Pet Sematary

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.