Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary by Stephen King
Doubleday - November 14, 1983
416 pages

Louis Creed and his family are moving from Chicago to the small town of Ludlow, Maine. He has a wife named Rachel, a kindergartener named Ellie, a two-year-old named Gage, and a cat named Winston Churchill (Church for short). Their neighbor is an elderly man named Jud Crandall. Jud and Louis become fast friends, and Jud warns the couple about the highway that passes by their house and shows them the pet cemetery (misspelled pet sematary). This causes Ellie distress, thinking about what would happen if Church died, and causes a fight between Louis and Rachel. A short while later, a college student named Victor Pascow leads Louis to believe strange things are happening.

If you don't like the last sentence because it's so mysterious, I apologize. I read this a while ago and didn't have the time to review it until now. One thing I found very distracting about Pet Sematary was the fact that Jud Crandall has a Yankee accent, one of the most annoying accents ever to be spoken (see Christine review). Another thing that I didn't particularly care for was the fact that nothing really seemed to happen that was suspenseful until the last fifty pages or so. When (spoiler alert!)Church gets run over on the highway but comes back to life(spoiler end), you assume that things are going to get strange, but yet they don't. They really don't get strange until the end, and by then you wonder why this couldn't have been accomplished in fewer than 416 pages.

Grade: C