Pet Sematary

I kept true to the promise I’ve given myself and I started to try out some of Stephen King’s classics, after reading the excellent ride that was The Dark Tower, so on one sunny summer morning I decided to pick up Pet Sematary. I’ve heard a lot of praise for this book both from critics and from my friends and family, and given that we’ve had a copy at home, it was an easy choice over other considerations such as The Stand, Mysery or Salem’s lot.

After reading the book. I’ve been left with two revelations, a positive one and a negative one. The positive – I wasn’t scared at all. The negative – it unfortunately didn’t live up to my  expectations, so let’s brake down why that is.

My one major issue with Pet Sematary is that it feels like King really didn’t know where he wanted to take the story. The book is absolutely fine from all technical aspects – the prose, the characters, the plot, the pacing, it just suffer from a clash of ideas. This is a story about death, about loss and grief, an examination of those themes through the viewpoint of a single person and I was so there for it, but than the ending devolves into straight up horror that any B-Movie writer who is given this idea could pull off.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think King did a bad job with the horror elements (he is the king of horror after all), but I think he should have doubled down on either the horror or the phylosophical aspects, because as it stands, the book feels torn in two different directions, while truly accomplishing neither. A clear indication of the unfocused nature of this story is one of the first important events in the book (minor spoilers ahead), the death of Victor Pascow. At the beggining of the book, a student dies in front of Louis Creed, our main protagonist, but he doesn’t stay dead for long, because he starts haunting Louis in what might be dreams or what might be reality. That was very interesting and engaging, I was eager to find out what was going on. Did Pascow actually come back from the dead or is he just an imaginary phantasm of a troubled mind? But as the book goes on, this plot point gets dropped almost completely. Yes, Pascow is mentioned a few more times, but the mystery of his possible resurrection and his weird connection to Louis stays just that – a mystery.

I still have to praise King for his character work though. That was the part of his writing, I was the most blown away by, while reading The Dark Tower, but here he showed me, that he doesn’t need seven big tomes, to get his characters across. Louis is a good enough protagonist, that when he starts making the stupid decisions obligatory for any main character in a horror story, you’ll feel like shouting: „NO! STOP! DON’T BE AN IDIOT!“, at him and Jud Crandall is one of the most likeable characters I’ve ever read. You just want to know someone like that. The rest of our cast is just fine, but they unfortunately don’t get nearly as much page time as the duo mentioned previously. I also found it very interesting, how differently the two characters are written. We see the majority of the story through Louis’s eyes, and King really leans into the fact, that Louis is a doctor. He frequently mentions people’s health, diagnoses them, and thinks about drugs that could help them. This really helped me to get into his head and made him seem very believable. It’s just a little touch, but it adds a ton of personality in my opinion. Jud’s character on the other hand is conveied more through his speech. He perfectly hits the tone of an old, world-wise country man, which creates a sort of atmosphere around him. You aren’t told who Jud is outright, but his manners, actions and way of talking paint the picture instead. It’s fascinating to me, how diametrically different these approaches to character building are, and yet King is able to pull them both off equally well.

I’ve discussed this book with my brother and a friend of mine (he has a review for it on this very site, so you can check that out, if you want a different take), and both of them told me that the book hit them really hard. My brother said it left him with a very unssetling feeling and my friend described the second half of the book as „one great depressive ride“, so I’m not sure why didn’t I get a similar response. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for it or maybe the Czech translation didn’t sit right with me, hard to tell. As it stands now though, I would consider Pet Sematary a fine read, but I would advise for reading it for the right reasons. It’s a solid story with excellent characters and that’s why you should read it, but I cannot recommend it to anybody looking for a horror story, or for the best of King’s work.