I’ve been working my way through Stephen King’s bibliography lately and the release of a new film adaptation made Pet Sematary a natural enough choice for my latest foray.
Louis Creed is a doctor who moves his family from Chicago to Maine in order to take a job at a university hospital. He becomes fast friends with his 83-year-old neighbor, Jud, who shows the Creed family the unusual feature of their property. The children of the town have a tradition of burying their dead pets in the woods behind the Creed house, with grave markers and everything. (The title’s unique spelling is derived from the missed signpost the children erected near the burial ground.)
Louis’s wife Rachel is traumatized by a sibling’s early death and freaks out about the sematary, forbidding her children, Ellie and Gage, to return there. Little does she know that something much scarier lies even further into the woods.
When Ellie’s beloved pet cat is hit by a truck on the highway near their home, Louis Creed has no idea how to break the news to his daughter. That’s when Jud takes him deep into the woods and imparts a little local knowledge on Louis. That action sparks a series of bad decisions with horrific outcomes as another more serious tragedy strikes the Creed family and sends Louis down a terrible path.
You probably know most of the rest if you’ve seen the commercials for the movie, but I’ll avoid spoilers just in case. King’s novel isn’t really high on mystery though. The tension rests on King drawing out the seemingly inevitable conclusion as long as possible, allowing the reader to foolishly hope that the disaster can be averted, that Louis Creed will come to his senses and not do what the reader knows he is going to do. Even when the inevitable happens, King outdoes himself, penning a truly unsettling ending.
Perhaps the best review of Pet Sematary comes from the author himself, who said that of all his books this is the one that scares him the most. If you read it, you’ll understand why.