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Summary
Summary
""Sometimes dead is better...."" When the Creeds move into a beautiful old house in rural Maine, it all seems too good to be true: physician father, beautiful wife, charming little daughter, adorable infant son -- and now an idyllic home. As a family, they've got it all...right down to the friendly cat. But the nearby woods hide a blood-chilling truth -- more terrifying than death itself...and hideously more powerful.
Author Notes
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, he became a teacher. His spare time was spent writing short stories and novels.
King's first novel would never have been published if not for his wife. She removed the first few chapters from the garbage after King had thrown them away in frustration. Three months later, he received a $2,500 advance from Doubleday Publishing for the book that went on to sell a modest 13,000 hardcover copies. That book, Carrie, was about a girl with telekinetic powers who is tormented by bullies at school. She uses her power, in turn, to torment and eventually destroy her mean-spirited classmates. When United Artists released the film version in 1976, it was a critical and commercial success. The paperback version of the book, released after the movie, went on to sell more than two-and-a-half million copies.
Many of King's other horror novels have been adapted into movies, including The Shining, Firestarter, Pet Semetary, Cujo, Misery, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers. Under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King has written the books The Running Man, The Regulators, Thinner, The Long Walk, Roadwork, Rage, and It. He is number 2 on the Hollywood Reporter's '25 Most Powerful Authors' 2016 list.
King is one of the world's most successful writers, with more than 100 million copies of his works in print. Many of his books have been translated into foreign languages, and he writes new books at a rate of about one per year. In 2003, he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 2012 his title, The Wind Through the Keyhole made The New York Times Best Seller List. King's title's Mr. Mercedes and Revival made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2014. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2015 for Best Novel with Mr. Mercedes. King's title Finders Keepers made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015. Sleeping Beauties is his latest 2017 New York Times bestseller.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The first unabridged audio edition of the novel King considers his most frightening should be more than enough to lure the author's fans, and the fact that it's read by Hall, who played the eponymous serial killer on Showtime's Dexter (adapted from Jeff Lindsay's novels), will only add to the appeal. Hall effectively employs a full emotional range, starting with joyous. That's the dominant mood of Dr. Louis Creed as he and his family-wife Rachel, kids Ellie and Gage, and Ellie's cat, Church-arrive at their new home in Ludlow, Maine. Hall's narration quickly loses some of its cheeriness when young Ellie falls from a swing and bangs her knee and toddler Gage is stung by a bee. And, when their new neighbor, elderly Jud Crandall, leads them to a pet cemetery (with its misspelled sign) in the shadowy woods behind their home, the atmosphere grows distinctly chilly. The chill only increases when Church is killed by a car and Jud informs Louis-in an avuncular, Down East accent courtesy of Hall-that some animals placed in the Micmac Indian burial ground just beyond the cemetery have been resurrected. Louis and Jud bury Church there, and the cat does come back, but it's different, malodorous, and sullen. Eventually there are more burials and reanimations, resulting in ever-increasing grotesqueries, with the narration rising to a hackles-raising height of terror. The combination of King at his bloodiest and Hall at his most terrifying make this irresistible. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
Authors recommend the books that caused them to lose sleep at night. The scariest book I've ever read is the haunting of hill house, by Shirley Jackson. I read it one night next to my sleeping wife and found myself unable to move, unable to go to bed, unable to do anything except keep reading and praying the shadows around me didn't move. - CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of "Her Body and Other Parties" I never really recovered from the collector, by John Fowles, a work of shattering brilliance and unbearable suspense - as well as the clear inspiration for "The Silence of the Lambs." "The Collector" presents the reader with a pair of unforgettable adversaries, locked in a desperate yet restrained struggle: Frederick Clegg, the introverted kidnapper, and Miranda Grey, his prisoner. Writing before the F.B.I. created its criminal profiling unit - before the term "serial killer" had even been coined - Fowles was there, methodically exploring the reasoning of humanity's most terrifying predators. - JOE HILL, author of "Strange Weather" I remember it - 13 years old, in the suburban security of a life I took for granted, oliver twist snatched all of that away, when the boy was stripped of everything and left alone. I agonized over questions I never agonized over before. What if everyone died, leaving me alone? Adults were selfish and brutal, and in the case of Bill Sikes, evil incarnate. Sikes scared me right down to the bone and still haunts my dreams. I got goose bumps just typing this. - MARLON JAMES, author of "A Brief History of Seven Killings" The books that have profoundly scared me when I read them - made me want to sleep with the light on, made the neck hairs prickle and the goose bumps march, are few: Henry James's "The Ttirn of the Screw," Peter Straub's "Ghost Story," Stephen King's "It" and "'Salem's Lot" and "The Shining" all scared me silly, and transformed the night into a most dangerous place. But Shirley Jackson's the haunting of hill house beats them all: a maleficent house, real human protagonists, everything half-seen or happening in the dark. It scared me as a teenager and it haunts me still, as does Eleanor, the girl who comes to stay. - NEIL GAIMAN, author of "Norse Mythology" PET SEMATARY, by Stephen King. I got it as a gift when I was 11 or 12.1 remember being so scared reading it that I threw the book away from me as if it were a poisonous insect. For the first time I felt a physical sensation with literature. It's so dark, so brutal. It's also very scary: the utter hopelessness, the way King just doesn't offer any relief. - MARIANA ENRIQUEZ, author of "Things We Lost in the Fire" In the fall of 2001,1 was working by myself on a weekend afternoon at a mystery bookstore in Greenwich Village. Traffic was slow and I had some downtime to read Sara Gran's come closer, which one of the bookstore's co-owners recommended highly. I generally shy away from horror - gore on film doesn't do it for me, and my imagination runs wild with the print versions - but once I began Gran's novel, about a young woman named Amanda who begins to behave in strange, inexplicable ways, I could not stop until I reached the very last line: "And that's all I've ever wanted, really: someone to love me, and never leave me alone." A common wish transformed into monstrous deed made me shiver in fear, a feeling that persisted until the end of my store shift, and in the years thereafter. - SARAH WEINMAN, author of "The Real Lolita" The scariest book I've read in a long time is A REAPER AT the games, by Sabaa Tahir. Though it has terrifying, fantastical monsters (picture the kind of face that would earn the name "Nightbringer"), the scariest part of this book for me comes in a hauntingly visceral portrayal of domestic abuse. Some scenes were so terrifying and hard to read I became physically nauseated! - TOMI ADEYEMI, author of "Children of Blood and Bone" Possibly the scariest book I've ever read was Richard Preston's nonfiction thriller the hot zone, about outbreaks of the Ebola virus and the efforts to identify and contain that sort of hemorrhagic fever. I like Stephen King's comment that he read "The Hot Zone" between his splayed fingers. There are times when the simple listing of factual events can be more frightening than even the best works of imagination a novelist can concoct - although Shirley Jackson's classic "The Haunting of Hill House" comes in a very close second to "The Hot Zone" on my personal read-through-splayed-fingers list. - DAN SIMMONS, author of the forthcoming "Omega Canyon" The scariest book I've ever read is the autobiography of my mother, by Jamaica Kincaid. It's categorized as literary fiction, but it's a horror novel, too. It's narrated by a woman whose mother dies giving birth to her and death is the book's obsession. The book is bleak and venomous and yet it's written with such spare beauty. It's her masterpiece. - VICTOR LaVALLE, author of "The Changeling" The scariest book I've ever read is Octavia E. Butler's near-futuristic parable of the sower. Much of Butler's work is frightening because it feels so plausible and true, even when she's writing about aliens or vampires. But this book's dystopia of walled-off communities, useless government, unchecked violence and corporate slavery feels like the waiting headlines of tomorrow - and too many of our headlines today. When I first began reading it, I could take glimpses of the teenager Lauren Olamina's world only a few pages at a time. But Butler forced me to grow stronger as I read. Despite the horror of its prescience, the stubborn optimism that burns at the core of "Parable of the Sower" helps me face our truelife horrors. As Butler wrote, "The only lasting truth is Change." - TANANARIVE DUE, author of "My Soul to Keep" I came of age reading pulp fiction like Iceberg Slim and V. C. Andrews as well as true-crime books like "In Cold Blood." One summer when we were staying in a house in the country - I must have been 14 - I read helter skelter, by Vincent Bugliosi, and began my lifelong obsession with murderous cults. I developed terrible insomnia and lay awake with visions of Manson and his girls lurking behind the trees outside my window, waiting to get me - or maybe for me to join them. - DANZY SENNA, author of "New People" IN THE CUT, by Susanna Moore. I am not usually drawn to detective or murder mysteries, and am ambivalent about books that hinge on erotics and violence against women. But this is such a deft and smart book. I gulped it down in my dorm room after teaching in Vermont during the day and could not sleep for the rest of the night. - MARINA BUDHOS, author of "Watched" DEATH IN SPRING, by Merce Rodoreda, is a terrifying book for me both psychologically and metaphorically speaking, making any dystopian or scary novels written today seem like a quiet, tranquil stroll through America's most festive beachfronts. Her images were so highly ferocious and so controlled that any misguided readers could easily mistake her brilliance for arbitrary oversight or chaotic overintoxication or abuse of symbolism. I love how she uses language in a poetic fashion to penetrate the horrors of fascism and the horrors of survival or of wanting to survive in a debased system that abuses human basic need: to just be. - VIKHI NAO, author of "Sheep Machine"
Kirkus Review
This novel began as a reworking of W.W. Jacobs' horror classic ""The Monkey's Paw""--a short story about the dreadful outcome when a father wishes for his dead son's resurrection. And King's 400-page version reads, in fact, like a monstrously padded short story, moving so slowly that every plot-turn becomes lumberingly predictable. Still, readers with a taste for the morbid and ghoulish will find unlimited dark, mortality-obsessed atmosphere here--as Dr. Louis Creed arrives in Maine with wife Rachel and their two little kids Ellie and Gage, moving into a semi-rural house not far from the ""Pet Sematary"": a spot in the woods where local kids have been burying their pets for decades. Louis, 35, finds a great new friend/father-figure in elderly neighbor Jud Crandall; he begins work as director of the local university health-services. But Louis is oppressed by thoughts of death--especially after a dying student whispers something about the pet cemetery, then reappears in a dream (but is it a dream??) to lead Louis into those woods during the middle of the night. What is the secret of the Pet Sematary? Well, eventually old Jud gives Louis a lecture/tour of the Pet Sematary's ""annex""--an old Micmac burying ground where pets have been buried. . .and then reappeared alive! So, when little Ellie's beloved cat Church is run over (while Ellie's visiting grandfolks), Louis and Jud bury it in the annex--resulting in a faintly nasty resurrection: Church reappears, now with a foul smell and a creepy demeanor. But: what would happen if a human corpse were buried there? That's the question when Louis' little son Gage is promptly killed in an accident. Will grieving father Louis dig up his son's body from the normal graveyard and replant it in the Pet Sematary? What about the stories of a previous similar attempt--when dead Timmy Baterman was ""transformed into some sort of all-knowing daemon?"" Will Gage return to the living--but as ""a thing of evil?"" He will indeed, spouting obscenities and committing murder. . .before Louis must eliminate this child-demon he has unleashed. Filled out with overdone family melodrama (the feud between Louis and his father-in-law) and repetitious inner monologues: a broody horror tale that's strong on dark, depressing chills, weak on suspense or surprise--and not likely to please the fans of King's zestier, livelier terror-thons. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Pet Sematary 1 Louis Creed, who had lost his father at three and who had never known a grandfather, never expected to find a father as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly what happened . . . although he called this man a friend, as a grown man must do when he finds the man who should have been his father relatively late in life. He met this man on the evening he and his wife and his two children moved into the big white frame house in Ludlow. Winston Churchill moved in with them. Church was his daughter Eileen's cat. The search committee at the university had moved slowly, the hunt for a house within commuting distance of the university had been hair-raising, and by the time they neared the place where he believed the house to be--all the landmarks are right . . . like the astrological signs the night before Caesar was assassinated, Louis thought morbidly--they were all tired and tense and on edge. Gage was cutting teeth and fussed almost ceaselessly. He would not sleep, no matter how much Rachel sang to him. She offered him the breast even though it was off his schedule. Gage knew his dining schedule as well as she--better, maybe--and he promptly bit her with his new teeth. Rachel, still not entirely sure about this move to Maine from Chicago, where she had lived her whole life, burst into tears. Eileen promptly joined her. In the back of the station wagon, Church continued to pace restlessly as he had done for the last three days it had taken them to drive here from Chicago. His yowling from the cat kennel had been bad, but his restless pacing after they finally gave up and set him free in the car had been almost as unnerving. Louis himself felt a little like crying. A wild but not unattractive idea suddenly came to him: He would suggest that they go back to Bangor for something to eat while they waited for the moving van, and when his three hostages to fortune got out, he would floor the accelerator and drive away without so much as a look back, foot to the mat, the wagon's huge four-barrel carburetor gobbling expensive gasoline. He would drive south, all the way to Orlando, Florida, where he would get a job at Disney World as a medic, under a new name. But before he hit the turnpike--big old 95 southbound--he would stop by the side of the road and put the fucking cat out too. Then they rounded a final curve, and there was the house that only he had seen up until now. He had flown out and looked at each of the seven possibles they had picked from photos once the position at the University of Maine was solidly his, and this was the one he had chosen: a big old New England colonial (but newly sided and insulated; the heating costs, while horrible enough, were not out of line in terms of consumption), three big rooms downstairs, four more up, a long shed that might be converted to more rooms later on--all of it surrounded by a luxuriant sprawl of lawn, lushly green even in this August heat. Beyond the house was a large field for the children to play in, and beyond the field were woods that went on damn near forever. The property abutted state lands, the realtor had explained, and there would be no development in the foreseeable future. The remains of the Micmac Indian tribe had laid claim to nearly eight thousand acres in Ludlow and in the towns east of Ludlow, and the complicated litigation, involving the federal government as well as that of the state, might stretch into the next century. Rachel stopped crying abruptly. She sat up. "Is that--" "That's it," Louis said. He felt apprehensive--no, he felt scared. In fact he felt terrified. He had mortgaged twelve years of their lives for this; it wouldn't be paid off until Eileen was seventeen. He swallowed. "What do you think?" "I think it's beautiful," Rachel said, and that was a huge weight off his chest--and off his mind. She wasn't kidding, he saw; it was in the way she was looking at it as they turned in the asphalted driveway that curved around to the shed in back, her eyes sweeping the blank windows, her mind already ticking away at such matters as curtains and oilcloth for the cupboards, and God knew what else. "Daddy?" Ellie said from the back seat. She had stopped crying as well. Even Gage had stopped fussing. Louis savored the silence. "What, love?" Her eyes, brown under the darkish blond hair in the rearview mirror, also surveyed the house, the lawn, the roof of another house off to the left in the distance, and the big field stretching up to the woods. "Is this home?" "It's going to be, honey," he said. "Hooray!" she shouted, almost taking his ear off. And Louis, who could sometimes become very irritated with Ellie, decided he didn't care if he ever clapped an eye on Disney World in Orlando. He parked in front of the shed and turned off the wagon's motor. The engine ticked. In the silence, which seemed very big after Chicago and the bustle of State Street and the Loop, a bird sang sweetly in the late afternoon. "Home," Rachel said softly, still looking at the house. "Home," Gage said complacently on her lap. Louis and Rachel stared at each other. In the rearview mirror, Eileen's eyes widened. "Did you--" "Did he--" "Was that--" They all spoke together, then all laughed together. Gage took no notice; he only continued to suck his thumb. He had been saying "Ma" for almost a month now and had taken a stab or two at something that might have been "Daaa" or only wishful thinking on Louis's part. But this, either by accident or imitation, had been a real word. Home. Louis plucked Gage from his wife's lap and hugged him. That was how they came to Ludlow. Excerpted from Pet Sematary by Stephen King All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
| Introduction |
| Part 1 The Pet Sematary |
| Part 2 The Micmac Burying Ground |
| Part 3 Oz the Gweat and Tewwible |
