I can understand why Stephen King once called Pet Sematary the book that scared him the most. At its heart is the most terrible thing that can happen to someone: the sudden, accidental death of a child. This primal fear is layered in King’s classic scenes of existential dread, American legends, and plenty of jump scares. This is also one of the best written King books I’ve read because it’s so tightly constructed, at a brief 374 pages in the hardcover copy from the library I read (with the original cover you see at right).
Louis Creed is one of the most ordinary yet tragic figures I’ve read. He’s a doctor, father of two, and quietly convinced that he is doing the right thing. It’s this last that leads to the horror and tragedy of the book. Louis barely paused to doubt himself as he begins to meddle with things that would be better left alone. (Those things are an appropriated figure from several Native American cultures—an appropriation that is more bothersome now than it would have been in 1983, along with brief, casual anti-Semitism and slightly misogynistic gender roles.) And yet, it’s hard not to empathize with Louis as he refuses to let dead things lie.
Almost immediately after the Creed family moves to Ludlow, Maine, their across-the-street neighbor introduces them to the local pet sematary, where local children have been laying their beloved pets to rest for decades. Rachel Creed doesn’t react well, due past trauma, but Louis takes the position that death is a part of a life. He is willing to talk about death with their daughter while his wife refuses to talk about it. When push comes to shove, Louis also rejects death when his daughter’s cat is killed by a passing car. To save her some tears, Louis allows that neighbor to initiate him into Ludlow’s terrible secret. This secret and its consequences should have warned Louis off meddling forever. It would have, except that Louis believes that he is smart enough to learn from his mistakes and that, next time, things will be different. As in any good tragedy, things are never different no matter how many times the story plays out.
I won’t say anything more about the plot of Pet Sematary. The scares hold up and I don’t want to spoil interested readers. (Besides, you readers out there can spoil yourselves by looking the book up on Wikipedia.) Instead, I want to talk about what King does with tropes in this book. There were a lot of familiar things in Pet Sematary: the dead that came back wrong, dreams and supernatural warnings, malevolent fate manipulating events. These tropes make me want to say that this book shouldn’t work. That number of clichés should have led to a stinker of a book. But because King layers them over some very human failings and emotions, Pet Sematary totally works. Who wouldn’t sympathize with a father who had a way to cheat death when it threatens to tear his family apart? No matter how much we might claim to have evolved attitudes towards the finality of death, every one of us will hit that stage of grieving where we feel the need to bargain to get our loved ones back. For all the supernatural elements, this book is absolutely grounded in real human experience.
Thanks to a coworker for recommending Pet Sematary as a creepy Halloween read. It definitely did the trick! This book is going to go on my list of scary reads to suggest to other readers who also want to read something chilling for Halloween.
It’s been years since I first read Pet Sematary….I’d almost forgotten the plot line. Thanks for the reminder. The first ever King book I read was The Dark Half….about a “serious” writer who also writes pulp fiction on the side, to make money, under a pseudonym. When he decides to “kill off” his pseudonym, the pseudonym character comes to life to exact revenge. It’s an interesting story, and one has to wonder how much of it comes from Kings own life, as he used to write under the name of Richard Bachman.
This book has one of the greatest ending lines I’ve ever read: “Darling, it said.” I remember re-reading that line like three times because it sent chills through me.