Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary is the most upsetting book Stephen King has written and it is upsetting for a reason that has nothing to do with the monster.

The novel's engine is a disagreement about death inside a marriage. Louis Creed is a doctor and a rationalist who thinks children should be told the truth; Rachel watched her sister Zelda die of spinal meningitis in a back bedroom when she was eight, and cannot hear the word. Their daughter Ellie is five and has worked out that her cat will die. The first two hundred pages are a family having that argument badly, in a house on a road where logging trucks come through at seventy miles an hour.

King wrote it after his own daughter's cat was killed on the road outside a rented house in Orrington, and after nearly losing his toddler son to the same traffic. The book knows exactly what it is about, and its most frightening passages are not supernatural at all: they are Louis performing CPR on a child in a hospital corridor, or the long chapter in which a two-year-old runs toward a road.

Jud Crandall is the best character and the reason it happens

The elderly neighbour across the road is warm, generous, lonely and the agent of every disaster in the book. He takes Louis up past the pet cemetery to the old burying ground because he is fond of a little girl and cannot bear to see her unhappy, and he spends the rest of the novel knowing he has done it. His long account of Timmy Baterman — a young man killed in France in 1943 and brought back by his father, who sat in the house with him until the town's men came to burn them both — is the novel's clearest statement of the stakes, delivered too late.

Church is the horror

The cat comes back. King's refusal to make him dramatic is what makes the sequence work: Church stinks, he is clumsy, he walks into things, he kills birds and mice slowly and leaves them where they will be found, and he sits in the room looking at the family. Something is wearing the shape of a cat and not bothering to do it well.

Where it is weaker

The Wendigo material is thin and the novel's mythology is at its least convincing when it tries to be specific. The last act accelerates into something closer to a slasher sequence than the preceding four hundred pages deserve. And Rachel's phobia is explained slightly too thoroughly.

For King's other great novel about a family destroyed by a place, The Shining; for the bleakest book in our index on any other measure, Tender Is the Flesh; for the Maine town that will not help its children, It.

The short answer: Gage, two years old, is killed by a truck on Route 15. Louis exhumes his son's body from the cemetery, carries it up past the pet cemetery to the burying ground, and buries him there. Gage comes back wrong, takes Louis's scalpel, and kills Jud Crandall — from under the bed, with the voice of Jud's dead wife — and then Rachel in the house. Louis finds what is left of his wife, finally does the thing he should have done to the cat, and kills the Gage-thing with morphine. He burns the house down. Then he carries Rachel's body up the path and buries her, because he has convinced himself that she has not been dead as long as Gage was and that this time it will work. The novel's last page is Louis sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire, hearing the back door, hearing slow footsteps. A hand falls on his shoulder. A voice says his name — one word, spoken in a tone the book describes as cold and full of earth. That is the end.

What is the burying ground in Pet Sematary?

Ground beyond the deadfall past the children's pet cemetery, which King's novel attributes to the Micmac — now written Mi'kmaq — and which the Micmac are said to have abandoned when it "went sour". Anything buried there walks again. Jud's position is that it was a place of power that something else moved into, and that the thing now in residence is a Wendigo. The novel is deliberately unclear about whether the returning dead are the dead at all, or something using the body.

Who is Timmy Baterman?

A young man from Ludlow killed in action in France in 1943, whose father Bill took the delivered coffin up to the burying ground. Timmy came back and walked up and down the road at dusk; he knew everyone's secrets and said them out loud. Four men from the town, Jud among them, went to the house to deal with it, and Bill Baterman shot himself and burned the house with his son inside it. Jud tells Louis the story as a warning — specifically, as the reason not to do it with a person — and tells it after Gage is already in the ground.

Why does Louis bury Rachel at the end?

Because the novel has spent five hundred pages establishing that grief does not reason. Louis's own stated justification is a technicality: Gage had been dead and embalmed for days, where Rachel has only just died, so the body is fresher and the result will be better. It is the same logic Jud used about the cat and the same logic Bill Baterman used about his son, and King's point is that every one of them knew better and did it anyway. Jud's line — that the soil of a man's heart is stonier, and a man grows what he can and tends it — is the book's thesis.

Who is Victor Pascow?

A student killed by a car on Louis's first day at the university infirmary, who dies on the floor of Louis's surgery after speaking to him and then returns repeatedly as a warning. He takes Louis to the deadfall in a dream, tells him the barrier was not made to be broken, and appears to Ellie and to Rachel to try to get them home in time. He is the only benign supernatural element in the novel and he fails completely.

Does anyone survive Pet Sematary?

Ellie, who is in Chicago with her grandparents for most of the final act, and Rachel's parents. Gage, Jud, Rachel and Church all die; Louis is alive on the last page and is about to be killed by whatever he has brought back. The 1989 film ends in the same place; the book's version is bleaker because King gives Louis the full chapter of deliberate, lucid planning first.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Tone 004 is the joint-fourth-bleakest score in our index — only 3 works score lower. A toddler dies, is brought back as a murder weapon, and the book ends with the protagonist doing it again on purpose.

Viscera 066 is above the median — 81 works score lower. A child's body described after a traffic collision, an exhumation, two scalpel murders, a mutilated corpse found in a hall, and an animal killing things slowly.

The threat at 030 is on the supernatural side — 35 works score lower. Every killing in the present is done by something that was once a person, and the novel declines to say what is operating it.

Pace 026 is slow — 35 works are slower. More than half the novel is a family arguing about mortality before anything is buried.

Era bias 020 is deep analog — only 34 works score lower. A 1983 novel of landlines, logging trucks, a rural road and a hospital with no scanners in it.

Reality anchor 038 is grounded — 24 works score lower. One rule, applied consistently, in a Maine town with a road through it.

On shocks: a handful. Nothing in the book startles as badly as the cat simply being in the room.