A review by cursedepub
Pet Sematary by Stephen King

dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Echoing another reviewer - I had kind of brushed this book aside as I am not generally interested in animal-oriented stories in any genre, nor do I particularly care for zombies in horror. But I was pleasantly surprised and impressed by how simply GOOD this novel was. King's prose is excellent, very immersive and evocative but still neat and tight, without bloat. 

I find the greatest strength of the book to be the sheer power and punch of the story's emotional beats.  I am not typically scared by horror but I connected very strongly with the depictions of dread in the early part of the novel
(Paxcow's death and Creed's succeeding nighttime stroll, the sense of wrongness and hints of possible deception or ill intent from Jud)
. And the reveal that
Gage would die in less than 2 months
literally knocked the wind out of me - what a perfect set-up of emotional high to emotional low. The sheer human ugliness and depth of the family's
grief
afterwards is genuinely gutting. 

At the end of the day the true horror of the book is in the fact that it is a tragedy, and like all the best tragedies, you simply cannot look away.
Like Creed himself,
you try to convince yourself up to the very end that maybe things will be different this time, but you probably already know how this story will end. 

I do find the actual Pet Sematary to be kind of underutilized by simply being the "front door," so to speak, to the true cemetery. The lore and mysticism could have been better-developed. However, truly a great and standout horror novel. I get the hype now.

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