Dr. Louis Creed has just moved his family (wife Rachel, daughter Ellie, and son Gage) from Chicago to Ludlow, Maine where he’s about to start a job with the University of Maine. In the beginning things couldn’t seem more American Dream. They have a beautiful house, a peaceful neighborhood (if you don’t count the 18-wheelers constantly roaring past on the highway just outside their front yard), and their new neighbors Jud and Norma Crandall become fast friends. Then comes the world.
Louis’s first day on the job starts badly with a fatality on the infirmary floor, and it’s almost at that point that the life of Louis Creed begins its downward spiral. The specter of Victor Pascow, the man who died in Louis’s arms, returns to him that night and warns him about the Pet Sematary (spelled that way by the local children who have tended the place for decades) and what lies beyond it, insisting, “The barrier was never meant to be broken.” But break it he does while his family is away for Thanksgiving and Church, his daughter’s cat, is run down in the road.
Grateful to Louis for helping when his own wife, Norma, had a heart attack, Jud tells Louis not to mention anything about the accident to Ellie just yet, and he takes him up to the Pet Sematary to bury it. Only the place Jud takes Louis to is a few miles beyond the clearing he’d first showed them, to an old burying ground used by the Micmac Indians.
“The Micmac’s believed this hill was a magic place,” he tells Louis. And indeed it is because the next morning, there’s Church, come home. Louis notices the changes right away, though. Church is no longer playful, unless you’re a bird or a mouse, in which case he’ll play your guts out through the hole he makes in your neck. Also, Church has a funk about him, a stench that no amount of baths can wash away. Louis distrusts Church from then on, knowing he’d prefer a strange Church over having to tell his daughter her beloved pet has died, but still he keeps his distance and keeps guard, knowing that, as Jud told him, “A man grows what he can, and he tends it.” Church, and what’s happened to him, are now Louis’s responsibility.
Once again, things seem to be moving along rather smoothly for the Creeds. However, as Jud has mentioned, the Micmac burying ground has a power, and he believes it may be ramping up for something big. So when the next accident in the road occurs, this one hitting a lot closer to home than the family pet, Jud is left broken over what he sees as his fault as sure as if he’d been driving the truck himself, while Louis is already pondering the ifs and limitations of that spooky burying ground several miles behind his house.
Since its first publication in 1982, PET SEMATARY has been one of Stephen King’s most famous tales, and with good reason. Hailed at the time as the book that was so scary even King himself almost couldn’t finish writing it, PET SEMATARY contained not only spooks and creeps enough to keep you reading all night, but the big dilemma feared by people around the world. What do you do when you outlive your own children? More importantly, what would you do if you had the power to bring them back?
The reader knows from go what’s happening and what Louis will do about it (otherwise, why waste time reading the book if he’s just gonna back out and get on with his life?), but even knowing doesn’t make it easier to take. King was in top form with PET SEMATARY and delivered not only one of his most difficult to read novels (difficult only in the sense of having to go through this with Louis, knowing how shattered we would be if it were us, but knowing we have to push through, thinking MAYBE there’ll be a happy ending, knowing all the while there won’t) but definitely one of his most well-written as well.
From the first scene, King builds the plot piece by piece and not one scene comes off as unnecessary. Each section provides another piece of the puzzle, one more detail that, in the end, serves to reveal the story in its entirety, whether the introduction of a character we’ll come to rely on later or the dropping of a clue as to what’s in store for the Creed’s. For the first time in years I was able to read a King novel and not edit out the filler in my head as I went.
The prose, also, is very straightforward. King’s usual tendency to run off at the mouth is kept closely in check with PET SEMATARY and what we have instead is the work of a true master storyteller:
“Gage?”
It was cool in the front hall. Cool and dark. The single word fell into the silence like a stone down a deep-drilled well. Louis threw another.
“Gage?”
Nothing. Even the tick of the clock in the parlor had ceased. This morning there had been no one to wind it.
But there were track on the floor.
Louis went into the living room. There was the smell of cigarettes, stale and long since burned out. He saw Jud’s chair by the window. It was pushed askew, as if he had gotten up suddenly. There was an ashtray on the windowsill, and in it a neat roll of cigarette ash.
Jud sat here watching. Watching for what? For me, of course, watching for me to come home. Only he missed me. Somehow he missed me.
Louis glanced at the four beers cans lined up in a neat row. Not enough to put him to sleep, but maybe he had gotten up to go to the bathroom. However it had been, it was just a little bit too good to have been perfectly accidental, wasn’t it?
The muddy tracks approached the chair by the window. Mixed among the human tracks were a few faded, ghostly cat prints. As if Church had walked in and out of the grave dirt left by Gage’s small shoes. Then the tracks made for the swinging door leading into the kitchen.
Heart thudding, Louis followed the tracks.
PET SEMATARY could easily serve as a guide for all writers in how to build the perfect plot, how to drop hints, how to fill in background detail, how to build tension.
The characters are well-defined, if a bit annoying (I hated Rachel and Ellie almost from the beginning as they were both HUGE whiners, always unhappy with a situation, always confrontational and insistent). Louis is about as “everyman” as one can get while Jud is the perfect down home caricature of a typical King Maine resident. The interaction between these two was a pleasure to read, especially Jud’s stories about the Micmac burying ground and his own experiences with it.
I was never frightened while reading PET SEMATARY, but I wonder how much of that is due to having read it before (this was my first time through it in almost 25 years, though), but even so it’s easy to see how well King creates the atmosphere so a reader could be easily creeped out. And then there’s the tragedy. No one wants to have to face the troubles Louis Creed is presented with, and King writes about it in such a way we’re sucked in and your skin crawls at certain passages, not because of the gore--there is none, really--but because we’re just a little too uncomfortable with what’s going on even though we know it’s all make-believe. It’s the idea and seeing it put down for us in words, our own worst fears given shape.
With the exception of the recent DUMA KEY, I’ve been pretty unimpressed with King’s output the last few years and it’s easy to start questioning such loyalty when it seems your favorite author has overstayed his welcome. So it’s nice to revisit one of the older works and remember just where that loyalty came from in the first place. PET SEMATARY has more than earned its status as a classic King horror novel, it’s a fan favorite and is one of his most popular works.
First published in 1983, Pet Sematary has since been regarded as one of Stephen King's most frightening and controversial novels. Daring to cross the ...More at HotBookSale
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