Review - Pet Sematary

The painful, hard thing about Stephen King's writing is that so often, he takes something real, something that people can experience in the real world, and builds the supernatural stuff onto that. In The Shining, there's Jack's alcoholism; in The Talisman, there's Jack/Jason's mother's cancer; The Stand plays on our fears of something, somewhere, in one of those labs, getting out of control; in Pet Sematary, it's the death of a child. So much of the book is completely real and believable: the arguments between Louis and his wife's parents, Gage running out onto the road and getting himself killed, Louis being willing to do anything to resurrect his son, anything. It's gruesome, because anyone with an ounce of imagination can put themself in that situation, imagine the horrible choice: do I try this and possibly get my son back or possibly create a monster, or do I pass this chance by and never find out whether it could have worked?

Stephen King is definitely not "just" a horror writer. His horror becomes much more "real" because he is also writing about real things.

This book hurt the most of the ones of his that he's read, and so it took me longer to get through it. I don't regret it, even if it grossed me out a bit. I think it's pretty brilliant, the ideas and the plot at least. Stephen King is not the most fancy writer in the world, but his prose works and goes down easy, and that makes it good, as far as I'm concerned.