Plot Summary and Opinions on Pet Cemetery
Plot Summary and Opinions on Pet Cemetery
Pet Cemetery is about Louis Creed and his family. Creed is a doctor who’s just taken a job at a Maine university. On his first day, Victor Pascow is killed in an accident. Before slipping off into the never-never, Pascow gives a cryptic warning to Louis about not going beyond the Pet Cemetery. To emphasize that he means business, Pascow’s ghost comes back one night, takes Creed to the graveyard of pets, points to a deadfall and again warns Creed not to cross the barrier.
And Louis Creed never does cross that barrier. Yeah, bull. If he never did, we wouldn’t have a book, would we? Louis’s old neighbor, Jud, takes Louis beyond the barrier the night after the Creed’s cat is killed by a truck on the highway. Louis buries the cat in an ancient Micmac Indian burial ground. And the cat, Church, comes back. But, he’s not the same old cuddly kitty he used to be.
Later, Louis goes beyond the barrier again, carrying a more important burden. We’ll get to that.
Pet Cemetery is an interesting novel and it’s come to hold a unique place in my estimation of King’s work. I first read the book in about 1984 or ’85 – sometime after the paperback printing but before the movie. Do you remember the hype? Pet Cemetery was billed to be a novel so terrifying King himself was afraid to reread it. “The most frightening book Stephen King has ever written,” was the braying endorsement from Publishers Weekly on the back cover of the original paperback version. Naturally, all that hype was setting the horror connoisseur up for a letdown. What book could live up to that?
Pet Cemetery didn’t. Sure, it was an immediate No. 1 bestseller, but all King’s books were shooting to that top spot upon publication. (Did I use past tense? Oops.) Let’s face it, big sales and high ratings does not always denote quality. Have you ever watched Survivor? Why? So, the fact everyone with a few bucks was buying King’s new book didn’t impress me that much. I knew he’d never top The Shining, anyway.
Of course, Pet Cemetery had something else working against it. I was a...