Pet Sematary (Stephen King)

Pet Sematary
Stephen King
Doubleday
Fiction, Horror
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Louis Creed had high hopes for the future when he moved his family - wife Rachel, young daughter Ellie, baby Gage, and cantankerous cat Winston Churchill (or "Church") - to the town of Ludlow. He has a new job as campus doctor for the University of Maine, and the old house has lots of room for a growing family. The elderly neighbors across the busy street almost feel like kin from the first day. Many's the night Louis sits on their front porch with a beer, listening to old Jud Crandall tell tales of yesterday's Ludlow... and tales of the strange little cemetery in the woods behind his new home, where the local kids have buried beloved pets since time immemorial. But when Church gets struck by a car while Rachel and the kids are visiting relatives for the holidays, Louis can't bring himself to destroy his daughter's childhood innocence by telling her that her beloved (if cranky) pet is dead - over Christmas break, no less. Old Jud has an unusual solution, leading him to a deeper, secret burial ground beyond the pet graves to bury the unlucky cat. Louis doesn't understand why - until a day later when Church returns. It's not quite the same as it was, oddly clumsy and smelling of the grave, but it seems like an ordinary, living cat. Somehow, impossibly, the hidden burial ground resurrected Church. But there are dark powers at work, powers that Louis is now part of. And when tragedy strikes his family, he feels a temptation to cross a dangerous line... for, if a cat can be brought back from the dead, why not a child?

REVIEW: This classic Stephen King horror story, in standard King fashion, brings an ordinary man and his family into contact with dark forces that crack open the veneer of normalcy and happiness and sanity in which they've been cocooned. It also serves as an examination of death, and how people cope (or fail to cope) with one of the most natural, inevitable events in existence. As a doctor, Louis understands on an academic level that death is the inescapable side-effect of life. He was half-raised in a mortuary by an undertaker uncle. If anyone should understand death on a practical level, it's him. He even tries to help his young daughter come to grips with the concept when their visit to the pet graveyard exposes her to mortality on a personal level for the first time in her life. His wife, on the other hand, was scarred by a childhood trauma involving a terminally ill sister and goes out of her way to not talk or even think about the d-word. When death enters their home, however, it's Louis who crumbles, scrambling to rationalize and undo the thing, despite his years of medical training and practice telling him that not only is death inescapable for all of us, but, as Jud puts it, "sometimes dead is better".
Disaster and darkness are foreshadowed from the start, but it takes a while for the plot ball to begin its roll. Along the way, the characters and the small Maine town come to life, the latter often through Jud's meandering tales of the town's history and the history of the secret burial grounds, which has been passed down through the generations as a local secret... one that has its own momentum, a way of creating circumstances where one in the know feels compelled to share the secret with another, feeding the ageless, shapeless, predatory darkness at its heart. There are many moments where Louis could step off the doomed path, many moments of possible salvation where the little voice of reason in his head tries desperately to be heard, but greater forces are at work, within Louis's increasingly-twisted mind and without in the woods beyond his home. Even seeing the disturbing changes in Church, how the once-docile animal develops something like a sadistic streak, isn't enough to stop the desperation of a father who sees the slenderest chance of mending an irrevocably shattered family. Tension and stakes raise ever more swiftly as the tale winds on, Louis's pains and torments drawn to excruciating extremes, eventually entangling the rest of his family. At some point, the climax becomes inevitable, yet remains riveting as it plays out. The finale is a masterful last twist of the knife.
Even as it plays on primal fears of death and unnamed evils in the dark and how quickly our logical higher minds (and the logical world views so many of us construct for ourselves) fall apart when confronted by the overwhelming and the impossible, topics King often explores in his works, the story ends up being about so much more than the gore and terror. For that it earned its extra half-star, even with the unrelenting darkness (and even with some old ideas on pet, particularly cat, ownership).

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