Sometimes, evenStephen Kingquestions the darkness of his books, and that was certainly the case with one classic novel that he originally hesitated to publish for that reason. As the author of hundreds of short stories andalmost 70 books, Stephen Kingnever seems to run out of terrifying ideas. InStephen King’s career that has spanned six decadesso far, it’s inevitable that there might be one or two stories that have rattled him.
King has always been a master of taking the prosaic and turning it into poetry, the monstrous beauty of his writing stemming from the fact that the horror almost always begins in the most mundane ways, and it’s that everyday setting that allows him to push boundaries. While King is quite at home with the dark and disturbing, even he can recognize when he may have gone too far, if not for himself, then too far for a potential audience who may not be as comfortable with the worst things the mind can imagine as he is.
He’s Been Open About The Fact That His Friends & Family Hated The Early Draft
As King explained in an interview withNPRwhile promoting2024’sYou Like It Darker,Pet Sematarywas that novel to make him question whether he should even publish it, a sentiment that he’s shared many times over the years. In fact, he never even intended to, merely writing it as an exercise:
“I had one novel calledPet Sematarythat I wrote and put in a drawer because I thought, ‘Nobody will want to read this. This is just too awful.’ I wanted to write it to see what would happen, but I didn’t think I would publish it. And I got into a contractual bind, and I needed to do a book with my old company. And so I did. And I found out – sort of to my delight and sort of to my horror – that you can’t really gross out the American public. You can’t go too far.”
He also revealed in that same interview thatItwas another book early in his career that made him question whether perhaps he’d gone too far and audiences wouldn’t have a stomach for the killer clown who preys on children. But, as he says, the American public seems to have a freakish love for the twisted and dark – simply look at our sometimes unhealthy obsession with true-crime documentaries and TV shows. There’s little in fiction one could throw at rational readers, as a general collective, that would completely turn us off.
That’s not to say that his writing is embraced by everyone; conservative and religious groups have regularly tried to get King’s books banned, to varying degrees of success (though usually to failure). But the public has embraced King and his work in ways that have sometimes surprised even him, never more than withPet Sematary. Considering the subject matter, it’s easy to see why the full-throated embrace of the 1983 novel was unexpected.
Pet Sematary Is One Of Stephen King’s Most Disturbing Books & That’s A Good Thing
It’s Cruelty Upon Cruelty
Anyone who has readPet Semataryknows how thoroughly dark, even bleak, it is. There’s no real way to spin the death of a pet and a child as anything but, especially not when the corpses of that deceased pet and child are then resurrected as twisted, malevolent creatures. Losing a child is a loss that’s impossible to wrap the mind around.Pet Semataryis cruel enough to do it twice to the Creeds and sandwich it with the abomination that Gage Creed becomes: first his accidental death, then his burial and resurrection as a murderousthing, then his purposeful death again at the hands of his father, Louis.
Losing a child is a loss that’s impossible to wrap the mind around.Pet Semataryis cruel enough to do it twice to the Creeds.
Some horror books have a darkly gleeful tone that lets you know the author is having a heck of a lot of fun putting their characters through the worst things imaginable, and it’s that sly wink at the reader that makes it more bearable. That wink lets you know it’s not real, it’s fiction, and we’re all having fun here. It’s that tone that keeps it from crossing the line, no matter how dark the actual plot might be.
There are no such winks inPet Sematary.King plays it straight, knowing the true horror of the novel lies in the fact that losing a child is all too possible, and it makes the impossible parts – Gage being resurrected inPet Sematary’s Native American burial groundand possessed by the spirit of a Wendigo – seem plausible. Louis Creed’s unfathomable grief is almost secondary to his ongoing horror, which in itself is a terribly dark reality of the book. In the end, he’s already dealt with so much that the death of his wife, Rachel, at the hands of the twisted entity that is Gage is almost an afterthought in the unrelenting waking nightmare.
It Opened New Doors To Explore Grief, Loss, And Meddling With Supernatural Forces
Despite that, it’s impossible for me, born in 1980, to imagine the horror genre before Stephen King. It’s equally as impossible to imagine it without a handful of his classic horror books, such was their vast and lasting impact on the genre and all that came after.Pet Semataryis one such novel, and it’s fitting that a book that itself was so influenced by a horror classic in the form of Mary Shelley’sFrankensteinwent on to influence later books.
Pet Semataryis great on its own merits (though, perhaps, King would choose to handle the Wendigo storyline a little differently were he to write it today with a deeper understanding of Indigenous culture), but it’s also more. As a blueprint that opened the door for other modern writers to explore in new ways grief and loss and a refusal to accept both by messing with supernatural forces one ought not meddle with, it’s a seminal work. As King proved to himself and others, darkness, real darkness, has staying power.
