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.
