Pet Sematary (1983)

This scared the absolute bejesus out of me. I was about 15 and it was my first horror story. I read it while babysitting for some freaky people in the middle of the night. ( )

A great example of Stephen King's craft - a highly enjoyable read and slightly disturbing rather than all-out scary (for me). Contains some classic locations and scenes, especially crawling over the windfall pile to the dark path beyond.... ( )

This is one book I did not read as many times as I do normally with his books. Maybe because it is about animals and I am very emotional when it is about animals dying.

It has been so long ago since I read this book. This one I really need to re-read again. Especially now that there is a sequel coming up, so I have a good excuse. ( )

The painful, hard thing about Stephen King's writing is that so often, he takes something real, something that people can experience in the real world, and builds the supernatural stuff onto that. In The Shining, there's Jack's alcoholism; in The Talisman, there's Jack/Jason's mother's cancer; The Stand plays on our fears of something, somewhere, in one of those labs, getting out of control; in Pet Sematary, it's the death of a child. So much of the book is completely real and believable: the arguments between Louis and his wife's parents, Gage running out onto the road and getting himself killed, Louis being willing to do anything to resurrect his son, anything. It's gruesome, because anyone with an ounce of imagination can put themself in that situation, imagine the horrible choice: do I try this and possibly get my son back or possibly create a monster, or do I pass this chance by and never find out whether it could have worked?

Stephen King is definitely not "just" a horror writer. His horror becomes much more "real" because he is also writing about real things.

This book hurt the most of the ones of his that he's read, and so it took me longer to get through it. I don't regret it, even if it grossed me out a bit. I think it's pretty brilliant, the ideas and the plot at least. Stephen King is not the most fancy writer in the world, but his prose works and goes down easy, and that makes it good, as far as I'm concerned. ( )

Rating: 5 of 5

Pet Sematary remains, to this day, one of the scariest books I've ever read. It gives me nightmares every single time, which is three re-reads as of April 9, 2013. And the first time I read it, about 13 years old, we lived in a log cabin located within 10 acres of woods. Yeah, I didn't sleep right for weeks. Good times! ( )