Pet Sematary

This is the book that ruined me for lesser horrors.

Sure, there are a ton of really great horror tales out there, some with bigger themes, some with more blood and guts, and some with tighter pacing, but none of them can quite layer and layer a single theme so deftly, craftily, or inexorably.

If you buy a sale of goods, it'll always come home to you.

This is a book of good intentions and a ton of character agency, of gambler's mentality throwing good money after bad, of the investment of life, love, and eventually grief and the grief process permanently stuck at "Bargaining". It's effective as a novel because every one of us have lost someone precious to us and we've all been through this very thought process.

Maybe we've not all been given show more opportunities such as this, but what would YOU do if it presented itself? Do you really think you're any less flawed than Louis or Rachel or Jud? They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but in the end, compassion was never their weakness.

Compassion is always our downfall. Don't you know?

We're going to Disneyland. Don't you worry, baby, we're going to Disneyland.

This is easily Stephen King's most horrific novel. I've read most of them, and I love others more for very different reasons, but as for the novel that scares me the very most, it was always a tie between this and [b:It|830502|It|Stephen King|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1334416842s/830502.jpg|150259]. But here's the thing about memory. There are a few rather huge flaws in It that Pet Sematary doesn't share. For one, we don't have the whole forgetting angle.

Pet Sematary leads us step by step, page by page, into an ever descending cycle of love, to foreshadowing, to horror and all the way back again, rinsing and repeating in ever greater cycles until Stephen King leaves you a gibbering mess. I had to finish it at 4 am, too. There's something quite magical about this novel. :)

If you write about it, then maybe it won't come true, right Mr. King? Rub some of that magic on us, too. show less

King! I forgot how much I love ya! Whenever I read King at his best, I am in awe of his gift to put flesh on his characters, his queer colloquialisms and his ability to make you feel like you are just sitting down at the kitchen table for a good yarn. But not only that, this book freaked me out. I really and truly had nightmares. It is hard to make something really and truly scary. It is also terribly sad; the raw grief is almost as terrifying as the horror. I am so glad I read it again after all these years.

It’s 1983, and I’ve secured a paperback copy of a book that all my friends are talking about. It’s a horror book by this guy named Stephen King who I’ve never heard of before, but everyone in school is talking about this thing. Home from school, through the house without engaging in conversation with the parental units, slammed door, dumped school books, plop on bed, start reading. As the afternoon sun wans, I’m too riveted to get up and pull the drapes, a mistake I’ll regret when the dark descends in earnest. Banging on the door – it’s Wednesday, and I’ve lost track of time and will be late for the mid-week Bible service, but it’s just a quick walk across a parking lot to the church building. Through the singing and show more reading and praying, all I can think about is Victor Pascow, the reanimated, gooey harbinger in Louis Creed’s dreams, or was it a dream – Louis had scratches on his arm and pine needles in the bed. On the walk back across the parking lot, the dark is oppressive – it’s never been this dark. Back on the bed, only to realize an hour or so later, I still forgot to pull the drapes, but I’m not going over to that window now, safer in the bed. Book finished well into the night, maybe midnight or later. No sleep.

36 years later, I’ve never forgotten Victor Pascow, or Paxcow, as Louis Creed’s daughter calls him. Never forgotten the [Pet Sematary]. As I re-read the book for the first time in so long, I knew what was coming next. But what was fresh for me was the literary quality of the book. Back in 1983, I didn’t have as many books under my belt, and didn’t notice the slow burn King manages in the lead up to the horror. It’s like the moment you wake feeling something on your face, knowing something is crawling on you and afraid to open your eyes but, in the same moment, desperate to open your eyes and get whatever creepy-crawly it is off your face. The suspense is a low-voltage charge, building and building and building to what you know is going to be a heart-bursting conclusion.

King is much more literary in [Pet Sematary] than is evident from all the attention the horror elements in the book garner. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ you say, not buying it from a Constant Reader like me – here’s a couple quotes to prove my point:

"Louis Creed was no psychiatrist, but he knew there are rusty, half-buried things in the terrain of any life and that human beings seem compelled to go back to these things and pull at them, even though they cut."

"It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horrors which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls - as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself."

I dare you – I triple-dog dare you. Pull the drapes open and sit down with this great book.

Bottom Line:Close the drapes before you start, you’ll appreciate the other qualities of this book that don’t get enough attention.

4 ½ bones!!!!! show less

‘Pet Sematary’ is the third book in my Stephen King 2026 Reading Challenge and I’m setting it aside at 10%.

The decision to set the book aside is more about me than it is about the novel.

I started it two weeks ago, and I’ve only made it through the first two hours of the audiobook. That’s not because the book is hard to read. The prose is accessible. Michael C. Hall’s narration captures the nuance of the text and the dialogue. The characters are clearly drawn. The sense of place is strong, and the sense of threat is even stronger.

The problem is that this is not a book that I want to read. Why? Well, firstly, after the briefest of acquaintances, I decided that I don’t like Dr. Louis Creed. He’s judgmental, combative, show more condescending and more than a little wrapped up in himself. Secondly, and more importantly, I can sense the tsunami of grief that is going to crash over him and his wife, and I want none of it.

Stephen King says in his introduction that this is a book he was reluctant to publish because he felt it had crossed a line. I’ve barely scratched the surface of it, and I’m already conscious of the transgressive nature of the novel. This is going to be about death and grief and rage and despair, and I don’t want to go there, partly because I know that Stephen King will make those experiences traumatic by making them have the emotional weight that they deserve.

So, I’m moving on to the next book, ‘Rose Madder’, which is longer and perhaps sadder than ‘Pet Sematary’, but at least it is about a struggle where it’s possible for the protagonist to win through in the end. show less

I don't understand why I continue to read Stephen King's books, why I'm continually drawn to the next release every few months, even though I come away more often with a sense of disappointment rather than satisfaction. I've read seventeen of his novels and short story collections at this point, and my average rating is just under 55%, ranging anywhere from 5% (The Long Walk--one of the worst, most insultingly stupid books I've ever read) to 80% ('Salem's Lot, among two others). So why am I still picking up one after another? Well, I kind of like his mythology, however unoriginal it is...and...uh...nostalgia, I guess. The movie adaptations scared the hell out of me as a lad, especially--especially--the adaptation for Pet Sematary, which show more I had thankfully forgotten completely between wetting my pants over it back in '91 and reading King's original story this last week.

We're introduced to the family Creed, arriving towards a new life in Ludlow, Maine, near Derry and Jerusalem's Lot and all the other fictional King towns. Father, mother, daughter, son. All exactly the sort of characters you expect from Stephen King. Louis is every other male protagonist of every other tale of extreme macabre suspense badassery; despite their different backgrounds, they really all do feel like the exact same character. Rachel, the wife, doesn't really get a lot of attention, and the kids! don't get me started on the kids! Let me tell you, King keeps his record of DOING IT WRONG consistent when it comes to three things in his books:

1. Endings. Steve, the 'only way to write stories' according to you is why everyone spits on your endings. You can't just nuke the fridge with this Deus ex madogshit every time you 'feel' the book's ending coming. Use an outline! Plot your stories out! Stop winging it!

2. Dream sequences. For the record, King even delves--with a nebulous charm--into the science of sleep in Pet Sematary. It's too bad he has no idea how dreams work. Every single King story has at least three characters fall into a 'dreamless sleep,' and at least one have a prophetic plot de--er, dream...that's not at all dream-like.

3. FUCKING KIDS.

How come every goddamn kid in a Stephen King story has magic superpowers of some kind? How come they always just 'know' everything? And how come their dialogue sounds like pedobear fanfiction?

"I hope I'll be okay in the fall," Ellie said. "I never was in a grade before. Only kindergarten. I don't know what kids do in grades. Homework, probably."

Wrong; they get pummeled by bear cock and tentacles. We all see where this is going. This...up above...this is garbage. I can't help but imagine Stephen King, an old, horny and really pleasant-to-be-around creep, writing this dialogue out, either chuckling to himself or taking it with the utmost seriousness--it doesn't really matter which; both achieve the same amount of retardation. And since this is early King we're talking about, he was probably tripping balls.

"Mommy, you're hurrrrting me--"

Grow a pair, Ellie. It’s not Rachel’s fault you’re asking for it.

Louis has come to Ludlow to be a doctor, to doctor around town, heal some kids at the university, you know: doctor things. Readers won't be surprised to learn that King in fact knows very little about medicine. And that he has trouble as usual sticking to the story, randomly throwing in important information serving no purpose to the advancement of the plot: Rachel's pondering on her psych 101 course, where she learned the valuably incorrect 'theory' of how humans can remember everything that ever happened to them, every meal eaten, every ugly face met, the weather conditions of each and every day of their life, essentially that we have infinite storage capacity in our brains, or really--I'll stop with the hyperbolic statements--a thousand billion memory chips worth of data; Louis' remembering an old date and teeth; references to King's mythology squeezed into the book with no purpose other than to reference (Jerusalem's Lot, she thought randomly, what an odd name. Not a pleasant name, for some reason...Come and sleep in Jerusalem); a description of our protagonist, Louis, 4/5ths into the book.

Stephen, at times, even goes so far as to actually jerk the reader around in order to pad out the length a bit. Fumbling through his pockets post-grave-robbing, Louis is stunned to realise he lost his car keys in Pleasantview Cemetery, near to where his son's corpse once collected moss, and continues for a while to flip right the fuck out, only to--I'm not kidding here--remember that he left them in the car. Oh, hi keys. Shockingly, Louis succeeds in moving the plot towards the most predictable conclusion by taking his son’s corpse to the Micmac burial ground, and his family, now over a thousand miles away, decides they (or at least okaasan) must run right the hell back to Maine because of a hunch. Are you kidding me? The plot's running on hunches now? Granted, it’s later explained—sort of…it’s still stupid—that the burial ground has mystical powers and is likely drawing her there to arrive at a specific moment in time—a moment of murder!

Poor guy finds forward motion harder and harder, until at last the potential energy of the rubber band equalizes the actual energy of the runner...inertia becomes...what?...elementary physics...something trying to hold her back...stay out of this, you...and a body at rest tends to remain at rest...Gage's body, for instance...once set in motion...

Thanks for that brilliance, Rachel. Your grasp of grade school physics, psychology and biology is astounding.

Shock number two comes when Jud, a relatively likable character in the story, while still acting out the role of the generic Old Guy/Girl in King’s stories, is woken up by a malevolent presence he just feels, from deep in his gut, closing in. This is after Gage is buried and brought back to…’life’…, after he’s left miles-worth of muddy footprints across the forest, throughout Louis’ house, up and down his stairs (reminder: Gage’s body is two years old, and his climbing a bunch of stairs leaving muddy footprints…I don’t know, I just had a hard time picturing this without wanting to roll my eyes. Imagine if Louis felt this presence and woke up early—impossible, right, because the burial ground would want him to sleep MOAR—and took a peek out his bedroom to see an evil toddler struggling to climb the stairs. Very threatening), across the rud, and all over the first and second floors of Jud’s house. How much mud was this kid dragging around? This is ridiculous! Erm, getting back to the point, Jud’s scared as all hell, facing his death as the door creaks open, and…

…a hideous mewling sound now arose, and for a moment all of Jud’s bones turned to white ice. It was not Louis’s son returned from the grave but some hideous monster.
No. It was neither.

…et cetera, et cetera. Is it Gage?! No, no…it isn’t Gage…but a monstrous demon! No! no, wait, it’s just Church…or is it, because Gage is right there behind him with a scalpel and the strength of a two-year-old?!?!? Oh fuHNNNNNNGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH.

Yeah, it’s Gage, or at least his corpse, now possessed by a demonical creature…a demonical creature who likes to talk smack, bitca!

"Hello, Jud," Gage piped in a babyish but perfectly understandable voice. "I've come to send your rotten, stinking old soul straight to hell. You fucked with me once. Did you think I wouldn't come back sooner or later and fuck with you?...Norma's dead, and there'll be no one to mourn you," Gage said. "What a cheap slut she was. She fucked every one of your friends, Jud. She let them put it up her ass. That's how she liked it best. She's burning down in hell, arthritis and all. I saw her there, Jud. I saw her there.”

Yeah, that’s scary. At the end of the day, an ancient force of evil in the body of a two-year-old child will resort to name-calling. Stephen, take another hint from your forefathers by having your ancient evil not stoop to melodramatic (“I saw her there, Jud. I saw her there”), juvenile bullshit. How is that frightening? It’s just stupid.

But fear not, Jud, because Rachel has arrived just on time to be…stabbed…to death. Damn that hunch! (So the Burial Ground Thing can influence people who have never come in contact with it across the continent now? and, apparently, cars? Feels like a cop-out to me.) Being killed by a scalpel-wielding baby is barely a step above being gummed to death by tooth-less, aging Chihuahuas.

I would give P.S. props for featuring one of King’s better endings this side of ’Salem’s Lot, but it utterly fails in having the most obvious conclusion you could come up with. Louis falls deeper into the magical thrall of the burial ground monster thing, and uses the place’s power to bring his wife back to life, which…I guess was the burial ground’s plan all along? I don’t know. I didn’t really understand the extent of the place’s power, or why it suddenly had Gage go on a murderous, muddy rampage for five minutes, or why it had Louis re-kill Gage if it had control of him anyway, or why it needs to personally possess bodies if, as the end of the book sort of hit you over the head with repeatedly, it could essentially control anyone (and anything) anyway, or why it stopped being able to control Jud, or why it never went full on evil before Gage, or whHNNNGGGGGH.

F.V.: 55%

[4,075] show less

Los clásicos no fallan. Pet sematary tiene una estructura sencilla y no por eso simple. King maneja los tiempos y la información de una manera impecable, como quien le da heroína a una rata de laboratorio. La historia también es tan simple como oa e Frankenstein o aquella en la que supongo que se inspira, La pata del mono, pero está llevada con tanta naturalidad y apego a los personajes que la trama, cocida a fuego lento, se desencadena en sus repercusiones obvias con tanta violencia como quien se pasó tres horas cocinando un plato delicioso y ahora está muerto de hambre porque mientras lo hacía se fumó dos porros. Pet sematary se devora y se disfruta, y tiene escenas que realmente se padecen por el genuino contenido macabro show more que también es dosificado a la perfección. Es una lección de narrativa tradicional. Las bases para un relato interesante y cautivante están definitivamente acá. Los que desprecian a King por no haber escrito En busca del tiempo perdido son unos nabos. show less

February’s Constant Reader book club selection is Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. It’s a reread for me, having first read it in 2019. The book is excellent, and I didn’t mind rereading it for book club. I’ve seen the movie countless times and find it a wonderful adaptation of the book.

The story follows Dr. Louis Creed, who relocates with his wife Rachel, young daughter Ellie, toddler son Gage, and their cat Church to a rural home in Ludlow, Maine. Near the house lies a hidden “Pet Sematary” (intentionally misspelled by local children), where generations of kids have buried pets killed by speeding trucks on the busy road out front. Deeper in the woods lurks an ancient Micmac Indian burial ground with unnatural, malevolent show more powers.

When tragedy strikes the family pet, Louis learns from his elderly neighbor Jud Crandall about the site’s ability to resurrect the dead—though what returns is twisted, wrong, and far from the loved one lost. As grief and desperation take hold, the Creeds confront the horrifying consequences of defying death, exploring themes of loss, parental fear, and the terrifying notion that sometimes dead is better.

I agree with the many people who describe Pet Sematary as one of King’s darkest and most disturbing works. It’s surprising to me that King had young children at the time this book was written and published in 1983. It’s astonishing that he went so utterly dark as a parent. However, this is the exact type of horror writing that King is known for, and I shouldn’t be shocked or expect anything less.

The first time I read Pet Sematary, I gave it a perfect five-star rating. I absolutely adored the book and was thoroughly impressed. Naturally, it surpasses the movie, even though the movie is excellent and closely follows the book. I thoroughly enjoyed rereading this classic King novel, but honestly, it didn’t quite compare to my initial reading experience. I attribute this to my prior knowledge of the plot and not feeling as surprised by the events as I did the first time. I don’t want to diminish the book’s exceptional quality, so I’ll maintain my five-star rating, as I believe it’s well-deserved.

I eagerly await our book club’s discussion at the end of the month.

I have photos, videos, and additional information that I'm unable to include here. It can all be found on my blog, in the link below.
A Book And A Dog show less