Final Review

“It’s probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience.” (King 305)

✴

If I were to choose any line that describes Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, it would be that. King takes horror and creepiness to a whole new level. Not only is this story scary, it has a compelling plot that keeps you hooked until the very end. The book is broken down into two parts, though part one is scary part two take it to the next level. King hooks you by making you grow to love the characters of this book, only to rip your heart out by the events that occur.

Any reader who loves a good plot and a book that you could read in one sitting, they would love Pet Sematary. Also, any reader who is interested in supernatural books would find this book extremely interesting.

What has kept me interested is the way King uses language and imagery that really reaches out and grabs you. Pet Sematary is one of those books that is suspenseful and action packed until the end. King has a way of making sure that you do not put it down.

Point of View in Pet Sematary

In Pet Sematary by Stephen King, King uses the third person point of view in order to allow the reader to view what is going on inside each character’s head. A big theme in this book is insanity that is caused by the Pet Sematary and death. By using the third person point of view, the reader can watch as the characters are slowly taken over by insanity. The main character, Louis Creed observes this himself throughout the book, especially when observing his friend Jud Crandall and his wife Rachel Creed. These two characters are significantly affected by the deaths that have occurred in their lives. King writes,

”He listened for any circularity in Jud’s conversation; he listened to see if Jud’s grasp of when was clear (no need to check him on where; that would prove nothing because for Jud Crandall the where had always been Ludlow, Maine); he listened most of all for any use of Norma’s name in the present tense. He found little or no sign that Jud was losing his grip.” (King 257)  

This is clear use of Louis’ point of view, evaluating Jud’s mental state after he suffered the huge loss of his wife Norma Crandall. This could be seen as King using the loss of Norma to foreshadow a future incidence of Jud “losing his grip” or going insane. It’s important that King uses Louis’ point of view because he may be able to evaluate Jud’s mental state on the outside, but he does not know what’s going on inside of Jud’s head.

King uses Rachel’s point of view when she is telling Louis about her experience with watch her sister Zelda die, King does this in order to portray the post-traumatic stress that Rachel sustained when she was eight years old when Zelda died. She says,”…she had bottles of some dope that smelled like Smith Brothers’ Wild Cherry cough drops and that smell was always there…some nights I wake up…even now I wake up and I think I can smell Wild Cherry cough drops…”(King 270) This is clear evidence that Rachel is suffering from some type of post-traumatic stress. This is also evidence of King portraying insanity through the use of point of view. He uses Rachel’s point of view again when he writes,”The first of the nightmares had come to Rachel that night, and when Rachel woke up at two o’clock in the morning, screaming for her mother, she had been in horrified to discover she could barely get out of bed.” (King 277) King goes onto explain that Rachel had strained her back trying to move Zelda, but she was so traumatized by her sister’s death that she was convinced Zelda’s ghost had given her spinal meningitis (the disease that killed her). This again shows that Rachel sustained mental issues due to this death in her life, and the use of her point of view proves this to the reader.

            As seen here, point of view is extremely effective in showing how a character is feeling in the moment, or how certain events affect a character’s sanity. Since insanity/sanity is such a big theme in Pet Sematary, point of view is very effective and poignant in King’s writing. 

 

Reader Response

Thus far, I am really enjoying Pet Sematary. Not only is it engaging and keeping me on the edge of my seat, but the plot is also complex and has many twists and turns. If you were not familiar with King’s writing, the story starts off on a very light note and it seems that it’s going to be a happy story, but if you know that he’s a horror writer you begin to pick up on the mysterious, creepy hints right away. For example, he describes the path to the cemetery as being beautiful, but the fact that it’s so isolated adds a creepy vibe to it. Then, when his friend Jud takes him beyond the stack of fallen trees (that looks a lot like a stack of fallen bones) this place that was once described as beautiful, takes on a very horrifying feel to it. There is a constant build-up of suspense, that even when something dramatic happens you still feel like the situation is somehow going to get worse.

 

Characterization of Louis Creed

Louis Creed is a man with a big heart and good intentions. He’s a doctor who really cares about the people who surround him, and loves his family. For example, when he gets the family cat Church neutered, so that he won’t cross the road anymore and possibly get hit by a truck. He did this so his daughter will not have to worry about Church dying, even though he really doesn’t want to get the cat neutered because he doesn’t “change” Church. He did something against his beliefs just to help his daughter rest easier at night, and not have to worry about her beloved Church dying.  The reader can tell that Louis really cares about his neighbors Jud and Norma Crandall, Louis offers to assess Norma’s arthritis several times without her or Jud asking him to. At one point Norma is having chest pains, Jud actually asks Louis to examine her, and he replies, ”I’d be happy to examine her.” (King 131)

These are all examples of indirect characterization of Louis Creed. So far, I haven’t seen a direct characterizations of Louis, and I think King does this on purpose to make it seem like Louis is just an ordinary guy that no one pays too much attention to. Yet, there’s a dark side to him, something that King has yet to reveal about Louis Creed’s character.

            

(Pictured: Louis Creed in the movie adaptation of Pet Sematary)

Setting

            Stephen King always has stunning descriptions of setting in his books. In Pet Sematary the most intriguing setting to me is his description of the cemetery and the path that leads to it. It’s a place so beautiful, yet so morbid. It’s even ironic that he describes the path that leads such a dark place as an example of nature’s beauty. He writes,” Overhead, white clouds moved slowly toward a horizon the color of faded denim. And everywhere were the late-summer fields, used up at the end of the cycle, dormant but not dead, an incredible tawny color. “Gorgeous is the right word,” Louis said finally.” (King 35-36) Here we can see how beautiful the path is, even the characters acknowledge it. And King’s use of describing the sky as denim allows the reader to be able to envision exactly what the characters are seeing.

            Describing the cemetery is where King starts to get dark, but still the reader is inclined to view the cemetery almost as something beautiful. He writes, ”There was no carpet of needles here, Here was an almost perfect circle of mown grass, perhaps as large at forty feet in diameter. It was bounded by thickly interlaced underbrush on three sides and an old blowdown on the fourth, a jackstraw-jumble of fallen trees that looked both sinister and dangerous.” (King 41) He starts off by describing a very neat and well-kept place that could be seen as beautiful, but then he ends it by describing the fallen trees as “both sinister and dangerous”. Here, King is truly showing, not telling, the reader exactly what they’re looking at, and how they should feel about it.

            My reaction to the setting is that the cemetery carries a sinister vibe to it, and it is a place that someone should afraid to go to. Yet, there is something very intriguing about its beauty. I feel like that if this place existed in real life, I would be inclined to have to visit it. It’s pretty creepy so I would have to go in the broad daylight with friends, but it’s still a place I would be intrigued to visit. I absolutely love the way that King describes his settings and characters. He really immerses you in this world that he has created, to the point where it feels real. There is something so amazing about that, even when it feels so real that you are terrified along with the character, you have to step back and admire how achieves that amount of horror. 

A Title Says 1000 Words

           The title of the book I chose to read is Pet Sematary. By the title of the book I could immediately tell that this book is going to involve a pet cemetery, and probably children considering the misspelling of “cemetery” as “sematary”. This also gives the book a very dark, morbid feel to it considering its going to involve children creating a cemetery. (Also, it’s a Stephen King book so naturally I’m expecting horror.)

 

Here is a link to the NY Times review: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/10/21/books/king-review-pet.html