Sunday, October 25, 2015

Stephen King's Pet Sematery still a classic

Stephen King is a prominent figure in the horror and fantasy genres, and is a New York Times’ bestselling novelist. Some of his most popular works include The Shining, Carrie, and IT, and many of these works have been adapted into movies. King was born in Portland, Maine on September 21, 1947. He studied at the University of Maine, and later became a teacher while he began to establish himself as a writer. He has sold more than 350 million copies of his books worldwide, and has had them adapted into many successful movies.


King’s first novel, Carrie, was released in 1973 and became a huge success one year after being published. The novel tells the story of a teenaged girl who gets revenge on her peers. Another well known novel that King released was The Shining which was adapted into a movie in 1980 that stars Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. In the novel the protagonist, Jack Torrance, and his family are trapped in a hotel that brings Jack to insanity from the dark past and isolated location of the hotel.


Pet Sematary begins with a family who moves to a house that is next to a highway frequented by speeding trucks. Louis Creed, the father and doctor, becomes good friends with his neighbor Jud Crandall and his wife. Jud takes Louis’ family on a hike to the town’s pet cemetery one day, which triggers bad memories and heated arguments between Louis and his wife, Rachel. After Louis has a traumatic experience with a patient in the hospital he begins to have nightmares about the cemetery. When his daughter’s favorite cat, Church, gets hit by a truck on the highway, Jud takes Louis to an ancient Micmac burial ground to bury him. The burial ground begins to bring horrors into his lives when they use the burial ground’s powers for the wrong reasons.


King uses a very consistent writing style that is present in all of his works. He describes the natural world in disturbing ways with things like “Dead fields under a November sky, scattered rose petals brown and turning up at the edges, empty pools scummed with algae, rot, decomposition, dust...” He also uses many existential themes in his books to add to the horror of what is already happening in the story and asks things like “...the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.” In Pet Sematary one major theme is the acceptance of death, especially in Louis’ daughter Ellie, “Death was a vague idea; the Pet Sematary was real. In the texture of those rude markers were truths which even a child’s hands could feel.”

Anyone who is a fan of horror novels should consider reading this book. The book is dark and disturbing and full of the topic of death if you’re into that. Anyone who is a fan of other Stephen King novels should definitely consider reading this book as well, because it is similar to his other books.

Senior Codi likes his cat and reading.

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