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Pet Sematary

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'Pet Sematary' by Stephen King is a chilling tale that delves into the depths of horror and supernatural occurrences. The story follows Dr. Louis Creed and his family as they move to a new home next to a busy road where tragic events unfold, starting with the death of their daughter's cat and escalating to even more devastating losses. As Louis is shown a way to bring back the dead, he is faced with moral dilemmas that lead to catastrophic consequences. The book explores themes of grief, loss, and the terrifying consequences of tampering with the natural order of life and death. Stephen King's writing style is described as vivid, thorough, and disturbing, with the ability to evoke fear and discomfort in the reader through his detailed descriptions and masterful storytelling.

Characters:

Characters are richly developed and their emotional struggles provide depth, making the horror more impactful and relatable.

Writing/Prose:

The writing style effectively immerses readers in psychological horror while maintaining a gripping narrative flow.

Plot/Storyline:

The plot intricately weaves themes of grief, loss, and the human instinct to restore what has been lost, ultimately leading to tragic outcomes.

Setting:

The setting contributes greatly to the atmosphere, with a rural backdrop that enhances the sense of isolation and impending doom.

Pacing:

Pacing alternates between slow character introspection and rapid, shocking developments that enhance the narrative tension.
Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened . . . although he ...

Notes:

Pet Sematary was originally written by Stephen King in the early 1980s and was considered by him to be one of his darkest novels.
King found the novel so disturbing that he initially hid it in a drawer, thinking he had gone too far and would not publish it.
The title 'Pet Sematary' is intentionally misspelled, reflecting the way children spelled 'cemetery' on a sign marking a pet burial ground.
The story explores deep themes of grief, loss, and the consequences of trying to reverse death, making it resonate powerfully with readers, especially parents.
The character Zelda, an invalid sister of the protagonist's wife, is particularly noted for being one of the most chilling aspects of the story.
Pet Sematary has been adapted into films, with a notable 1989 version and a 2019 remake, but many fans consider the book superior to its film adaptations.
The novel has a profound emotional impact on readers, often leaving them uneasy or deeply contemplative about the nature of death and loss.
Stephen King has said that he felt Pet Sematary deals with the real horrors of parenthood, making it especially haunting for those with children.

Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings

Triggers include child death, animal death, depiction of grief, and themes of mental deterioration.

From The Publisher:

Soon to be a major motion picture from Paramount Pictures starring John Lithgow, Jason Clarke, and Amy Seimetz! King's iconic, beloved classic is 'so beautifully paced that you cannot help but be pulled in' Guardian

'SOMETIMES…DEAD IS BETTER'

The house looked right, felt right to Dr Louis Creed.

Rambling, old, unsmart and comfortable. A place where the family could settle; the children grow and play and explore. The rolling hills and meadows of Maine seemed a world away from the fume-choked dangers of Chicago.

Only the occasional big truck out on the two-lane highway, grinding up through the gears, hammering down the long gradients, growled out an intrusive threat.

But behind the house and far away from the road: that was safe. Just a carefully cleared path up into the woods where generations of local children have processed with the solemn innocence of the young, taking with them their dear departed pets for burial.

A sad place maybe, but safe. Surely a safe place. Not a place to seep into your dreams, to wake you, sweating with fear and foreboding.

'King can make the flesh creep half a world away' - The Times

'So beautifully paced that you cannot help but be pulled in' - Guardian

'The most frightening novel Stephen King has ever written' - Publisher's Weekly

'Wild, powerful, disturbing' - Washington Post Book Review

Ratings (263)

Incredible (51)
Loved It (102)
Liked It (76)
It Was OK (25)
Did Not Like (9)

Reader Stats (414):

Read It (277)
Currently Reading (2)
Want To Read (71)
Did Not Finish (3)
Not Interested (61)

4 comment(s)

It Was OK
3 months

Casa grande, de maderas que crujen y jardin que da a un cementerio de indios americanos. Con una carretera donde pasan camiones a toda leche , con ninyos, con una gato de mascota....

Planteamiento tan clasico que se ve venir la trama desde tan lejos que es mas la impaciencia porque pasen las coss ya que el ver que va a ocurrir o como.

 
It Was OK
6 months

Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.

Pet Sematary surprised me: it was a lot

better than I thought it would be, and also a lot less fun. I was expecting something fast-paced with a lot of jump scares, an adult version of

The Screaming Staircase or a better-written and more mature

Horrorstör. What I got was an interior (but still page-turning) meditation on death and grief and marriage and parenting that’s more gruesome and disturbing than scary, the literary equivalent of watching a car crash in slow motion. I did

like it—I could barely put it down—and I think it’s legitimately high-quality literature, but I don’t think it’s quite the kind of book for me.

King is a good writer. The prose isn’t particularly stylized, but it is clean and extremely effective at shaping character and atmosphere. I’m also extremely impressed at how quickly the novel read, even though it’s not really that fast-paced in terms of important plot events happening. There are a lot of quiet conversations and chapters of Louis ruminating or fighting with his wife or dealing with his kids, but there’s something compulsively readable about it.

In fact, there isn’t

that much supernatural activity in the book. I mean, what does happen is central to the plot, and Louis is often thinking about supernatural things that have happened, but very little of the book involves active supernatural occurrences.

Most of the plot is pretty predictable (especially if you read King’s introduction, which really should have been moved to an afterword). It turns out that’s not a bad thing because there’s so much more to the novel than just the summary of what happens: it’s all about exploring the nature of grief and what it does to a marriage. As a result, the plot sort of meanders around in a fairly literary way, which was unexpected.

All told, the novel was both more and less disturbing than I’d expected. The gore is fairly intense but it’s only a tiny sliver of the book—there are maybe 4 or 5 extremely gruesome scenes, but the rest of the horror is primarily psychological, with the reader coming to terms with what’s just happened and realizing what’s probably (inevitably) going to happen next. I also was expecting a lot of graphic sexual content, and there was a

lot less than what I’d expected—really, there was almost none at all, though what there was is completely gratuitous and could have easily been removed. Louis/King does have a weird, recurring obsession with the cat getting neutered; he also has this strange idea that a neutered cat won’t hunt mice unless forced to, which I’ve never heard before (is this a regional myth?) and any outdoor cat owner will tell you is laughably absurd. The real horror is in what’s happening and the decisions Louis makes, not the shock value of how those events are described.

And then there’s the ending… First, I have a bone to pick with King calling that an “Epilogue.” An Epilogue is supposed to give a summary of how things ended up from some distant point in the future, wrapping up the story even more definitively than a regular ending. Instead,

this Epilogue is merely an extension of the prior chapter, and it’s open ended. (I mean, it’s pretty clear what’s about to happen in the immediate future, but the long-term consequences are completely unknown.) He should have just titled it like a regular chapter. Content-wise, though, I thought it was great. Not the ending I necessarily

wanted, but it made thematic and structural sense, and is also consistent with the character.

I’m not sure if I’ll end up reading more King. I enjoyed

Pet Sematary, but it’s in a weird gray area of not quite as literary as I would have wanted for a character study, and not quite as fun as I would have wanted in mindless genre fiction. Mostly I’m still trying to recover from the realization that one of the best-selling horror authors is closer to Kazuo Ishiguro than Dan Brown on the writing quality spectrum.

Some favorite passages:

The grass in the back field was almost waist high, and now there was goldenrod, that late-summer gossip which comes to tattle on autumn every year.

The river flowed wide and peacefully, as if in its own deep dream.

His own memory of childhood enthusiasms, reinforced by his dealings with Ellie, was that they tended to burn like newsprint—fast… hot… and quick to die.

And just by the way, Ellie, what’s on your mind? But it didn’t work that way with Ellie. You didn’t ask things right out. She was wary of giving too much of herself away.

“I don’t want Church to be like all those dead pets!” she burst out, suddenly tearful and furious. “I don’t want Church to ever be dead! He’s my cat! He’s not God’s cat! Let God have His own cat! Let God have all the damn old cats He wants, and kill them all! Church is mine!”

He held her and rocked her, believing, rightly or wrongly, that Ellie wept for the very intractability of death, its imperviousness to argument or to a little girl’s tears; that she wept over its cruel unpredictability; and that she wept because of the human being’s wonderful, deadly ability to translate symbols into conclusions that were either fine and noble or blackly terrifying. If all those animals had died and been buried, then Church could die (any time!) and be buried; and if that could happen to Church, it could happen to her mother, her father, her baby brother. To herself. Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.

Louis stared at her, nonplussed. He more than half suspected that one of the things which had kept their marriage together when it seemed as if each year brought the news that two or three of their friends’ marriages had collapsed was their respect of the mystery—the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there was no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery. And no matter how well you thought you knew your partner, you occasionally ran into blank walls or fell into pits. And sometimes (rarely, thank God) you ran into a full-fledged pocket of alien strangeness, something like the clear-air turbulence that can buffet an airliner for no reason at all. An attitude or belief which you had never suspected, one so peculiar (at least to you) that it seemed nearly psychotic. And then you trod lightly, if you valued your marriage and your peace of mind; you tried to remember that anger at such a discovery was the province of fools who really believed it was possible for one mind to know another.

“Maybe I did it because kids need to know that sometimes dead is better,” Jud said with some difficulty. “That’s somethin your Ellie don’t know, and I got a feelin that maybe she don’t know because your wife don’t know.

It’s probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror 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, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, 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.

The graves in the Pet Sematary mimed the most ancient religious symbol of all: diminishing circles indicating a spiral leading down, not to a point, but to infinity; order from chaos or chaos from order, depending on which way your mind worked.

There were masses of rotting flowers here, layer upon layer of them, washed down by seasons of rain and snow. Christ. No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery.

Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning, let there be smiling Episcopalian ministers in shining white surplices… but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe.

He did not turn around but only looked at his cards as the slow, gritting footsteps approached. He saw the queen of spades. He put his hand on it. The steps ended directly behind him. Silence. A cold hand fell on Louis’s shoulder. Rachel’s voice was grating, full of dirt. “Darling,” it said.

 
It Was OK
6 months

Too long and a bit repetitive

 
Did Not Like
8 months

The best way to explain my feelings for this book, is that it does this big build up, and have a spectacular let down. Basically 95% of the book build up the characters, and have you invest in them, and then all the supernatural interesting stuff feels dumped on you during the last 20 or so pages. So honestly, this feels like one of them major tv series, that gets cut mid-season, and the productor tries to wrap up 4-5 seasons worth of build up in 4 remaining episodes.

 
 
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