Pet Sematary
First edition cover
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| Author | Stephen King |
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| Cover artist | Linda Fennimore |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Horror |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
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Publication date
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November 14, 1983 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 374 |
| ISBN | |
Pet Sematary is a 1983 horror novel by Stephen King, nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1984, and adapted into a 1989 film of the same name. In November 2013, PS Publishing released Pet Sematary in a limited 30th Anniversary Edition.
Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago, is appointed director of the University of Maine's campus health service. He moves to a large house near the small town of Ludlow with his wife Rachel, their two young children, Ellie and Gage, and Ellie's cat, Church. From the moment they arrive, the family runs into trouble: Ellie hurts her knee after falling off a swing, and Gage is stung by a bee. Their new neighbor, an elderly man named Jud Crandall, comes to help. He warns Louis and Rachel about the highway that runs past their house; it is constantly used by speeding trucks.
Jud and Louis quickly become close friends. Since Louis' father died when he was three, he sees Jud as a surrogate father. A few weeks after the Creeds move in, Jud puts the friendship on the line when he takes the family on a walk in the woods behind their home. A well-tended path leads to a pet cemetery (misspelled "sematary") where the children of the town bury their deceased animals. This provokes a heated argument between Louis and Rachel the next day. Rachel disapproves of discussing death, and she worries about how Ellie may be affected by what she saw at the "sematary". (It is explained later that Rachel was traumatized by the early death of her sister, Zelda, from spinal meningitis—an issue that is brought up several times in flashbacks.)
Louis himself has a traumatic experience during the first week of classes. Victor Pascow, a student who has been fatally injured in an automobile accident, addresses his dying words to Louis personally, even though the two men are strangers. On the night following Pascow's death, Louis experiences what he believes is a very vivid dream in which he meets Pascow, who leads him to the "sematary" and warns Louis to not "go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to." Louis wakes up in bed the next morning convinced it was, in fact, a dream—until he finds his feet and the bedsheets covered with dirt and pine needles. Nevertheless, Louis dismisses the dream as the product of the stress he experienced during Pascow's death, coupled with his wife's lingering anxieties about the subject of death.
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