Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary is a 1983 novel by Stephen King.

Warning: Plot details follow.

The novel focuses on Louis Creed, a doctor who accepts a post as director of the campus health service at the University of Maine at Orono. He moves with his wife, Rachel and their two young children, Ellie and Gage, from their hometown of Chicago to a large house on the outskirts of the (fictional) small town of Ludlow. 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. Luckily their new neighbour, 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 big trucks.

Jud and Louis soon become close friends. Louis sees Jud as a surrogate for the father he never knew (his real father died when he was three). A few weeks after the Creeds move in, Jud puts the friendship on the line when takes the family on a walk in the woods behind their home; the path leads to a "pet sematary" where the children of the town bury their deceased animals. This eventually leads to a heated argument between Louis and Rachel. She disapproves of discussing death (she was traumatized by the early death of her sister from spinal meningitis) and worries about how Ellie may be affected by what she saw at the "sematary".

Louis himself has a traumatic experience during the first week of class when Victor Pascow, a student who has been fatally injured in an automobile accident, seems to address his dying words to Louis personally, even though the two men have never met. On the night following the death, Louis experiences a very vivid dream in which he meets Pascow in the "sematary" and receives a warning to not "go beyond, no matter how much you feel you need to." Although he wakes up very shaken - especially when he finds his feet and the bedsheets covered with dirt and pine needles - in the ends he dismisses the dream as the product of the stress he experienced during Pascow's death, together with his wife's lingering anxieties about the subject of death.

However, Louis is forced to confront the subject directly when Ellie's cat, Church, is run over outside their home at Thanksgiving. Or perhaps not? For Jud tells Louis a dark secret: there is another burial ground, farther into the woods beyond the "sematary", that has the ability to bring dead animals back to life. The two men bury Church in the burial ground and within a few hours the cat returns home. But it is obvious that Church is not the same as before. For one thing, while he was vibrant and lively before, he now acts lethargic, and ornery and -- "a little dead", in Louis's words. Jud confirms that this condition is the rule, rather than the exception, for animals whose owners have chosen for them to be resurrected in this fashion.

Louis is deeply disturbed by Church's resurrection and begins to wish that he had never done it. However, after little Gage is killed by a speeding truck, Louis becomes obsessed with bringing his son back to life--no matter what the consequences may be...

The novel's theme of death and the afterlife so disturbed Stephen King after he wrote it that he left it unpublished for several years, thinking that he had gone too far.

Pet Sematary was made into a movie in 1989, starring Dale Midkiff as Louis and Fred Gwynne as Jud.