Of Stephen King’s horror novels, this one is probably my favorite. I first read Pet Sematary before I was a dad, and it’s eerie environment, the sematary seemingly out of space and time, in the woods, so close to where I grew up and played as a child, and yet, another world where the profane lingers behind the trees and the fog… then there’s the device of the road, ever present in the background, this monster outside the house that could attack at any moment. Of course the themes of mourning and the desperate desire to undo death, these are primal and universal.
After becoming a father, these fears became doubly so… I look at my sons, particularly, and how easily they have repeatedly run into a busy street, with no regard for what may be approaching at high speed… King wrote this book from a place that all of us touch daily. That is what makes this book so great. It’s about the fears borne from our very living.