Pet Sematary by Stephen King

Louis Creed, his wife Rachel, and his two children Gage and Ellie move from a large city to a small town. Louis works in the university hospital and his wife takes care of the children. They get acclimated to their home and befriend the gruff neighbor Jud Crandall, but something is still bothering them. On their property lies a pet cemetery where local children ritualize their pet's deaths, but the real and very powerful cemetery lies beyond a barrier. When the family cat dies, Jud shows Louis this burial ground, but the cat is simply not the same anymore when it returns. Then tragedy strikes their family and Louis plots to do the same without looking at the grave consequences.

Pet Sematary features an unlikeable protagonist but has some redeeming qualities. Louis Creed is awful and deeply entrenched in toxic masculinity. He's insensitive, quick to anger, and sees his wife as completely irrational and childish. At one point, he literally infantalizes her to the point of seeing her as his own daughter in adult clothes and it's gross. When tragedy strikes, Louis can't deal with his own emotions and sees it as his own responsibility to lead his family through grief. It's almost painful to read. Rachel, on the other hand, is much more sympathetic. She had to care for her disabled sister Zelda and grew to resent her because of her worsening behavior and the trouble it took to care for her. Her parents are the most horrible, abusive people who made her take care of Zelda alone when she was a child on the night Zelda died. Of course that is going to have far reaching effects for Rachel and it isn't weakness or childishness.

** spoilers **

The truly horrific part of the story is Gage's death and return. The grief and sadness of losing the young child is well written. Losing any family member is traumatic, but the loss of a child so young is unimaginable. However, the reveal is completely botched in perhaps an effort to couch the tragedy. Louis talks about it before it happens and completely destroys the shock of Gage getting hit so suddenly by a speeding truck. When Louis digs up his son's body to resurrect, the descriptions of Gage's rotting body are much more extreme than I expected. When Gage returns, he's almost a parody of the boy he was and it's so much more horrific because he was only two years old and could barely speak when alive. The comparison of him living and undead is much more stark and disturbing. The ending is creepy, but again the product of Louis' stupidity. I can't understand why he would make the same mistake a third time.

Pet Sematary has some creepy, disturbing elements that are eclipsed by the awfulness of Louis. He makes the most horrible decisions throughout the book and essentially ruins his family's lives because of his hypocritical inability to accept death. The true horror of the book is in the loss of a small child and its effects on a family, but it's lost in the hamhanded reveal of the death and in Louis' annoying perspective.

My rating: 2.5/5 fishmuffins