Pet Sematary
Ratings520
Average rating3.9
King says this is his darkest book. Not scariest, though. And I agree, it's brutal. Personal family horror is what he writes best and in that regard this is his second best after The Shining. When he tries he really can write extraordinarily. That more I wish he just scrapped books like The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (read it just before this one) and never released them because they're lazy writing exercises extended two to five times of what would and could be their proper length.
As it is with almost all of his books ending is weak. It doesn't outright suck in this one but it's kinda lazy. He went for the easiest way out instead of trying to do something more horror-ish. Doesn't take away from book's quality, though. I learned that King is about the journey, not destination even if a good destination would sure make re-reads more enjoyable.
As it is it's in my top three of his books with The Shining and Night Shift.
I was ready to rate this 5 stars but the last 70 or so pages weren't great. I hated the ending, it was so rushed and stupid.
This was my first Stephen King novel and I'm happy it was because his writing style is amazing. I cant wait to read more of his books!
Just a little upset about that ending though :/
I'm just... speechless. Stephen King wasn't kidding when he talked about how he felt like this was his scariest book. Not in the usual, jump-scarey, gory sense, but in the subject matters and topics that it deals with with raw, brutal clarity. This book had me on the verge of tears at some parts, or froze a permanent grimace on my face at others, but it was all engaging and I got sucked in so hard that I was late to feed my cats (hah!) dinner because I just had to get to the end.
Dr Louis Creed decides to make the move to Ludlow, Maine, with his wife Rachel, two young children, Ellie and Gage, and their cat Winston Churchill to start a new career as a doctor in the local university's infirmary. It's not a glamourous job, but it's a relatively pleasant and stable one. The Creeds make friends with their elderly neighbours, Jud and Norma Crandall. Jud shows the family around, and takes them hiking along the nature path behind the Creeds' new house, which leads to a communal pet burial grounds called the Pet Sematary.
What follows after is a master class in how to write a seemingly normal narrative with a sickening sense of something's not quite right and eerie foreboding. But what this book delivers isn't just horror in the supernatural sense, but also horror in a very, very human sense. This book is all about death: how children begin to parse it, how adults confront it, and how old people look at it straight in the eye. It's about grief, trauma, and how the road to Hell is always paved with good intentions.
This is my first ever Stephen King book so I don't really have much to compare it to, but I am absolutely bowled over by his writing. I've said before in other reviews that I'm an impatient reader, I like to skim passages because I want to get to the end quicker, but Stephen King had me clinging on to every word, even when it was seemingly unimportant. There's no high-flown vocabulary or weird gimmicks here, it's just the sheer magnetism of his writing style.
Horror is a genre that is almost entirely new to me. I have steered clear of it because I'm not very good with jump scares and things that go bump in the dark. I don't know what freak mood I'm in to make me want to dip my toes in this genre now but I'm very much enjoying the ride. What I like most about it is that so many horror novels, especially King's, is only superficially concerned with the scary unreal things - the real crux of it is examining the horrors of being human, the things that scare us in everyday life. Often times, the human protagonists almost always end up just as scary as the supernatural antagonists, and I love it.
This book is deeply unsettling to read. It's brutal and it's uncomfortable af. But it's also insightful and reflective on so many things. I have so many quotes saved from this because King goes off on short tangents sometimes to reflect on some irrelevant topics, like the realities of marriage and parenthood. In Pet Sematary, of course, the most uncomfortable bit to read was when Gage died from the accident, especially during the fight between Louis and his father in law over the coffin, knocking it over and causing the latch to open just a bit, just enough for Louis to have seen Gage's hand. That was the part where I had to close the book and set it aside for a few minutes before continuing. I've never done this with a book before, but I guess there's a first time for everything. A lot of the things in the plot makes you uncomfortable, but it also never feels meaningless or cheap, like it's just there for no reason. These aren't jack-in-boxes in haunted houses, but real solid traumatic events that's handled with brutal honesty and insight.
I never thought I'd say this, I thought I was past this, but this book gave me nightmares on the first night I read it, after the scene where Victor Pascow comes back in Louis's waking dream. There was just something so visceral about the way events played out during that part, and I also made the poor decision of reading that at about 2-3am in the morning before turning in. I woke up in the middle of the night because of that.
In short, I will need some time to digest and recover from this book, but I will definitely be reading more Stephen King again.
What do you do when something dies, but won't stay dead.....
Louis and his family move into a new home and find a pet cemetery nearby. Kids have been burying their pets there for years. But when tragedy strikes, Louis is about to discover there is more to that plot of land than just a place for beloved pets.
DO NOT READ THIS IN THE DARK.. oh my goodness! I scared myself silly with this book. I really enjoyed reading through it - however, there were sections of the book that made me thankful I could read through it during the day.
Fabulous and Stephen King never disappoints! We used this for our book club choice this month and it was great! What a book!
This review contains 2 spoilers
Another book I should have read a lot sooner in my life but hey it's never too late. I enjoyed the characters, which seems to be my favorite thing about King's works. As always, I gobbled up every word King wrote. The book was fast-paced, interesting and spooky. I rarely feel uncomfortable when reading horror considering it's all I read but this one delivered the terror. I think it's partly to do with the fact that I'm a mother of 3 and can't imagine losing a child. It also upends my nerves because it brings to mind the question of “would
I do the same for my children and family?” Hm something to ponder. Great read.
If I have any complaints; as an animal lover Church should have lived.
It's a nice story, but I didn't love it. So many people told me it was one of the scariest books by SK that I expected something, well, scary. It's not. It's overstretched at times, and I hate the main character, but I liked the overall experience. Gage is a great monster... wish we'd had more of that.
3/5 stars
The end had me kinda shooketh tbh but I didn't care about the rest of the book
In the end there was only the clock, and the markers, which became eroded and nameless in the passage of time.
Louis Creed, a doctor, moves with his family to Bangkor, Maine. Next to their house there's a path to a pet cemetery. When tragedy pays a visit, he soon finds it holds powers beyond his wild nightmares.
I read Pet Sematary in my teens. I hadn't read much of King by then, and in a burst I read through his most famous work, mainly consisting of the early novels Cujo, Carrie, The Shining and, of course, Pet Sematary. The Shining was all the rage, no small part thanks to Kubrick's film. It was cool to read King then, and having a copy of The Shining in the house made you cool. But later as my tastes swerved, I left him behind. For many years. I think it was Doctor Sleep (2013) that brought me back. I read 11/22/63 (2011) and enjoyed it, then the Bill Hodges trilogy, and enjoyed it. I even tried The Dark Tower, something I had avoided because I remember King and me as quite unequivocally hit-and-miss. (Didn't get too far with that project, though.)
Then, during Halloween in 2018, I don't know where exactly I got the bug from, I wanted to go through some of his early classics. Maybe I just miraculously had some space in my reading schedule, and perhaps it was just the right kind of reading. And it was Halloween! This was to be the designated time to do just that.
Interestingly enough, although I remembered much of the plot, I had also forgotten some surprisingly elemental components of the story, sometimes so much so that I had no idea what would happen next. Ideal circumstances, then, if you ask me. And now, years later, as a father of three young girls, the novel opened up as a completely different experience. In my youth I was looking for the thrill, but this time, in a more meditative frame of mind (death is the topic of one of my favorite books in recent years, Frank Ostaseski's The Five Invitations), I was above all stricken by the depth of King's writing: the prose is cruel, the sense of anguish and loss so thick you could touch it, the grief so heartbreaking I broke down in tears several times. I was certainly not expecting to find Pet Sematary so heart-wrenching, brilliant, meditative and profound as it turned out to be. The bottomless darkness of losing a child, the endless what ifs that drive you mad, the heaviness of the wheel of time that you'd love nothing more than to overtake and coerce to go backwards. The emptiness, the bitterness.
Everything that follows in the story, the macabre, the horrible, the gruesome, comes from the notion of what it is like to feel so lost in one's grief that if one had the chance to tinker with the laws of nature and the universe, what would compel one not to do so? In this context I understand King's own statement, in the Introduction to the 2014 reissue by Scribner, that he considers it the most frightening book he's ever written. “Put simply,” he writes, “I was horrified by what I had written and the conclusions I'd drawn.” And this is the books' strength: it draws us in like the book's titular cemetery (the book draws its name from an actual pet cemetery King and his family had in their neighborhood), and it takes us far beyond the darkness we are comfortable with. Not for the thrill of it, but for the mere predestined-seeming and unrestrained compulsion. Life and death have reached their singularity, and there's nothing else left.
I read this on my Kindle, and also had the audiobook I listened intermittently, thanks to the Whispersync for Voice feature. Michael C. Hall's narration is stupendously good.
Pet Sematary really snuck up on me. Around half way it was 3 stars all day long and although enjoyable it was a bit pedestrian; however, slowly it got it's claws into me and before long I was severely invested in the family and even considered not finishing it when the sadness hit.
Pet Sematary was very, very creepy. That ending... whoa. It freaked me out.
It's a typical SK's book: there are a lot of descriptions and it's slow-paced, which didn't bother me. I think it did wonders to set the creepy vibes.
The inspiration for this book came to Stephen when he and Tabitha were staying at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. The Stanley was also the inspiration for his novel The Shining. There is a small pet cemetery behind the Stanley, and yes, it's a creepy place.
Beautiful writing. Writing was one of the best of all of his novels I've read so far. Really enjoyed this one and a beautiful mix of dealing with grief with death + supernatural horror.
The only complaint I have about this book is the super long build-up to the climax. It was definitely suspenseful, which I loved, but the build-up does last for a good majority of the novel. Everything else - perfect! Incredibly chilling and the ending leaves you with enough to make your own conclusions about what happened past the book's finality. A definite read for a lover of horror.
This took me so long to read:(( but towards the last 50 pages or so only it began to pick up.
The beginning was good, middle soo boring and the ending page TURNING.
Towards the end I got chills,coz of everything that was happening but I feel like if the book had been shorter it would def have gotten a 5 star from me!
The last page ended on a cliff hanger, I think we have to imagine what happens next but I wish we had actually gotten the rest coz it left me hanging.
The beginning was intriguing, the end was the best, the middle was tolerable.
For a ‘horror' book this book didn't actually seem to have that much horror in it. The end of it sure, the beginning some. The middle was more sad than creepy. And there was a lot of middle.
For those who know nothing of the plot (spoilers):
Louis Creed, his wife Rachel, daughter Ellie, son Gage, and cat Winston “Church” Churchill have just moved house. There's a path just off the house, heading towards the back, that leads to the ‘Pet Sematary' where children over the decades have buried their beloved pets. This is not the real cemetery that the book is about however. There is a second one behind this Pet Sematary. That one you don't, and shouldn't want to visit. We first see it shortly after Church dies when he is hit by a truck on the busy road in front of their house. Their neighbour, Jud, takes Louis and the cat to the cemetery beyond the sematary. Later that night Church comes back... kind of. He's not really the same old Church.
I quite enjoyed this part of the book and was intrigued to see what would happen next. Except not much did until the end of the book. Just talking, and reminiscing, and more talking. Which is why it probably took me so long to get through this book. I started it enthusiastically, then about half way through was just reading bits of it every now and then, until I got to the last few chapters and then got ‘back into it'. Frankly there was too much filler in this book for my tastes, and the tastes of most of my friends who have read it also.
Almost rated it 4 stars because I quite enjoyed the end, but could only overall rate it a 3.
