Rating: 5 out of 5 screaming loons
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Preview (i.e. no spoilers)
Pet Sematary is another of King’s heavyweight classics. Not necessarily by length – as many of his books could easily be used as ballast and this isn’t one of them – but if you were to ask someone in the street to name 5 Stephen King books, they’d probably include it in their list. Well, actually, they’d probably walk away from you assuming you were trying to sell them life insurance, but you get the point.
Its place in the King Pantheon (Kintheon) is well-deserved. If you were new to King and came expecting gore and teeth and slowly creaking doors, you’d be disappointed – Pet Sematary is an exercise in slowly-ratcheting tension and emotional breakdown. There is gore, and there is visceral horror, but the horror of this book comes from within. The creaking is the sound of the build towards a grimly inevitable climax; the sharp teeth are those of human grief.
It’s a hard read at times, particularly for those of us with children, as it lives within all-too-familiar fears. But that’s what great horror does – it takes a little parasite fear that lives inside our heads, and pulls it screaming into the world, like a deeply ugly brain-baby. The kind of baby that would make people say “oh, it’s very… striking, isn’t it?”
And really, that’s what this whole book is. It’s not beautiful, although the prose is splendid at times, and very affecting. But the ugliness of it chimes with the ugly fears inside ourselves that we choose to pretend are dead and buried, and forces us to reanimate them for a grisly inspection. And who doesn’t want that out of their holiday read?
Review (i.e. sometimes, spoilers are better)
Okay, so: as per my own rules, I try not to spoil any other books while spoiling the heck out of the one I’m currently reviewing. So I’ll try to mince my next few words into a lexical sausage and hope it still tastes good.
For me, Pet Sematary is the conclusion of a trilogy that also includes The Shining and Cujo. The core thing under threat in all of these is a young son, and each successive book pushes a little further into the fear of threat against them. If this actually were presented as a trilogy, I think it would be the best and most devastating series in history – even including the Fast & Furious franchise.
What marks Pet Sematary out is how far King takes you into the numbness of grief. The protagonist, Dr. Louis Creed, makes increasingly poor and irrational decisions, and in order to make it even halfway plausible that he would do so, King has to make us truly live with him as he fails to cope with his son’s death. Death is a part of life, as the good doctor himself insists, and yet the genius of this book is to still make it a powerful, mind-altering shock to both Creed and the reader.
One of King’s favourite short stories is The Monkey’s Paw – he details his respect for it in Danse Macabre. I would be truly shocked if it didn’t turn out that it was the inspiration for this book, in which it’s even referenced. He takes you up to that book’s famous ending and beyond, pushing through the what if? of the vanished door-knocker and into visceral horror. It shouldn’t really work, but it does, magnificently. The sly devil has had his cake and eaten it to the point of diabetes.
This isn’t a cheerful book. Many of King’s books, even the most devastating ones, balance levity in with the darkness. Not so this – it’s a right bloody downer, let’s be clear. But it’s still pretty magnificent all the same, and worthy of a place in the top-ranked echelons of King’s bibliography.
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