Pet Sematary could easily have been told as a short story or novella. The story is simple enough: A nice young doctor, Louis Creed and his family move from Chicago to an old house in Maine. They discover they have a kindly Yankee neighbor across the street and a pet cemetery on the backside of their property. There's an impassible deadfall at the back of the cemetery and it looks like the path continues on beyond. Where could it go?

Before long, we find out. Tragedy (and a big truck) strikes the family cat Winston Churchill and Jud the neighbor shows Louis how to pass the deadfall and head on to an ancient Indian burial ground that holds the power of resurrection. This of course, is a Stephen King book, so you can bet your bottom dollar that Church won't be the last thing resurrected by our unfortunate hero.

So yeah, the story could have been covered in a quarter of this novel's page count. However, King takes this simple frame of a story and turns it into a rumination on death and our fascination/fear/revulsion of it. He does this with his usual well rounded and believable characters.

Louis is a doctor who worked for his mortician uncle when he was younger. His wife Rachel is emotionally scarred by the childhood loss of a sister to spinal meningitis. Jud is an 80+ year old man who loses his wife over the course of the novel.

In this novel especially he made me believe his characters were making the choices they made due to what kind of a person they were rather than requirements of his plot. Though the characters in this novel aren't quite as likable as his usual characters (aside from Jud, who is one of my favorite King characters), they were ones that to me seemed most believable.

If there's a fault with the novel, it's that King maybe spends too much time on his characters. The thing is, for me the first three quarters of the book (dealing with the characters and their issues) were the most interesting. Once the book kicks in to high gear, it begins to feel rushed. A book that is four hundred pages shouldn't have a rushed ending. Also King makes one slip that I don't remember seeing from him before: He tells us how evil and manipulative the cursed area is instead of just showing us. He does show us as well. It's just that there are a number of times when the narrative points out something like 'She got the feeling she was being purposely delayed.' We are smart enough to get that on our own, and usually King knows that.

I did like Pet Sematary. I appreciated the time King spent building his characters and layering the story with different observations of death. The book does begin to feel sloppy as it reaches a finale, but it isn't fatal. Whatever irritations I had were squelched by a terrific cliff-hanger of an ending. ( )

Classic King at his best here, one of my favorates from him so far. As always, greatly developed characters, the type of story that gives you chills, probably one of his scarier novels. A certain part in the story was extremly frightening, emotionally moving, sad, and more all wrapped into one, and it was handled perfectly. I would recomend this to any King fan, or any horror/thriller fan for that matter. ( )

Reading this on the heels of Christine showed up the sloppy inconsistencies in this book. Where Christine is sharp and laser focused, Pet Sematary is wobbly and weaves around like a drunk. Problems with tone and show versus tell are the biggest ones, but there are character annoyances, too. Maybe those aren't flaws, but they detracted from my enjoyment of this book.

Let's start with focus or lack of it. In Christine we are focused on tight set of characters and circumstances that all have bearing on the current events. Arnie, Dennis, their parents, Leigh, Lebay and Christine are basically the only players and their back stories and personal demons are all important, so when King goes down a rathole to explore one of them it has relevance. In Pet Sematary the biggest rathole has almost none and so was grating and took me out of the story. This was Rachel's back story; her psychological trauma and resulting mindless fear of death, the dead, coffins, funerals, hearses and anything else remotely connected with death. Shit, she was probably even afraid of grave markers she was so nutty. The idiotic way she was portrayed made me want to get a Zelda mask and creep up on her and say "boo!". In the end though, her irrational fears had pretty much no bearing on the main story which is the death of her kid. She made it to the funeral and the cemetery despite her psychological problems, so it didn't matter that she had them. Sloppy. Plus I usually enjoy the various nooks and crannies that fill out King's tales (some call this bloat, but I don't), but this time I didn't. Rachel was annoying and I personally rooted for Zelda.

The other thing that I found glaringly different from Christine was tone. The individual stories of each player and the events in their lives had the same feel to them and were presented in the same way. Both Arnie and Dennis found Christine's magical self-repairing creepy and unsettling. Leigh, too, found things to keep her awake at night. They were all of a piece and presented with the same loving concern for Arnie. When Christine's killing spree started, those were given to us in a cold, just the facts sort of way. When Leigh and Dennis set their plan in motion it took on a lot of the tone of Christine's parts, thus smoothing out the emotional and the documentary approaches. Not so in Pet Sematary.

The beginning of the story is set out with King's usual sentiment and romance. A man and his family begin a new chapter in their lives. Lou is a bit mystified to find himself in the role of father and breadwinner, but bends to his yolk happily enough, secure in the knowledge that he can bear it and it will feel light. When Jud comes into his life as surrogate father, he's almost delirious with happiness at his situation and so are we. We proceed to the deaths; Pascow, Church, Norma and lastly Gage. Each is presented with increasing sharpness, sentiment and sadness. Gage's in particular is gut-wrenching. The family breakdown is equally emotional and tortured. Jed is unsteady, Rachel is practically catatonic, Ellie is lost and Lou is foundering. But fast-forward to the very end and we're suddenly transported to Dawn of the Dead or Evil Dead…it's camp. Camp! After all that emotional turmoil, degradation and pain we get a zombie Michael Myers, just add clown suit. Thanks, Steve.

Lastly there is the show don't tell rule breaking that goes on. I don't know what happened exactly, but unlike Christine, King just has to keep repeating how the evil entity works its devilish magic. The innate sense of what's going on underneath just isn't conveyed the way it is in Christine. In that story we just feel that the already twisted Lebay and Christine are melded together as one malign entity. As soon as Christine comes into his life, Lebay is somehow completed and something greater is born. We don't know how or why, we just know. In Pet Sematary however, we have to be told (repeatedly) that the evil presence in the Micmac burying ground is controlling events and destroying men's sanity. Again, I don't know what's broken here, but that underlying assurance that there is a master plan just isn't present. I'm told that the Wendigo or whatever made Jud take Lou up there in the first place, laying the seeds for future reaping, but I don't feel it. Lou's disintegrating sanity is well done, but Jud's state of mind (control) isn't. A better student of fiction writing than I can probably come up with an explanation of what's missing in Pet Sematary, I just know it's there. Maybe instead of dwelling on Rachel's unimportant neuroses, we could have had more information about others who got sucked into the Wendigo's madness. Maybe had more about what happened to Jud, his dog and his friends (Jud's telling is very factual and not very spiritual, so maybe that's what makes it less felt as the fabric of the universe). Maybe some chapters from the POV of the malignancy itself like we had in Cujo. Either way, I think it would have helped solve a lot of the jarring ups and downs in the story. ( )

Mr. King felt this was a scary book, but I didn't get that. A good read, but not as scary as some of his other works. An average King novel. ( )

This is King's zombie book. It's uneven: silly and sometimes funny in parts, but with such a poignant depiction of the death of a three-year-old boy that it's hard to read. ( )