King Arthur Movie Tristan

title: Pet Sematary

author: Stephen King

genre: horror

pages: 559

published: 1983

rated: 4 1/2 out of 5 stars

"Sometimes dead is better...."



When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son -- and now an idyllic home. As a family, they've got it all...right down to the friendly cat.


But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth -- more terrifying than death itself...and hideously more powerful.

While reading the introduction of this edition of Pet Sematary I learned two frightening facts. One being that author Stephen King thinks that this is the scariest book he has ever written. And secondly, this book was inspired by true events. So just reading the introduction creeped me out a bit even before I read the story. Apparently when King first moved with his family to a rented house in Maine, they lived right off a busy road where his daughters cat was hit and killed by a truck. And she did cry out 'Let God have his own cat!', which is a line that made it into the book. The cat was buried in a pet cemetery not too far from the house. He also says that after writing Pet Sematary, he put the manuscript away in a drawer because he felt he'd finally crossed the line. He was scared by what he had written.





The Creed family makes a move from Chicago to Ludlow, Maine. Louis, his wife Rachel, their 5 year old daughter Ellie and 2 year old son Gage, along with the family cat, Winston Churchill, move into a nice house, right along a dangerous road where trucks tend to fly by at high speed. Just up the road, conveniently, is a pet cemetery. Louis is a doctor and his new position running the University of Maine's infirmary is the reason for his family's recent move.




Louis and his elderly neighbor Jud Crandall become instant friends.
Jud takes the Creed family on a little outing one day, to the woods behind their home. He shows the family the pet cemetery which was created over the years by children who wanted to bury pets that had been killed on the busy road.






Just beyond the cemetery is something else, further into the woods, an ancient Indian burial ground. There are large tree limbs, thorny vines and poison ivy blocking the entrance way.



There's all kinds of unsavory rumors, mostly known by the older residents of the small town, about the old Micmac Indian burial ground. Rumor has it, whatever you bury up there, returns.








Disaster strikes the Creed family and Gage is hit and killed by one of these huge tanker trucks on the road. A grief stricken and half mad Louis does the unkthinkable, he buries his toddler in the Indian burial ground, wanting to bring his son back from the dead.





I wanted to get into a really good old fashioned King read, and this book was it. I was scared silly while reading. As usual when I'm reading a scary S.K. novel, he has me so drawn into the story that I don't realize how creeped out I am until later on when I won't want to go into my basement to do laundry alone. Without a doubt, I can say that this is the scariest book I have ever read.



Pet Sematary is definitely a disturbing read, not for the faint of heart. I had a hard time getting through the description of Gage's death as well as Louis' grave robbing.



The one part of the story that was really creepy was Rachel's deceased sister Zelda. After suffering a long time with Spinal Meningitis, Zelda died while a horrified 8 year old Rachel watched on. The description of Zelda and her long time suffering was nightmarish. I couldn't get the image out of my head.




Another aspect of the story that was really scary was how the burial ground itself kind of took hold of events. There was a supernatural force that made Jud tell Louis about it's power, it made the truck driver drive at unsafe speed as soon as it got on the road where the Creed family lived. Later, this unseen force made Louis bury Gage up there. There's an evil presence surrounding the Indian cemetery that partly orchestrated what was going to happen the entire time.



With a horrifying plot and well written characters Pet Sematary had me hooked from the start. S.K. makes this story almost believable, I think that's what makes it so terrifying. Turning the pages felt scary to me, I feared what was next while reading this book, but I just couldn't stop reading.



This is not just a story about blood, ghosts and reanimated corpses, there's a family within the story that you can't help but like. It's about what this father and husband does at his most desperate hour.

As sick as Louis' actions were, as mad as he slowly became, I pitied him. In his mind he kept rationalizing what he was doing. When his mind finally snaps and he loses his sanity, he realizes that as well.

His screams echoed and racketed shrilly through the house where now only dead lived and walked. Eyes bulging, face livid, hair standing on end, he screamed; the sounds came from his swollen throat like the bells of hell, terrible shrieks that signaled the end not of love but of sanity; in his mind all the hideous images were suddenly unloosed at once.

The film version of Pet Sematary scared me badly when I was young. After reading the book, I do think they adapted it as well as they could for the big screen. However, the cutesy Gage in the film is nothing like what comes back from the dead in the book. Of course, the book is better. You get to see why these characters did these things, why Jud told Louis about the Micmac burial ground in the first place, because he simply had to.