King's Pet Sematary

Stephen King. Whatever your opinions may be (and I have heard a few, surprisingly a lot are negative), I quite enjoy snuggling up on a dark night and tucking into some classic King horror. I lost a whole day reading 'Misery' recently and it has indeed whetted my appetite.

The following exert is taken from The Guardian's blog section. A brave writer taking on King, one week at a time...


"King's introduction to this novel tells a cute story: about how he wrote it, then found himself horrified by it. It was so wrong, so dark, he put it into a drawer and thought he'd never publish it. It was, he claims, too horrifying to put out into the world. Then he reached the end of a contract, and he needed to publish a novel. There was only this one left, and his wife persuaded him to publish it, maybe against his better judgment. But he wondered if this was right; if it wasn't just too unpleasant.

It's a good story: the master of horror finding something too scary to exist. Doesn't matter if it's true or not; what matters is, it's part of the mythos. If you read that proviso before you read the book itself, you're in the state he wants you to be: ready, willing, but apprehensive, slightly on edge about what exactly this book contains – the perfect state to read some horror.

Horror has something of a bad reputation these days, surrounded by constant claims that, as a literary genre, it's on its last legs: there are, after all, only so many ways you can tell a ghost story. King has a curious relationship with horror himself. While his work moves between genres and styles, horror – in its truest sense – is what underpins much of these early texts. The Shining, Salem's Lot, Cujo, Christine: they're all horror novels, in the most conventional sense of the word, the kind that is so unfairly maligned: haunted houses, vampires, possessed whatevers. But King knows that horror can be something else. It can, at its best, make us reflect on the darkness of the human soul. Sure, Pet Sematary is a story about evil from beyond the grave, reanimated animals, terrible physical injuries … But more than that, it's about what happens when we want something so much we don't care about the consequences."

Pet Sematary is the next one for me, but I must remember to leave the hallway lights on. There is something about horror books that make them so much more frightening, and they stay with you longer, than films. It's your imagination - there is no quitting, turning off the telly and putting it to bed until the next time you press play. The book stays, those images you create, stay. Spooky. 

The writer goes on to explore his views on Pet Sematary: to read the rest of the blog - go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/feb/21/rereading-stephen-king-pet-sematary.

Happy Reading.