Pet Sematary

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.