Pet Sematary
Ratings665
Average rating3.9
3/5 stars
The end had me kinda shooketh tbh but I didn't care about the rest of the book
The only complaint I have about this book is the super long build-up to the climax. It was definitely suspenseful, which I loved, but the build-up does last for a good majority of the novel. Everything else - perfect! Incredibly chilling and the ending leaves you with enough to make your own conclusions about what happened past the book's finality. A definite read for a lover of horror.
I was ready to rate this 5 stars but the last 70 or so pages weren't great. I hated the ending, it was so rushed and stupid.
This was my first Stephen King novel and I'm happy it was because his writing style is amazing. I cant wait to read more of his books!
Just a little upset about that ending though :/
Beautiful writing. Writing was one of the best of all of his novels I've read so far. Really enjoyed this one and a beautiful mix of dealing with grief with death + supernatural horror.
I felt the same attraction to this book that Louis felt to the woods. Funny, isn't it?
It's a nice story, but I didn't love it. So many people told me it was one of the scariest books by SK that I expected something, well, scary. It's not. It's overstretched at times, and I hate the main character, but I liked the overall experience. Gage is a great monster... wish we'd had more of that.
Novelón de Stephen King de su etapa dorada dónde consigue atraparte en una atmósfera cada vez más desazonadora, a medida que avanza la trama. Como es típico en él se toma su tiempo para ir creando el ambiente que rodea la novela e ir desenredando la psicología de los protagonistas.
Además me encanta el origen del mal de esta novela, acudiendo de forma parcial a la mitología nativo-americana.
Si te gustan las novelas de Stephen King no dudes en leerla. Eso sí, no la recomiendo de primera novela, puede parecer muy lenta para los no están habituados a su escritura.
If I'm not mistaken I am pretty sure I watched the original movie adaptation of this a long time ago but I remembered nothing about it besides the basics like the cat coming back to life and that's pretty much all I remembered. So I went into this blind pretty much. My husband got away with himself and kind of spoiled something for me but it didn't ruin my enjoyment of this book.
I don't know if it's because I've read several of Kings books at this point or what but this book was really easy to read. I still found myself zoning out sometimes and forgetting what I just read because King is very wordy and I feel like the book could have been shorter because a big chunk was just filler to me.
I really like the characters especially the kids Ellie and Gage they are so adorable and the neighbor Jud was a great side character as well. Some of the actions of the characters though had me rolling my eyes. I can't really talk about those without spoilers though so sorry for being very vague.
I hate how King spoils things that are going to happen before they actually happen. It takes away from my emotional reaction of the events. There is something that happens in this book that I am 100% certain would have broke my heart and made me balling my eyes out had he not so casually mentioned it in the chapter before it happened. Because of this when that reveal happened it didn't hit me as hard as it could have.
I think because King is such a hyped author I have some high expectations for his books. I expect his books to be scary, creepy, messed up etc. So when something else was being revealed I was expecting it to be way worse than what it was described as and I was disappointed in that. There was one comment that I really did not appreciate at all and again I don't want to spoil the book so I am just going to say how he described something in this book and likened it to being like a retarded boy. Ugh I hate that word and that really pissed me off.
I know my review sounds mostly negative but I swear I really enjoyed this book. Like I said it was an easy book to read and I found myself flying through it. It didn't scare me but so far no book/movie has.
Catapulted to one of my favorite King books on this first reading. You can see so many elements that were later used in It here, but still raw and only slightly developed. Well written, the human tragedy of this book almost outweighs the horror elements.
In the end there was only the clock, and the markers, which became eroded and nameless in the passage of time.
Louis Creed, a doctor, moves with his family to Bangkor, Maine. Next to their house there's a path to a pet cemetery. When tragedy pays a visit, he soon finds it holds powers beyond his wild nightmares.
I read Pet Sematary in my teens. I hadn't read much of King by then, and in a burst I read through his most famous work, mainly consisting of the early novels Cujo, Carrie, The Shining and, of course, Pet Sematary. The Shining was all the rage, no small part thanks to Kubrick's film. It was cool to read King then, and having a copy of The Shining in the house made you cool. But later as my tastes swerved, I left him behind. For many years. I think it was Doctor Sleep (2013) that brought me back. I read 11/22/63 (2011) and enjoyed it, then the Bill Hodges trilogy, and enjoyed it. I even tried The Dark Tower, something I had avoided because I remember King and me as quite unequivocally hit-and-miss. (Didn't get too far with that project, though.)
Then, during Halloween in 2018, I don't know where exactly I got the bug from, I wanted to go through some of his early classics. Maybe I just miraculously had some space in my reading schedule, and perhaps it was just the right kind of reading. And it was Halloween! This was to be the designated time to do just that.
Interestingly enough, although I remembered much of the plot, I had also forgotten some surprisingly elemental components of the story, sometimes so much so that I had no idea what would happen next. Ideal circumstances, then, if you ask me. And now, years later, as a father of three young girls, the novel opened up as a completely different experience. In my youth I was looking for the thrill, but this time, in a more meditative frame of mind (death is the topic of one of my favorite books in recent years, Frank Ostaseski's The Five Invitations), I was above all stricken by the depth of King's writing: the prose is cruel, the sense of anguish and loss so thick you could touch it, the grief so heartbreaking I broke down in tears several times. I was certainly not expecting to find Pet Sematary so heart-wrenching, brilliant, meditative and profound as it turned out to be. The bottomless darkness of losing a child, the endless what ifs that drive you mad, the heaviness of the wheel of time that you'd love nothing more than to overtake and coerce to go backwards. The emptiness, the bitterness.
Everything that follows in the story, the macabre, the horrible, the gruesome, comes from the notion of what it is like to feel so lost in one's grief that if one had the chance to tinker with the laws of nature and the universe, what would compel one not to do so? In this context I understand King's own statement, in the Introduction to the 2014 reissue by Scribner, that he considers it the most frightening book he's ever written. “Put simply,” he writes, “I was horrified by what I had written and the conclusions I'd drawn.” And this is the books' strength: it draws us in like the book's titular cemetery (the book draws its name from an actual pet cemetery King and his family had in their neighborhood), and it takes us far beyond the darkness we are comfortable with. Not for the thrill of it, but for the mere predestined-seeming and unrestrained compulsion. Life and death have reached their singularity, and there's nothing else left.
I read this on my Kindle, and also had the audiobook I listened intermittently, thanks to the Whispersync for Voice feature. Michael C. Hall's narration is stupendously good.
What do you do when something dies, but won't stay dead.....
Louis and his family move into a new home and find a pet cemetery nearby. Kids have been burying their pets there for years. But when tragedy strikes, Louis is about to discover there is more to that plot of land than just a place for beloved pets.
DO NOT READ THIS IN THE DARK.. oh my goodness! I scared myself silly with this book. I really enjoyed reading through it - however, there were sections of the book that made me thankful I could read through it during the day.
Fabulous and Stephen King never disappoints! We used this for our book club choice this month and it was great! What a book!
This book was off to a really good start but in the last run of the book which is what the entire story is leading up to was really a drag for me and what should have been the most interesting and thrilling turned out to be quite the let down...The narrator does a wonderful job at bringing these characters to life and appropriately vocalizing the super creepy moments in the book, would love to listen to more narrations by him.
4.4
I've finished reading this like book a week ago and I have completely forgotten to update my progress here at Goodreads. But nevertheless, I found the time to give a review about this book so here it goes.
This book literally shows the reader a lot of things about “death”; how death is the ultimate and that when a person dies, no matter how much you love them, there's no coming back. Except for the case of Louise Creed, his wife Rachel, their children Ellie and toddler Gage, and their pet cat Church. They just moved to a new place in the town of Ludlow - it was just a great place and everything's delightful. But the problems were; 1. The road right in front of their house with very very fast trucks passing by from time to time. 2. The Pet “Sematary” (which is a misspelled word for cemetery” at the end of a small path into the woods at the end of Creeds' property. One night Church was hit and killed by one of those trucks while Louise's wife and kids are out of town, and Lou's neighbor, Jud, takes him beyond the Pet “Sematary” to an old Indian burial ground to bury the cat. The next day, the cat comes back to the house, seemingly alive, but violent, aggressive, clumsy, and “non-Church like”. Then, later, Lou Creed's little boy, Gage is hit and killed by a truck. Louis will go through the ultimate test: bury Gage and bring him back. As the story progresses, just to prevent any major spoilers, Louise later realized that being dead is better. (BECAUSE LITERALLY ALL HELL WILL BREAK LOOSE).
Just as disturbing and horrific the second time around as it was the first. Stephen King at his darkest.
Was gonna go two stars just because I love the author so much, but this is the worst Stephen King book I've ever read. Dumb characters, ridiculous plot, poorly paced. I just hated it.
The passages about grief were very well written. And the first third of the book was pretty solid, if slow.
::SPOILER::
But I could never wrap my head around Jud's motivation for getting all the business with the sematary started in the first place. He knew the place was evil and the things brought back from the dead came back wrong. Yet he leads the charge to resurrect Church. King alludes to the forces in burial grounds compelling Jud to act, but I don't think he ever sold it. And without this initial motivation cemented in my imagination, the rest of the story fell apart for me. Not to mention the big bad villains of the piece are a house cat and a two year old. It just didn't work for me. At all.
::END SPOILER::
All that said, I think a sequel starring grown up Ellie Creed (great name!) would be pretty damned interesting.
The beginning was intriguing, the end was the best, the middle was tolerable.
For a ‘horror' book this book didn't actually seem to have that much horror in it. The end of it sure, the beginning some. The middle was more sad than creepy. And there was a lot of middle.
For those who know nothing of the plot (spoilers):
Louis Creed, his wife Rachel, daughter Ellie, son Gage, and cat Winston “Church” Churchill have just moved house. There's a path just off the house, heading towards the back, that leads to the ‘Pet Sematary' where children over the decades have buried their beloved pets. This is not the real cemetery that the book is about however. There is a second one behind this Pet Sematary. That one you don't, and shouldn't want to visit. We first see it shortly after Church dies when he is hit by a truck on the busy road in front of their house. Their neighbour, Jud, takes Louis and the cat to the cemetery beyond the sematary. Later that night Church comes back... kind of. He's not really the same old Church.
I quite enjoyed this part of the book and was intrigued to see what would happen next. Except not much did until the end of the book. Just talking, and reminiscing, and more talking. Which is why it probably took me so long to get through this book. I started it enthusiastically, then about half way through was just reading bits of it every now and then, until I got to the last few chapters and then got ‘back into it'. Frankly there was too much filler in this book for my tastes, and the tastes of most of my friends who have read it also.
Almost rated it 4 stars because I quite enjoyed the end, but could only overall rate it a 3.
It has taken me several attempts to get into this book over the years & i can say that, having finished it, I was not that entertained. I have always been a big fan of Stephen King & loved several of his books but i will not class this as one of them. It seemed to me to drag & i felt that the story could well have been told in novella form rather than as a novel, I read the extended version of The Stand last year & at almost 3 times the length I found it so much easier to get into. Sometimes, with Kings writing, I find that what he describes in 2 or 3 pages, most writters could set up in a few paragraphs. Pet Sematary seemed a little drawn out for, what I felt, was a very disappointing ending.