Pet Sematary is King’s 14th book, and was published in 1983 (the same year as Christine and Cycle of the Werewolf). The book is dedicated to Kirby McCauley. Kirby was King’s literary agent at the time and his fingerprints are all over King’s career in this era. He was an active champion and promoter. This book is cited by many fans as his scariest work, and King himself has said of all his books this one scared him the most. It was made into two movies, one in 1989 and one in 2019. As a Gen Xer I don’t have to tell you how much of an effect the 1989 movie had on me, it was easily the scariest thing I had ever seen (years before I read the book) and Zelda has roamed the halls of my mind ever since. Although this read through was my 4th, I hadn’t picked the book up in well over a decade, and having seen both movies multiple times, I got the various plots tangled up in my mind, so this revisit felt like a real rediscovery of the original text.

“Death is a mystery and burial is a secret.”

The Creed family moves to an old farmhouse in Ludlow, Maine from Chicago. We have Louis Creed, a doctor, his wife Rachel, his daughter Eileen (Ellie) who is 5, and his baby son Gage who is soon to be 2, and Ellie’s cat Winston Churchill (Church). Across the street we have the older couple Jud and Norma Crandall. Jud is 84, has a thick Maine accent, drinks beer on his porch, chain smokes ciggies, chops wood, adores his wife (who has terrible arthritis), was born in 1900 in the same house and town he lives in now, and is one of King’s most endearing characters, for my money. The day the Creed family arrives Jud and Louis become fast friends. And the day they arrive Jud warns the family of the dangers of the busy road out front, which is a travel route for big speeding trucks.

Behind the Crandall’s new home, on their property, is a trail that leads to a pet semetary (the misspelling of the word is King’s nod to an actual handmade pet cemetery sign he saw) that the children of Ludlow have been using for decades to lay their beloved pets to rest. Jud takes the whole family there to check the place out one fine evening. It’s about a mile back on a well kept path and the grave markers are laid out in a series of concentric circles. One side of the clearing is walled by a massive deadfall that is more than 8 feet tall. The visit to this site illicit emotions in Ellie and Rachel. Later Ellie talks with her Dad about her cat Church dying someday, and she cries. Rachel overhears this and becomes extremely upset, causing a huge fight between Louis and her. Rachel has trauma surrounding death and fears Ellie will be likewise harmed by the realities of death, which she thinks should be kept from her. Louis, a doctor, disagrees, viewing death as a natural and inevitable part of life. Conflict.

One plot point that gave me pause in this year of our Lord 2026 was the conversation around getting Winston Churchill fixed. Church arrives to Ludlow an intact tom cat. When Jud and Louis are sitting on Jud’s porch tipping some beers Jud asks “Do they climb when he walks?” which is not a phrase I was familiar with. Louis replies that Church is not fixed ( so yes, yes they do climb) and Jud says he should get the cat fixed to keep him from crossing the road, which again, is a literal deadly weapon. Louis is against this, because he feels it will turn Church into a fat lazy pile of shit and put out the flame of his wild spirit. Seriously. I couldn’t tell if this was reflective of a belief Steve may harbor, or if it was just a necessary conflict to service the plot. They do get Church fixed and Louis is like, yep, the cat is ruined (not as ruined as he will be later). And this (of course) does not keep Church from going in the road. I was a kid in the 80s and I have seen the shift in how we treat pets, and the conversation about getting animals fixed (especially an outdoor male cat) has become more clear, but I was a bit ruffled by Louis’ feelings about Church post snip. He likes the cat less, has less respect for the cat, which seems extremely stupid to me and made me like Louis a bit less. Also that procedure will not (and does not) keep the cat out of the road!

Louis starts his work at the University at the campus health center, and on day one a student, Victor Pascow, gets hit by a car, and is dragged in on death’s door, completely smashed up. He says some spooky things to Louis as he is dying, like, “In the pet cemetery,” “It’s not the real cemetery,” and what becomes the chorus to this entire novel, “The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis. A man grows what he can…and tends it.” That night Pascow comes to Louis in a dream/not a dream, and takes him to the pet cemetery. The next morning Louis’ feet are muddy, and there are pine needles in the bedsheets. Which is chilling. Pascow is warning him, this place is bad, do not, and I mean do not, bury anyone round here. I wonder if he will head that warning?

While Rachel and the kids are out of town for Thanksgiving Church does indeed get killed on the road and Jud finds the dead cat, and so they make the first of many trips out to the other burial ground, the Mic Mac (Mi’kmaq) burial ground, which lies beyond the deadfall, another three miles past the pet cemetery. Jud and Louis are almost manic on this journey, some force pulling them along, and the writing here is remarkably good. The walk, at night, through deeply ancient haunted woods, is very scary. Louis digs a hole in this other, weird and wild plot, builds his stone cairn, and they trudge back. The next day Louis is sore and spent and fuzzy on what occurred the night before, but soon enough Church comes sauntering out of the woods and back home. But it is not Church. The cat is dirty, smells of death, and has bits of green trash bag (which he was buried in) around his whiskers (a good touch). Church is wall eyed, stumbles around, and contains none of the characteristics that made him such a special cat. I repeat, there is nothing good about this resurrected cat, and although he is not aggressive with the family, he does start killing large birds/animals (like a crow). If you thought Louis was an unkind to Church after his neutering, it’s got nothing on how he treats this zombie cat (that he created!) He loathes the cat, kicking it, and throwing it outside in the cold every chance he gets. When the family returns they all sort of notice Church smells and is weird, but nobody seems to too affected by this.

We get the back story on the other, cursed burial ground when Louis marches across the street and is like, what the hell, Jud?! It’s ancient, predating the state, town, and the dumb white people who start messing around with it. Some lunatic dragged a dead bull up there (which seems impossible to me, did he have a backhoe? It’s miles into the woods and requires scaling a ten foot deadfall of trees, they mention a wooden litter and I’m just like, there is no way, magic I guess.) Jud himself buried a dog there, which came back, and lived an ok-ish life until it died later and was laid to eternal rest in the pet cemetery. But that bull came back mean and had to be killed, Jud confesses, so sometimes that happens, fyi.

Things pick up speed here (I read one review of this book, Kirkus, that describes it as over-long and slow moving, but I could not disagree more. This book is taut, almost sparse (for King) and really moves, especially compared to some others like The Shining and Christine, which did truly have some bloat) and things happen fast. Norma dies, and Louis and Ellie attend the funeral. Rachel refuses to go and we finally get the whole story of her sister Zelda, who died when she was a kid. Rachel was alone with Zelda, who had spinal meningitis and had been bed bound for a long time, when she actually passes, and this whole chapter of her life messed her up big time. In the movie Zelda is an absolute nightmare and gets a lot more screen time. Louis and Rachel bond here, and you get the sense that Rachel may find her way to some healing. There is a very poignant stretch that Louis describes as the last really happy days of his life. He flies a kite with Gage. A word about Gage, I would describe him as a happy little meatball of a kid; a cheerful, sweet, curious little guy, you really feel this in the writing. Making what happens next even more devastating.

Act II opens with Gage’s funeral, which is brilliant. We experience the funeral with Louis, and the narrative of what happened to Gage is sprinkled into the wretched unmoored experience of the funeral and burial (in a real cemetery in Bangor) of his 2 year old child. I’ve mentioned this before, but so many of these early books have young children in danger (The Shining, Firestarter, ‘Salem’s Lot) and the writing here felt like a deep purge on King’s part of the ugliest most horrifying thing imaginable – the death of one of his children. He got deep in the mud here, dredging up the darkness from within and holding it up to the light. At one point Louis says, “Gage, where are you?” and for those of us that have lost a loved one, that desperate question is scalding and familiar. Gage was hit by a truck in that damn road, of course, running gleefully away from his parents, a fun game, with Louis chasing him but not quiet able to catch him (a scene he thinks and dreams about relentlessly). Everyone in the family is shellshocked. Rachel’s parents (who hate Louis) attend the funeral, and the grandad, drunk, screams in Louis’ face, and they get in a fist fight, and grandpa falls back ONTO the tiny coffin knocking it over. Horrific.

The deep grief cracks Louis’ psyche wide open, and the Wendigo finds nice purchase there, so Louis is like, you know what I should do…and he does. Jud tries to warn him against this, and tries to stand sentry to prevent this, but the machine of fate/evil/grief/hubris is in motion. Louis is possessed. He sends his family away, tells Jud to stuff it, and goes and digs up his son. This is a harrowing journey, getting his boy out of one grave and into another, with opportunities to call it off stacked to the sky, but Louis is locked in. Rachel catches some kind of psychic wind and starts to try and journey back to Ludlow, but she too is a cog in a greater force, and she doesn’t make it in time. Gage returns. And he is a demon. Nothing, and I repeat nothing, is scarier than a child demon. I read this part of the book alone in my house at night during a thunderstorm and I swear I heard little feed thumping along my floors. The end of this book is so good and so scary. There is another trip to the cursed burial ground, and the cycle continues, because grief always returns, and people are so damn slow to learn a lesson, and the same mistakes cycle and repeat across time, and there is always an enormous price to pay for trying to interfere with fate. This novel is of course inspired by “The Monkey’s Paw” by W. W. Jacobs which you should check out if you haven’t read it.

I loved this book the first time I read it, and I love it today. It is my favorite of the eight I’ve revisited so far (just a hair ahead of ‘Salem’s Lot). I also wanted to say that the new remake of the movie, which came out in 2019, is worth seeing if you haven’t, as it is a very fresh and different take on this story (purists will hate it, but I thought it was a cool approach). Up next we have It, which is my favorite Stephen King book, of all of them! Will a reread change that? We shall see. You can find all of my King Reread project here: Reread Project.