Pet Sematary: King's #1 bestseller – soon to be a major motion picture

by Stephen King

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

• ISBN10: 1848940858
• ISBN13: 9781848940857
• Publish Date: 22 March 2010 (first published 31 December 1925)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
• Imprint: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
• Edition: Digital original
• Format: eBook (EPUB)
• Pages: 300
• Language: English

Reviews

[kiracanread]

so so so so so many thoughts about this.

This isn't a horror until like 75% of the way through the book, the first part is about loss, grief, hurt from losing a loved one. The final part is the Stephen King in this book. The creepy, eerie, spooky, gross part. I disputed this ranking so much in my head because quite honestly, I loved this book, I adored it. Is it a 5* worthy book? no. Is it a 5* book in my heart? absolutely. And I will remember this book for years. The way it made me feel, how I looked at life, how it hurts to grieve. I needed this.

[cornerfolds]

Read more of my reviews at Cornerfolds.com!

*Review to come!*

[celinenyx]

Stephen King has called Pet Sematary his scariest book - and while I get where he is coming from, I also found it his dullest.

Louis Creed moves with his family to a nice house in Ludlow, Maine. There is little remarkable about it, except for the grassy path leading into the forest. At the end of the path a cemetery lies where children have been burying their beloved pets for generations. Yet the path does not stop at the Pet Sematary - a darker road leads further, into places only fit for nightmares.

Pet Sematary circles around a single clear conflict: how far will people go in order to spare their loved ones grief? How does one deal with death? This recurring theme follows all characters throughout the book. Rachel has lost a sister when she was only a child. Louis works in the medical profession, and faces deaths of the most gruesome kinds. Their neighbour, Judd, has a wife who probably will not outlive him. Death permeates this novel, and perhaps that is what created such a hesitance and even aversion to reading this book.

King always writes in an easy, accessible style that is born from years of practice. Usually one can breeze through his books, because his prose draws you forward. This magic did not work for me this time, making me slog through the majority of this novel. Related to this issue might be the fact that King writes a men's world. Even though he occasionally incorporates female characters, they are generally flat, passive, and more often than not become victim of one evil or another. I felt this very keenly in Pet Sematary, where Rachel is only given page time when her thoughts refer to Louis or her children. She has no personality or agency of her own. This was such a shame, because I found her backstory to be more interesting than anything Louis brought to the table - after a few hundred pages, I was fed up with his standoffish ways and tough-guy talk with neighbour Judd.

Like in many of his novels, the characters of Pet Sematary face a nameless evil, something that can be bested - if one is willing to sacrifice something - for a short period of time. The idea of cyclical evil, of some force returning again and again, lying dormant for some years before rearing its ugly head, is something that is familiar from most of King's bestselling novels, including The Shining and It. Though darkness looms, I did not feel the terror I expected to when reading Pet Sematary. The evil always felt too distant, and the characters were too bland to instill any sort of compassion within me.

Pet Sematary boils down to a will he/won't he, and I truly did not need to read over six hundred pages to find out whether he would.

[neddieb]

Way better than the movie