, in the darkest recesses of your heart you know its inevitable: the worst is yet to come, and it does...but far worse than anything most people would imagine, except for KING himself who said after writing the book that "This is the one I put away in a drawer thinking I had finally gone too far." The readers will have to be the judge of that.

Although most people are familiar with the story , allow me to make the synopsis brief: The Creed family moves to a small rural town in Maine. Louis, father and soon-to-be local physician, Rachel his wife and mother to Ellie [10] and Gage [2]. They have a black cat named Church who plays the role as one of the central characters. Across the street is Jud Crandall, an old timer who lives directly across the street and soon becomes friends of the Creeds. Later it is Jud's influence that introduces the family [in particular Louis] to the horrors that lie beyond the woods. And from the moment the family makes its first trek up the darkened pathway to discover the Pet Sematary, the horror begins.

In addition to the basic premise of the story, there are enough "hints" and "secrets" to add real depth to the book: The house is located on a busy highway with trucks running day and night; there is the ghost of Victor Pacow, the victim of an unfortunate accident, who dies in Louis Creed's hospital and haunts him in his sleep; Rachel, Louis's wife, who is haunted by memories of her sister Zelda who suffered from spinal meningitis; and then there are the words of Jud Crandall that haunts the readers throughout the story, right to the grisly end: "What you buy is what you own, and sooner or later what you own always comes back to you."

And it does. In Pet Sematary, it always does.

This book is high on my list of recommendations, not only for horror/macabre fans, but for fiction lovers who crave a great story that cuts to the bone of fear. You will not be disappointed with Sematary as it ranks amongst one of the great reads by the "Master of Horror."

Not one scene of this book was frightening. Someone else mentioned the unused plots that may have been interesting - all-knowing zombies who've been to hell for instance.
It could be a generational thing that mine is desensitized to violence and gore - but the cashier at Borders who was my age said she had trouble at night after this book! Was she afraid that a retarded cat would run away from her in fear and mistrust?!
The only emotion I felt was pity at the grief of the cardboard characters. I have read one other SK, The Stand, and the slender, middle class females - Rachel and Franny are almost indistinguishable from one another. If I get any commenters that disagree, please, tell me what makes this a horror novel. Church being resurected with dulled senses and becoming skittish is well, meh. You know Gage will be resurected and it lasts like 3 pages, a slightly retarded 2 year old zombie overpowers his insane-with-grief mother and his neighbour. And that's it. I was mildly interested by some sub-plots and the writing but I wanted to be scared damn it! So, so many plots that could have been utilised and weren't!

Now don't just give me a non-helpful vote cause I didn't like the book, at least hear me out. I like King...a lot. He was one of best American authors in the latter half of the 20th Century, and has churned out thriller after thriller that are rightfully critically acclaimed. However, no matter how much I like a particular author, I judge each book individually, and this is not a good book.

Characterization is one of the things that makes King more than Dean Koontz: he develops his characters to the point where the reader really cares what's happening to them. In addition, if you pardon the cliche, his books are "tightly-plotted," moving quickly from situation to situation and keeping the reader involved. Both of these crucial developments are missing in Pet Sematary, none of the main characters are well developed, and so when terrible things begin to happen the reader remains more detached than involved. In addition, supporting characters are brought in at times when the plot calls for it and then thrown away, without ever being developed at all.

The plot is also surprisingly flimsy for a King novel, used only as a clothesline to hang scary and macabre situations on, instead of supporting the novel itself. The actions by the characters often don't make sense, especially at the climax of the book, and the wonderfully set-up "Pet Sematary" itself is inexplicably abandoned in favor of the place "beyond" the Pet Cemetary over the big dead tree.

Look I wanted to like this, I really did, but it's a poor piece of writing that people like because it's macabre and written by Steven King. 3/10