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A review by courtneydoss
Pet Sematary by Stephen King
4.0
"Sometimes dead is better."
My parents were incredibly liberal with the type of content they allowed my sister and I to watch when we were children. For that reason, Stephen King's It was my favorite movie from the ages of 4-5. For whatever reason, a killer clown with a penchant for terrorizing children didn't scare me. Zelda from Pet Sematary scared me.
I think that everybody has at least a little bit of fear when it comes to death. The idea of ceasing to be, at least in the physical sense is very scary. It goes against every instinct we have to roll over and accept it. However, knowing that it is something that we will all have to face, reading about Zelda's death was really disturbing because it could easily be me. The knowledge that there will come a day where I will be in pain, I will be helpless, and there will be no hope in my heart that I will one day be better is terrifying. Like, pants-shittingly terrifying. Obviously not all deaths are that horrendous, but our death is one of the few things in life that we have absolutely no control over and no way out of. You get the hand you're dealt, and I pray like hell that my hand doesn't suck as bad as Zelda's did.
I think what makes this book all the more upsetting, if not scary, is that it forces us to consider the deaths of our loved ones, and the absolute powerlessness that we will feel during that time. I have been lucky enough to have avoided the loss of anybody super close with me. Outside of a few influential grandparents, there have been no deaths and certainly none unexpected. Although not a parent, I have animals and the thought of them one day dying is scary to me. If I had a magical burial ground in my backyard, I can't guarantee that I wouldn't use it to bring my animals back, even if it did make them smell like the grave.
This book was pretty good, but it didn't scare me in the way I wanted to be scared. Yes, it made me think about scary things, and maybe that's what people mean when they say a book is scary, but I didn't think that any of the scenes in the book were particularly frightening. The closest that it got was the mentions of my girl Zelda, that spooky bitch that haunts my nightmares. But still, it wasn't that bad.
My parents were incredibly liberal with the type of content they allowed my sister and I to watch when we were children. For that reason, Stephen King's It was my favorite movie from the ages of 4-5. For whatever reason, a killer clown with a penchant for terrorizing children didn't scare me. Zelda from Pet Sematary scared me.
I think that everybody has at least a little bit of fear when it comes to death. The idea of ceasing to be, at least in the physical sense is very scary. It goes against every instinct we have to roll over and accept it. However, knowing that it is something that we will all have to face, reading about Zelda's death was really disturbing because it could easily be me. The knowledge that there will come a day where I will be in pain, I will be helpless, and there will be no hope in my heart that I will one day be better is terrifying. Like, pants-shittingly terrifying. Obviously not all deaths are that horrendous, but our death is one of the few things in life that we have absolutely no control over and no way out of. You get the hand you're dealt, and I pray like hell that my hand doesn't suck as bad as Zelda's did.
I think what makes this book all the more upsetting, if not scary, is that it forces us to consider the deaths of our loved ones, and the absolute powerlessness that we will feel during that time. I have been lucky enough to have avoided the loss of anybody super close with me. Outside of a few influential grandparents, there have been no deaths and certainly none unexpected. Although not a parent, I have animals and the thought of them one day dying is scary to me. If I had a magical burial ground in my backyard, I can't guarantee that I wouldn't use it to bring my animals back, even if it did make them smell like the grave.
This book was pretty good, but it didn't scare me in the way I wanted to be scared. Yes, it made me think about scary things, and maybe that's what people mean when they say a book is scary, but I didn't think that any of the scenes in the book were particularly frightening. The closest that it got was the mentions of my girl Zelda, that spooky bitch that haunts my nightmares. But still, it wasn't that bad.