'I don't wanna be buried / In a pet sematary!' sing The Ramones in the theme song from the soundtrack of the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King's book. Those lines, and the lurid video that accompanied it, were my first exposure to the story, which to my teenage eyes looked deeply stupid. I have been guilty of sneering at Stephen King ever since but after recently viewing the TV versions of 11.22.63, Salem's Lot and The Stand, I have grown to admire his relentless storytelling and his weird, trash-Gothic sensibility. And so nearly thirty years after having laughed at The Ramones' song (which nonetheless remained riveted in my memory) I finally read Pet Sematary itself.
In the book, Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago, and his family move into a house in a small town in Maine located close to a pet cemetary. After the family's cat, Church, is killed by a passing lorry, elderly neighbour Jud Crandall urges Louis to bury the animal in an obscure area behind the cemetary, triggering a cycle of macabre events and revelations about the sordid history of the area.
I will admit that there were stretches of saccharine dialogue (of the 'Daddy, I wanna go pee-pee' variety) that had me gritting my teeth in exasperation and the ending was little more than a B-movie custard pie in the face. But otherwise this was a compulsive read with a lot of suitably taut prose and decriptive passages of real visceral power.
There is something very compelling and plausible about the book as an exploration of loss and grief that raises it above the level of the run-of-the-mill thriller and had King held back on the excesses of the ending, he might have achieved something genuinely haunting and even poignant. But this is clearly a writer wihout literary pretensions who is more interested in the grand guignol potential of his story and it's hard to begrudge him his wish to entertain his readers.
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