Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary


By: Stephen King
Reviewed by: gothiclolitamaiden, 16
Rating: Really liked it


"Sometimes dead is better...."

“When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son — and now an idyllic home. As a family, they've got it all...right down to the friendly cat.

But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth — more terrifying than death itself...and hideously more powerful.”

This is the first Stephen King novel I’ve ever read (gasp). I must say that I’m quite impressed with King’s writing, and sort of creeped out as well. I had, of course, heard of Stephen King, but had never read any of his books, so I decided to try it out. You see, whenever any book or author gets a lot of hype, I feel the need to check it out to see what the hype is all about. That is my nature, and the reason I even bothered to read Twilight in the first place, but I digress. It is also my nature to willingly seek out books that will likely scare me out of my wits, and read them, and consequently spend a couple of weeks cowering under my covers at night. I don’t know why I torture myself like this, but I’m just drawn to horror novels, especially the ones that involve ghosts or other things that go bump in the night. And thankfully, Stephen King has many other scary books to satisfy my craving for well-written horror novels.

King is very convincing, a master story-crafter, with considerable talent for creating characters. In Pet Sematary, we meet the Creeds, a seemingly ordinary family, living in a seemingly normal small town, with a seemingly normal cat and a seemingly normal elderly couple across the street. Everything’s lovely, except for the Pet Sematary in the woods behind the house. Generations of children have buried their beloved pets there, and before it was a pet burial ground, it was a Micmac burial ground, which quickly becomes problematic. Of course, from the beginning we readers can tell that there is something very wrong with the Sematary, other than the fact that “sematary” is spelled wrong, but we keep reading anyway.

King handles the supernatural elements in the story very well, and the book is creepy. The suspense (and the madness) builds up steadily. The only slow part was when Louis was digging up Gage, where the author described the process of grave-robbing in detail, which should have been gross, but was instead rather boring. Those scenes were dragged out too far, but the rest of the book progressed fairly quickly.

As much as I enjoyed Pet Sematary, as I read I got the feeling that I wasn’t reading King’s best work. I am eager to read more of his novels, and from what I see in Pet Sematary, reading King’s books is going to be very interesting.


Recommended to: Horror fans, supernatural fans, anyone who likes to read scary books in the dark, older teens and adults for gore, mature content and language.