Pet Sematary

This book scared the bejeebers out of me when I was just a teen. (Not fair, Steve.) I think it’s a highly underrated King novel, if possible, maybe because the various movie versions flopped. Sure, it’s a horror novel, but I was stricken by the story’s messages about dealing with grief due to the death of a loved one. And it also had the age-old message that we all need to remember: if it seems too good to be true, it absolutely is.

I loved the New England vernacular and characters. I also enjoyed how something as simple as a… show more.

All that glitters isn't gold, and sometimes, dead is better. For a tale that Stephen King was told not to publish because it was too scary and that he only released to get out of a contract, I've always found this book oddly comforting. It once genuinely helped me process a string of sudden bereavements. 

I admire its frankness about death: it pulls no punches. In my own family, and perhaps in British culture more widely, we struggle to talk about death. I've read the novel lots, as a young man and as a not-so-young man with his own children,… show more.

Nobody weaves a better tale than Stephen King. He is the all-American storyteller who transports you into his world of characters and settings, making you fall in love with them just before he shatters all of that like a hammer against a mirror.

It is like listening to a good friend next to a campfire drinking beers, and Pet Sematary has all of the good horror elements from atmosphere, cemeteries, ancient burial grounds, and dead people rising from the grave.

I was never a huge horror fan until I read this book.

My mother gave me a copy for Christmas my first year of university, and as an English teacher, she was always pretty picky about the writing quality of the books she gifted me, so I was willing to give it a chance.

A writer requires a good grasp of their story world in order to make it come to life in a way that suspends a reader’s disbelief, especially a reader who’s prepared to be skeptical, and Stephen King definitely has that. Pet Sematary remains the only book… show more.

No horror list would be quite complete without the King himself, but while I could pick many books that are thrilling, horrific, and terrifying, nothing quite does slow creeping dread as well as Pet Sematary.

From almost the very start of the novel, you know not only that things are going to go wrong, but you can pretty quickly work out exactly how they’re going to go wrong. The beauty of this book is not the surprise, but watching well-painted characters make precisely the terrible decisions you feared they would make.

It’s like a Greek tragedy, or watching a… show more.

The master.

What better metaphor for the past returning than the bodies we bury coming back to us? I see in King’s Pet Sematary exactly this metaphor of how we see “the good ole days,” the imagined past.

When we attempt to resurrect that which has found its fateful or natural end, what we are confronted with is the grotesque—either its distorted form from our memory or a painful vision of its reality.

I also love it for its touch of Native American folklore, or rather its peeking into North American folklores views and fictions of Native American folklore. This… show more.

As one of King’s (self-described) most horrific books, Pet Sematary delves into issues of death, rebirth, and the lingering power the dead have on our lives. In this novel, King has found a way to get under your skin and a sense of unease lingers there long after it is over. The book also has a profound focus on place and belonging—one that echoes, emotionally, what I believe to be some lived experiences of ancient sacred spaces and tombs. 

You definitely can’t leave Pet Sematary off of the list! For true horror novel fans everyone knows Stephen King is the G.O.A.T. for horror novels adapted into films. The major highlight of the book, unlike the film adaptation, was the sematary itself. I think the most horrific parts of the novel weren’t the fact that this ancient burial ground resurrected the dead, but the most horrifying part was reading about Louis and Rachel Creed attempting to cope with the untimely death of their 2-year-old son. 

Anyone who has ever lost someone wishes they could come back, that we could do something to bring them back.

It’s a universal story that crosses every boundary.

The beautiful idea takes a dark sinister twist with vivid eerie imagery that leaves you unsettled.

As the characters deal with death in the family, the grief process of guilt and anguish was too horrifyingly real.

If you only read one Stephen King book in your life, Pet Sematary is the one you should read. The title gives it away… you may say. And to that, I’ll have to answer a loud “no.”

Sure, we all know the plot; animals that get buried there—well, they come back. It is the secondary plot that deals with grief and how people handle it that makes this book worthy.