Pet Sematary
Stephen King, 1983
★ 4.09 from 741k ratings on Goodreads
A doctor moves his family to a Maine town where the local pet cemetery sits beside something older, and grief becomes a door that should stay shut. A slow, heavy dread gathers around ordinary family life, with grief and moral unease pressing in as the story moves.
Feels like dread, grief and unease. About morality, death and family.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want a horror novel that takes grief and family seriously and builds unease through everyday details. Be warned that it is deliberately bleak and slow-building, and some readers find the pacing or characters less engaging.
Why read it
It offers a serious, unsettling look at grief and the choices it tempts people toward, told with plain, accumulating pressure.
A page from the book
Every ordinary object is a trap if you think about it long enough.
He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boogie of electricity- Available At Your Nearest Switch plate Or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nerdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too- Shower With A Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. What readers say
Readers describe a slow-building, deeply unsettling experience, with many finding the final stretch terrifying and emotionally wrenching. They frequently mention grief, death, and family, while some rereaders feel nostalgic affection and others find the pacing or characters less engaging.
Stephen King.King wrote Pet Sematary in a rented house in Orrington, Maine, where a real pet cemetery lay behind the property; he found the manuscript so bleak he shelved it for years.
Books that feel like this
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It
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A Maine town, a childhood summer, and the shape-shifting thing that hunts its children — a horror novel about memory as much as monsters.
The Stand
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A flu escapes a lab and empties America; survivors choose between a saintly old woman and a smiling dark man. King's big, bleak, compulsive plague epic.
Misery
Stephen King, 1987
A novelist wakes from a crash in a stranger's house, nursed by his number-one fan — who has read his new book and wants him to take it back.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Pet Sematary for me?
- You may like it if you want a horror novel that takes grief and family seriously and builds unease through everyday details. Be warned that it is deliberately bleak and slow-building, and some readers find the pacing or characters less engaging.
- What is Pet Sematary like?
- A slow, heavy dread gathers around ordinary family life, with grief and moral unease pressing in as the story moves. Feels like dread, grief and unease. About morality, death and family.
- What should I read after Pet Sematary?
- If you liked Pet Sematary, try The Exorcist (William Peter Blatty), Dracula (Bram Stoker) and Frankenstein (Mary Shelley).
A taste of the feed
Some people are cold in a way no weather can fix.
The blaze of sun wrung pops of sweat from the old man’s brow, yet he cupped his hands around the glass of hot sweet tea as if to warm them.
The Exorcist · William Peter Blatty
A mind wakes up with no history, and nobody to ask.
“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
Frankenstein · Mary Shelley
When authority is challenged by brutality, the line between life and death evaporates.
“Put that gun down,” Rafter ordered from the doorway, and a split second later another shot rang through the reception area, a shot that went into the ceiling somewhere well above Rafter’s head and reduced him to a mere mortal. Turning the gun back to me, he nodded, and I complied, entering the conference room behind Rafter. The last thing I saw on the outside was Madam Devier shaking at her desk, terror-stricken, headset around her neck, high heels parked neatly next to her wastebasket.
The Street Lawyer · John Grisham
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