Synopsis: When Dr. Louis Creed takes a new job and moves his family to the idyllic rural town of Ludlow, Maine, this new beginning seems too good to be true. Despite Ludlow’s tranquility, an undercurrent of danger exists here. Those trucks on the road outside the Creed’s beautiful old home travel by just a little too quickly, for one thing…as is evidenced by the makeshift graveyard in the nearby woods where generations of children have buried their beloved pets.

Then there are the warnings to Louis both real and from the depths of his nightmares that he should not venture beyond the borders of this little graveyard where another burial ground lures with seductive promises and ungodly temptations. A blood-chilling truth is hidden there—one more terrifying than death itself, and hideously more powerful. As Louis is about to discover for himself sometimes, dead is better…

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King once self-proclaimed his novel, Pet Sematary, to be the scariest, darkest of all his books, a statement I expected to hold true for the king of horror, however, I found that this novel was not in fact scary in the sense that I expected, but rather more so disturbing, and then only near the end, after tragedy befalls the Creeds.

Truth be told, I spent a majority of this novel just waiting for something to happen. It’s a long story, and King spends much of the novel fleshing out the main character, Louis Creed, until he feels like an old friend that we’ve known all our lives. The character development is phenomenal, if painstakingly slow, and Louis and his actions throughout were quite believable, especially to someone who has felt the pangs of grief as he does. However, I never quite got over his treatment of the cat, Church, which actually made me quite mad.

It’s no secret that this novel touches upon a cemetery, and the title itself states it deals with pets, so it is safe to assume that you’ve already figured out that animals, such as Church, come back from the dead in this novel. But what I wasn’t ready for was the absolute abysmal treatment of the reanimated cat by Louis, who is the worst offender, and then the rest of his family, who are none the wiser to the fact that Church was brought back to life by the Indian Burial Ground located not in the Pet Sematary itself, but beyond, deep in the woods full of danger and strange sounds.

I love cats, and poor Church never asked for anything, nor did he ask to be reanimated, but once he is, his poor coordination, constant smell of decaying dirt, and his uncanny ability to be wherever Louis doesn’t want him is not his fault, and I literally spent over half the novel feeling sorry for this poor animal who is really only a precursor for what is to come much later in the novel, the darker twist that readers see coming from a long ways off, one they hope won’t come true, but know ultimately will.

And how that all unfolds is the portion that is disturbing. I wouldn’t say it is scary by any means, but rather just awful to think about, and a hard pill for many to swallow, especially adults with children in their lives. Luckily, King doesn’t seem to want to dwell on it much either, and this portion, the part that is really what Pet Sematary is all about, is the shortest portion of the novel, moving along quite quickly and then, like so many others of Kings novels, leave readers on a cliffhanger of sorts. One where we must write the rest of the story; one that might keep us up late at night just thinking, what if?

I think, had I the proper information going into this novel (I’ve never watched the movies, nor looked up the premise, save what I heard in “Broken Fingernails,” episode 17 of the hit podcast LORE by Aaron Mahnke, which is what made me pick up Pet Sematary in the first place), I wouldn’t have been as disappointed as I was with the lack of scares I felt as I slogged through the novel, and in this vein, I am very happy that I listened to this novel via audiobook.com, as Michael C. Hall did a great job narrating and switching voices, adding depth to the story that I feel I would have completely missed had I read this in the traditional sense.

All in all, I was looking for a few more scares in this novel, and thus, it’s a 3.5 star read for me.

I received this audio book as part of a free trial for audiobooks.com.

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