"Sometimes dead is better." - Stephen King, Pet Sematary
Pet Sematary may be one of the most horrifying novels written by Stephen King, and it's not because of the serial killer baby or the demon in the woods. To be fair, "horrifying" isn't the right word describe Pet Sematary. The novel touches on mostly life, death, loss, pain and a lot of deeper subjects. King of course still touches on those things in other novels but Pet Sematary uses those as its central themes. I'd say Pet Sematary is more "disturbing" than "horrifying" mainly because everything that happens in the novel (the death of a pet, family, friends, etc) are things that nearly everyone has actually experienced once, so it is a book that can be very hard to get through. I'll probably be taking specific moments and quotes from the novel itself and more or less giving my own thoughts on it throughout this post.
Stephen King focuses heavily on loss and acceptance and eventually recovery. There's a really great quote here about the subject matter itself. The main character Louis' daughter Ellie had recently lost her pet cat and Jud, Louis' neighbour and all-around nice guy says, “Maybe she’ll learn something about what death really is, which is where the pain stops and the good memories begin. Not the end of life but the end of pain.” I thought this was a really good quote because there is a lot to be said about getting over a loved one's death. King focuses on the idea that it's unhealthy to be in constant denial and depression and you should rather focus on the happy memories you had with the person (or pet) who passed. The idea of remembering those who died positively as a healthy way of getting over their death is very prominent in book, along with actually ACCEPTING that they're dead, which segues into what I consider to be the central point of the novel: Accepting a loved one's death is so very important.
The premise of the novel is that there is an ancient Indian burial ground that could resurrect any dead living things, but the resurrected people or animals will never return quite the same: they will tend to me more violent and there is a "dead" aura about them that causes them to be out of place. The Pet Sematary in the novel (and yes the cemetery is meant to be spelled wrong; the cemetery in the novel was made by kids and they spelled cemetery wrong) is a place where kids bury their dead pets. The sematary represents accepting death and moving on healthily while the burial grounds represents the idea of unhealthy denial of death. The fact that the resurrected animals and people are very unnatural is another way to show that denial is wrong and shouldn't essentially try to mess with the course of nature even if you could.
The book is a very depressing one because, as it is the case with all King books, deal with some major life issue, in this case, Death. I'm not sure why but this novel hit really hard with me. I haven't really lost anybody close to me yet so the book really instilled a deep, cold fear in me that I could lose someone I deeply care about and that I might not be able to handle it very well. However, it is also possible that I already had that fear and left it unaddressed, which the book just pulled forward.
Even though the book is really depressing and one of King's darkest ones, it actually does provide some really great life lessons about death, preserving the memory of your loved ones, and eventual acceptance. I noticed that this book, even though it is horror fiction, it's also quite philosophical; the book does deal with a lot of deep topics and I honestly do believe that this is one of Stephen King's greatest works.
For my next review, I will be reviewing a movie about the Holocaust and Nazi Germany. I consider the movie (directed by Stephen Spielberg and starring Liam Neeson) to be one of the greatest movies of all time. As always, thank you for reading my blog, and I always will enjoy hearing from all of you, so if you have any comments, feedbacks, opinions, suggestions, etc., please feel free to comment, and I WILL respond to ALL comments!
