I have a tendency to stay away from horror novels, as I used to get really freaked out just reading creepypasta years ago. During quarantine, I was so bored that I decided that I was going to try to scare myself by reading a horror novel. Pet Sematary was recommended to me, and I decided to read this book to try to scare myself. This book didn’t really succeed in doing this. Instead, I spent most of the book mad at the characters for their bad decisions and wondering how they were going to mess up next. That doesn’t mean that I absolutely hated this book, but I read it in a more critical way than a horrified/scared to read the next page way. And I think that is fine personally, it encouraged me to read more horror novels as I wasn’t scared of reading them anymore. This could have also been influenced by the fact that I read the book as an ebook rather than a physical book, but I don’t think that it influenced my reading experience that greatly.
This review will contain slight spoilers for things that happen pretty early on in the plot (think first 100 pages) but if that is too much I suggest that you don’t read it.
I knew that the Pet Sematary was going to play a big part in this book, but what I didn’t know from the movie trailers/general knowledge was how many people knew that it was a bad idea to go there. Literally Jud mentions that the natives from years before knew that the area had truly bad energy. So WHY would you bring your kid’s cat to the graveyard? It’s literally just a cat, it’s not that big a deal, the kid who misses the cat is like 5. If you comfort her during her grief and get a new cat, she will be able to process the situation. In this book, she would never have the chance to process her grief at all. This is probably the least of the bad decisions Creed makes in this book, but none of the rest of the book would have happened had he not made that decision.
Because Creed clearly makes bad decisions, most of the rest of the book wasn’t that out of the blue to me. Once the properties of the Semetary are introduced fairly early on, I kinda knew he was going to try to use it for something stupid. I wasn’t sure how dumb the idea would be, but I knew that he would try to do it. The one thing that did shock me was how he never consulted his wife on any of these things. Like I’m pretty sure if he asked his wife “hey should I bury our daughter’s dead cat in a creepy cemetery to try to bring it back” that she would have told him not to do it. But instead, he wanted to be Superman and save the day. In a way, I feel like that’s what he had the idea of doing for most of the book. He was going to fix everything and not tell anyone else about it.
The scariest storyline in the book was actually not the storyline of Creed and the cemetery, but the storyline of his wife and her sister. I feel like it was scary to read about this woman and think about how in pain she was, but also hear about how she terrorized her family. I’m not sure how the chronically ill/disability community felt about her character, but it was definitely a scary read. It was scary because it seemed at least slightly more based on reality than some kind of haunted cemetery.
This book felt long to me, but I know that compared to some of King’s other books *cough* Under The Dome & IT *cough* this is actually rather short! I don’t know how I would get through one of his 1000 page books if I could barely get through one of his 500-page works. But I might try, especially if those are some of his more scary books.
I did enjoy reading this book and seeing how the story played out, I definitely think that it worked well as my first full Stephen King read. I hope that I enjoy/feel more scared by some of his future novels.
Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5 books.
