After the ordeal of finishing Pale, I thought I’d opt for something easier and more familiar next. I think the last time I read a Stephen King book must have been at least twenty years ago. His early horror novels were formative for me but I never cared for his forays into fantasy. I’d read that he considers Pet Sematary to be by far the scariest novel to himself and since I never really find novels to be scary, I thought I’d give this a go. As many other readers have discovered for themselves, this book reads very differently as an adult who has experienced the death of loved ones rather than as a child. I am very glad I read this at my age and I do declare this to be a very scary horror novel indeed.

Doctor Louis Creed moves with his family to a house in the town of Ludlow to work in the clinic at the University of Maine. He brings with him his wife Rachel, two young children Ellie and Gage, and Ellie’s cat Church. Upon arrival, they are greeted by their elderly neighbor, Jud Crandall, who has lived in the house across the street all his life. He warns them about the road that separates them as heavy trucks frequently speed along it. As Louis and Jud become good friends, he takes them on a tour of the land behind their newly purchased house, showing them the pet cemetery where local children bury their pets. On the first day of school, a mortally injured student is brought to the clinic. Though Louis has never met him before, the student calls him by name and in his last moments, warns Louis about the cemetery. During Thanksgiving, Rachel and the children travel to visit Rachel’s parents but Louis stays at home as he has a bad relationship with them. While they are gone, Church is run over by a truck and killed. That night, Jud instructs Louis to take the corpse then leads him to a hidden spot behind the pet cemetery, supposedly an ancient burial ground used by the Native American Mi’kmaq. After burying the cat there, Church returns to life the next day but is changed.

It isn’t difficult to spot where King is going with at any given moment in the story. Any reasonably educated person will recognize that this is a rewritten version of The Monkey’s Paw so it’s not as if there are any real surprises. In fact, even as I was reading it, I was conscious of the specific writing techniques that King was using. There is so much foreshadowing which makes it even more obvious what will eventually happen in the story, though King likes to play around with exactly when specific events take place. For example even before we are properly introduced to the character of Jud Crandall, King tells us that he will be such a good friend to Louis that he considers him a surrogate father. In order to make us readers empathize with Louis and really feel his pain, he makes sure to give us plenty of happy moments with him and his family. As I’ve pointed out in my writing on films, it’s not enough to just show a character suffering. You need to show the audience what he or she has to lose to make the suffering matter. King does all this and more and he’s such a masterful storyteller that it works even as you’re aware of what he is doing.

What makes this novel work so well is that even as Louis knows what a terrible idea it is to invoke the power of the cemetery and even as us readers silently scream at him not to do it, everything that we know of him and his life convinces us that he cannot help himself. His love for his family makes it so that he must try despite all of the warning signs. That and how the novel confronts the question of death is what makes it so scary. I’m aware that many readers start reading King as teenagers or young adults but this is one novel that is perhaps best appreciated by a mature adult. It takes someone who already has some experience of life to understand Crandall’s admonition that death is all around us and closer than we think. The novel embraces the notion that death is indeed terrible and something that we should strive with every fiber of our being to avoid as the pain of the loss of our loved ones is unbearable. At the same time, King exploits this to create the sense of horror as Louis goes far beyond what he should to stave off death. Though readers will broadly be able to predict what is going to happen, the specific imagery is still very powerful and I won’t spoil them here. The result is true horror on a deep, emotional level because we know that we would do the same if placed in the same situation.

Catching up on this so long after I’d stopped reading King’s books and with experience of reading fiction from more different writers, I’ve also come to better appreciate his style. For example, Crandall’s folksy wisdom can seem overly obvious and annoying at first, but that’s before we see the dark edge in the character. Then there’s how King varies the pace so greatly. At times, months pass in a few paragraphs. But at key moments the pace slows to such an excruciating extent that you can practically feel every twinge of Louis’ muscles, prolonging his suffering and pain. King is also ruthless about paring things down, describing supporting characters with just the right amount of detail depending on their role in the story he wants to tell. So while Jude is a major character, there’s almost nothing about his wife Norma. It seems like a trivial point to make, but this is so very different from the style of the modern web serials and makes for a good reminder of what a good novelist can do.

I do have some quibbles about King’s version of The Monkey’s Paw problem. As he must have realized, you can only tempt a good man into making a terrible decision by driving him to desperation, and there’s only so many crises you can throw at an innocent man before it starts looking awfully suspicious. In effect, the cemetery itself is actively malicious and exerts its power to nudge the people involved to act as it wants. This does reduce the agency of key characters like Louis and we wonder how much of a choice did he ever really have? On the other hand, it’s part of the horror of the cemetery which actively seeks out victims across history. I think he strikes a decent balance as the cemetery can lay the trap but it’s still the people who choose to trigger it out of the love they have for their pets and their family members. All told, this is a fantastic novel with the perfect ending and some really keen observations of how we see death. It’s so good I’m considering whether or not I should pick up some of the King novels I missed out on.