If you’re a horror author, you prefer to ignore the first rule they teach in MFA programs: namely, write from your own experience. Far better to consult your overheated imagination or, in the worst case, your feverish nightmares. I assure you that Edgar Allan Poe didn’t want to experience "The Premature Burial" or "The Pit and the Pendulum." Robert Bloch, author of Psycho , had no interest in checking in at the seedy Bates Motel. H.P. Lovecraft would have gladly skipped the opportunity for a face-to-face (face-to-mandible?) interview with Cthulhu or Azathoth.
But Stephen King actually paid a visit to the Pet Sematary. The resulting novel—which King later described as "the most frightening book I’ve ever written"—drew extensively on events and settings he encountered after returning to his alma mater, the University of Maine at Orono , for a guest teaching stint in the late 1970s.
King rented a house in Orrington, a rural community twelve miles from the University campus. The house bordered on a busy country road, and a neighbor warned him about the dangers it posed to children and pets. "That road has used up a lot of animals," the local shopkeeper told King, and in ominous confirmation of this remark, the author's daughter soon lost her cat Smucky, killed by a passing vehicle.
But the youngsters in the area had created their own impromptu animal graveyard a short distance away from the King residence, in a secluded wooded area. A sign on a tree declared it was the "Pet Sematary"—a creepy misspelling that the author later latched on to as the title for his book. Here Smucky was laid to rest, along with a homemade tombstone, prepared by King's daughter, which read: "SMUCKY: HE WAS OBEDIENT." (To which King adds: "Smucky wasn't in the least obedient, of course; he was a cat, for heaven’s sake.")
King describes an unnerving coda to this incident: "Our youngest son, then less than two years old, had only learned to walk, but already he was practicing his running skills. On a day not long after Smucky’s demise, while we were out in the neighboring yard fooling around with a kite, our toddler took it into his head to go running toward the road." King took off after his son but, at that same moment, could hear the sound of a truck barreling down the street in the direction of their home. The near disaster was averted—King either caught the boy, or the toddler stumbled. "When you're really scared, your memory often blanks out,” he later noted. “All I know for sure is that he is still fine and well and in his young manhood." [Ted's gloss: And is also a well-known horror writer in his own right, working under the name Joe Hill.] "But a part of my mind has never escaped from that gruesome what if: Suppose I hadn't caught him? Or suppose he had fallen in the middle of the road instead of on the edge of it?"
Almost every detail here found its way into King’s novel—even Smucky and the makeshift grave marker. Yet the end result is a book so phantasmagorical, that readers would hardly guess that so many real-life settings and incidents went into its making. The 'Pet Sematary' itself, as depicted in the book, is one of the eeriest settings in the history of horror fiction, on a par with Richard Matheson’s ‘Hell House’ or Mr. Bloch’s infamous roadside motel . The small touches—the graves set in a spiral, the chronological ordering of the dead pets, the broken-down tombstones constructed from scrap materials, the peculiar or misspelled tributes to "MARTA OUR PET RABIT" and "GEN. PATTON (OUR! GOOD! DOG!)"—make this amateur necropolis both palpably realistic and disturbingly unreal.
I could imagine Stephen King, in an alternate universe, pursuing a career as a humor writer.
Of course, the Pet Sematary in the novel is much more than a graveyard. The nearby land previously served as a Micmac burial ground, and a few local residents know about strange events that have taken place there over the years. Our hero Louis Creed, who has settled in the area to take a job as physician at the University’s student health center, gets an unexpected introduction to the dark powers attached to the Micmac land when his daughter Ellie's cat is struck and killed by a truck on the adjacent road. His neighbor Jud takes him to a hidden place beyond the Pet Sematary, and provides instructions on how to dig a hole and set up a burial mound for the animal. The next day, the cat returns home, resurrected from the grave—but now with more violent tendencies, jerky and unnatural movements, and a bad smell that won’t go away no matter how many times the animal is bathed and scrubbed.
Gradually Creed learns about the history of this area—and the handful of local residents who have used it to bring back a beloved animal from the Great Beyond. But when Creed asks his neighbor whether anyone has every tried to revive a dead human being in this manner, Jud grows secretive and defensive. In a brilliant stroke, King has telegraphed the inevitable plot twist in his novel, but in such a way as to add to the suspense and uncertainty. Usually readers lose interest when they know what will happen in a novel, and this is especially true with horror books, which depend on surprise for their greatest effects. Yet the opposite is the case with Pet Sematary. Readers soon realize that a dead person will rise from this grave in this novel. But who will it be? What will they do? And, above all, what will they tell us about their experiences in the depths of the Underworld?
Even in the hands of a lesser writer, these ingredients could serve as fodder for a successful story, and probably a juicy movie deal. But King is the master at extracting the maximum impact from his plots, and works his own kind of magic in these pages—perhaps not the same kind possessed by an ancient Micmac burial ground, but powerful in its own way. He doesn't just toss off cardboard characters, as do so many genre writers, but brings them to life (okay, maybe he has some Micmac blood in him) via incidents, details and revealing dialogue. King also learned long ago something that many horror writers never grasp —namely that laughter and screams can work in tandem. I could imagine King, in an alternate universe, pursuing a career as a humor writer, and although he only applies comedy in judicious doses here, he does so in effective ways, sometimes to dissipate tension, at other junctures to leave the reader less prepared for the frights ahead.
King is also a master at pacing, backstory and subplots, and though he will never put Cormac McCarthy or Marilynne Robinson out of business as a describer of landscapes, he knows when to linger on the scenery or call the reader’s attention to some uncanny detail. Indeed, Stephen King rarely rushes into the main conflict in his books, and often devotes a hundred pages or more to establishing the readers’ emotional connection to his characters. This may be the most underrated virtue of his craft—perhaps unmentioned because it is so unfashionable in the current day. Critics will remark on his skill in conjuring up scary scenes, but these often wouldn’t have half the impact on the audience without the fright-free narrative that precedes them. In some ways, King is a throwback to an earlier generation of genre writers. Just compare his careful build-up to key moments of crisis to the usual fare nowadays in horror tales and movies.
Above all, King possesses that supreme talent for a horror writer: knowing what to leave unsaid. Sometimes he offers explanations for the incidents in this book, but just as often he lets them events speak for themselves. Or even remain silent, as the situation warrants. And as anyone who has lingered in cemeteries late at night can tell you, the silence is the scariest part. That’s why folks whistle when they walk by.
I won’t tell you how Pet Sematary ends; but trust me—there isn’t much whistling involved. Our protagonist has been granted the rarest of powers, the ability to raise the dead. But in this instance, the worst horror is the one you bring upon yourself by Faustian overreaching. And if other scary tales aim to summon up the fear of the grave, King manages to show that the story of what happens after we bury our dead can be even more gruesome. The result is a horror classic, and one of King’s finest efforts.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.