Have you ever looked at a list of Stephen King's scariest novels? I did recently, and most people seem to agree that Pet Sematary is his scariest novel yet. I usually don't listen to audiobooks because I tend to lose focus easily. My mind wanders and then I have to go back and listen all over again. This one (mostly) held my interest for the first five hours, then it began to feel long and a lot of the time I was left thinking, "Get to the point." To be honest, I don't enjoy Stephen King's novels. His novellas and short stories are great, I love some of the movies based on his work (Silver Bullet, 1408, The Shawshank Redemption...Apt Pupil wasn't "bad," but it made me sick, though not as sick as the novella) and Nightmares and Dreamscapes was a fantastic mini series, but his novels...He's too verbose for me.
The audiobook is narrated by Michael C. Hall and is about sixteen hours long. I listened to it in the morning while applying my skincare and makeup before work, so it took me about two weeks to finish it.
As a note before getting into the actual book, it was really interesting to hear about how Stephen King came up with the idea for this story, from his own personal experiences.
There are major spoilers for the book starting now.
Pet Sematary begins with a family moving into their new home. The father, Louis, is extremely unlikable at the start of the book. He has no tolerance for his children. Honestly, Gage and Ellie are both annoying (I think it may be, in part, because of the way they're narrated), listening to how they scream and carry on drove me crazy, too. But that's why I'm not having kids. Listening to a parent think the things that he thinks about his family is incredibly off-putting and I took an immediate dislike to him. He does get better (until he begins resurrecting dead family members) as the story goes on, but it was too late by then.
When Louis' family goes away for Thanksgiving, his daughter's cat, Church, gets hit by a truck and dies. His neighbor, Jud, asks if Ellie will be devastated by the loss. Of course she will, Church was family. Jud takes Louis on a dangerous hike through the woods, past the "pet sematary," to an old Native American burial ground. As Louis buries Church, he has a nagging feeling that something about that place is wrong. When he tries to question Jud about it, he's told he'll understand soon.
And he does. Because Church, the previously dead cat, returns home. He has blood caked in his mouth and he smells like dirt, he stumbles around like he's drunk and he isn't behaving like himself, but he's Church. When he finally talks to Jud, his neighbor explains that when he was a child, he buried his dog there. The dog came back and he was never the same, but he was a good dog and he lived for several more years. Only one pet ever came back bad (a bull) and he tells Louis he shouldn't worry too much. Louis then asks if a person has ever been buried there and even though Jud denies it, he gets the feeling the old man is hiding something.
Let's talk about the way the family treated Church when he came back because it really upset me. They pushed him, kicked him, yelled at him. Then they acted surprised when he started hissing at them, after they beat him with a vacuum attachment and threw toys at him. I'm inclined to believe these imbeciles are the reason Church turned on them. I don't know how I would react to an undead cat, but I would like to believe I would treat it better than they treated Church.
I'm not sure why Stephen King "spoiled" Gage's death before it happened, unless he felt that him dying wasn't as horrific as his father deciding to bring him back from the dead. It's hard for me to say whether or not I would have been annoyed by this since I watched the original film when I was like, five years old, so I already knew he would die.
For about five hours, I didn't take any notes. This audiobook is almost sixteen hours long and a whole lot of nothing happens for most of it. What we get, repeatedly, are Louis' little asides to himself, and they got on my nerves in a way I didn't even know was possible. I couldn't stand it. If I had to hear "Oz the Great and terrible," "What you buy is what you own," or "Hey ho let's go" one more time, I would have lost my damn mind. Get on with it already.
Anyway. Obviously, Gage comes back and tries to kill everyone. Louis knew something like this would happen, because Jud came clean about the last person who was buried in that place. I can't even feel sorry for him because he knew better and he still did it. I get it, he was grieving. Or maybe he's a doctor with a God complex. But when someone tells you, "Yeah, the last guy buried up there came back and knew things he shouldn't have known and he was probably possessed by a demon," YOU DON'T BURY YOUR KID THERE. How are you even supposed to explain that to people? Louis is the worst.
Gage and Church team up to kill Jud and Rachel, and while I'm sure this wasn't meant to be humorous, I laughed. Was Church waiting that entire time for the demon to be set free so they could wreak havoc together? I still think he would have been fine if that damn family hadn't abused him when he came back.
Throughout the end of the book, after Gage had killed Rachel, I kept telling myself there was no way Louis would make the same mistake with his wife that he made with Church and Gage. Surely burying Rachel there was just written in for the movie. As it turns out, Louis is even dumber than I thought he was. Three strikes, you're out. The book ends with Rachel coming home, so you can draw your own conclusion as to what happens next. Personally, I'd like to think Rachel killed him and put an end to his madness. Good thing his daughter was away when Gage came back, she might be the only surviving member of this family. Her father most likely orphaned her by not heeding Jud's warning.
I think I understand why most pets came back okay-ish, but the bull, the other dead boy, Church and Gage came back "bad." There's a line in there somewhere that says something like, being touched by the wendigo makes you ravenous. I believe it was also alluded to that Gage was eating Jud and Rachel after killing them. And Church was eating just about every living thing he could get a hold of. The wendigo must have found them on their way back home. I could be totally wrong, but I hope not because I really want the wendigo to have a more significant role than just some creature stomping around the woods.
I haven't watched the original Pet Sematary in years, so maybe I'm wrong, but from what I remember, it seems like a pretty faithful adaptation of the book. Of course they cut some things out, some characters don't exist in the movie, but Stephen King drones on for five hundred years (usually about trivial things that don't affect the plot) and a movie is usually between an hour and a half/two hours, so I think they did a good job with the time they had.
Conclusions on the audiobook...I know most people really enjoyed Michael C. Hall's narration, but I found it grating. Jud was the only character that didn't bother me, his voice was perfect. I would like to reiterate that I really enjoy Stephen King's short stories and novellas, so I'm honestly not trying to insult him or his work. His novels just aren't for me and I won't attempt to read another one.
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