Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21 in the year 1947 in Portland city in the US state of Maine. Often dubbed as the 'King of Horror' (pun intended), King has been a prolific writer since his book, Carrie was first published in the year 1973. His books have sold over 350 million copies and a lot of his stories have been adapted into films, television series and mini series.
So what makes Stephen King the giant of horror literature? And why do so many authors credit King as the starting point for their obsession with stories? Well, for starters, King is a masterful storyteller. What makes Stephen King truly special is his ability to weave stories that will remind you of your darkest fears. It is truly a testament to his skills that despite being a horror writer, even if you remove all traces of the supernatural from his books, what remains is a malevolence, an undercurrent of unease that doesn’t come from his monsters but from the real people, flesh and blood!
In the honour of his birthday, looking back at one of Stephen King’s most brilliant but criminally underrated books, Pet Sematary.
In the introduction to Pet Sematary, Stephen King writes us a foreboding; after he had finished the book, he was so horrified by its contents that he put it in a drawer. He thought that he had gone too far and despite all the tales of monsters and vampires he had written, this book was the most horrifying! He was determined that it would never see the light of the day, not in his lifetime at least.
Obviously, that was not how it all ended. The book did get published but I will spare you the details of how it came to be! In the introduction to the book, King writes beautifully and takes you on a journey with his storytelling skills, and it’s always better to get your information from there.
I first read Pet Sematary when I was in the middle of a reading slump sometime ago. I started the book on a whim, without many expectations. Pet Sematary isn’t the first book that you think of when talking about Stephen King, neither does it compete for the prize of the most horror of them all! But probably, that’s the price one pays for being as good a storyteller as King is. The hidden gems remain just that. Hidden! Unless someone walks beyond the obvious choices and dives deep into his world. And what an adventure that is!
The story, like most of King’s, is set in a small town in Maine. Dr. Louis Creed, our protagonist, a rational and logical young man, moves his young family from Chicago to the small town of Ludlow. They move into a big old colonial bungalow, surrounded by green lush lawn with fields and woods for children to play in as far as one could see. An almost Eden-like place for living and for raising a family.
Almost!
Just beside Louis’s house, there is a busy highway frequented by speeding trucks, one that has claimed the life of many pets and unfortunately, a few children. And a little beyond the house, there is a pet cemetery (sematary is how it’s spelled) where children have buried their pet for generations. And just behind the sematary is an even older Indian burial ground, a place that reeks of malevolence and an unsatiated hunger and seems to give the creeps to Louis and his wife, when they first encounter it.
And the reader knows, not a good place!
Perhaps no other book of King deals with death and the concept of mortality and takes it as seriously as Pet Sematary does. Death is just around the corner, on the edges of the page, patiently waiting to spread its wings, hoping for Louis and his family to slip up. And with two small children, Ellie, five, and Gage, just about two, and a pet cat, Louis surely has a lot to lose.
At just a little above 400 pages long, Pet Sematary is not as humongous as King’s other works. And that works in the book’s favour. With its tightly plotted narration and its endearing characters; a lot of inspiration was taken from King’s own young family and as the familial scenes play out, you can’t help but feel your heartstrings tug at the love that exists in a family in the most mundane moments. Not many of us have encountered a monster clown who wants you dead (hello It!), but most of us have felt the pull of unbridled love; the kind that’s so fierce that it makes your heart hurt and brings with it, a fear of the same magnitude.
What if you lose the one you love the most? And what price is too great for keeping your loved ones with you?
Pet Semetary tackles this question head on. There are no supernatural monsters or ghosts in this book, we don’t encounter them anyway! But almost from the very first page when the action begins, and it does begin immediately, King places a ticking time bomb at the back of our heads. King builds his characters in the first half of the book, he familiarises us with them and apart from a few brushes with the concept of mortality, nothing much happens in terms of action. Just a family going on with its daily business, but there is a sense of unease, a dark mist of sorts, slowly filling up all the space and you don’t realise it until it’s all around you, making it difficult to breathe.
Louis Creek is a good man; a little snarky at times but he loves his family, even his interactions with his fatherly neighbour, Jud Crandall, make him a person you want to root for. He has a set of moral values, very normal and very average, like how almost all of us are! And he is a doctor, he knows that death is the most natural thing in the world.
And even then, when he is given a choice of either keeping his loved ones or accepting the truth and living with a heart shattering grief, we know it’s just an illusion. There is no right answer in this situation. But despite knowing his decision, we still hope, against hope, for Louis to make a sane choice. But what is sanity in the face of insurmountable grief? And how many of us can claim to see facts amidst our fury?
And that’s where the real horror stems from. Knowing that it would end very badly for Dr. Louis Creed, if faced with the same choice, a lot of us would probably do the same! Protect the ones we love, because what greater grief there could be than living without our blood, the ones we love the most in this world?
And how many of us can survive that?
After all, it is the cost we pay for being a human and for not understanding the most basic human truth. Mortality. Like how Jud Crandall in the book says, “sometimes dead is better”.
Sometime back, in a Vanity Fair article, while researching for best Stephen King books, I had read a line that stayed with me. The author wrote that ranking the best Stephen King books is like a Rorschach Test; our favourite tells a lot about who we are, everything that we hold dear and the fears that keep us up at night; the monsters beneath our bed.
Pet Sematary is mine.
The author is an Assistant Professor (English) at JC Bose University of Science and Technology, YMCA.
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