Pet Sematary by Stephen King

ISBN: 0743412273
576 pages
published in 1983.

This was definitely – by far – the scariest King novel I’ve read to date. There was something so vivid and real about this book that it gave me serious chills. I found myself walking around my apartment tonight while reading it feeling really uneasy and uncomfortable and unsafe (and a whole bunch of other un-s). Pet Sematary is the story of a family that moves to a small town in Maine – a family that seems to be doing very well for itself, in fact. A husband, a wife, a daughter, a baby son. Soon they all settle into a new routine in their new home. Louis – the father and husband – becomes good friends with an old man that lives across the street and finds himself having a beer or two with him every night. Louis is a physician at a local university and the family doesn’t seem to want for much. Unfortunately, one day his neighbor Judson Crandall decides to take the family and their little daughter Ellie for a hike in the woods to see the pet cemetery (misspelled ‘Pet Sematary’ on the entrance) that the neighborhood kids tend. It all seems innocent enough – Ellie has a bit of an adverse reaction to her first glimpse of what death really means – but it’s very reasonable and understandable and doesn’t seem the least bit unhealthy.

However, it’s what lies beyond the pet cemetery that is the real problem in this book. A plot of land in the woods that once belonged to the Micmac Indians and seems to be able to bring the dead back to life – or so Louis finds out when his daughter’s cat is killed in the road near their house and Jud brings him on a trek into the woods.

The monsters were perhaps the least scary thing in this book. What was truly frightening was the depictions of just what could go wrong. The death of a family pet, the death of a child, the death of people you love and the idea that perhaps there are things worse than death – a reality that many of us are not very comfortable with confronting. “Sometimes dead is better” Judson Crandall tells us in the novel, and after reading through this book, that is something you may find yourself accepting.

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