Pet Sematary

Dr Louis Creed is uneasy as he drives his family - wife Rachel, children Eileen and Gage and cat Winston Churchill (Church for short) - to their new home, a rambling white-frame house on the outskirts of Ludlow, New England. The children are tearful, Church is restless and even Rachel is short-tempered. Was it a wise move to leave Chicago? How would life in a small town compare with the heady pace of a big city? But the place is just perfect - apart from the busy road outside the house. And you can get used to the noise. And then the family meets Jud Crandall, their old and wily neighbour who takes them exploring and shows them the Pet Sematary, where local kids have buried their pets for generations. Only Eileen is slightly disgruntled. After all, her beloved Church is going to live forever...

The family has barely settled in when the nightmare begins - for Louis anyway. Day one at Maine University Medical Center and a young student, Victor Pascow, is brought in, horribly mutilated and dying - the innocent victim of a careless car driver. Pascow tries to warn the young doctor about the place beyond the Pet Sematary, a burial ground far, far older used by the Micmac Indians and touched by the very essence of evil. But Louis doesn't listen.

Death comes again on Thanksgiving. Rachel and the children are away in Chicago when Church is run over by a truck, his neck broken. As Louis worries about breaking the news to his young daughter, Jud persuades him to take the cat up to the Pet Sematary... and beyond.

Eileen and Church are joyfully reunited, but Church is somehow different. Smellier, slower and meaner. By now Louis has invoked powers best left undisturbed, forces of an elemental evil feared even by the Micmacs. And when personal tragedy strikes the Creed family his grief and desperation to turn back the clock at whatever cost lead Louis on a terrifying journey with consequences beyond the realms of human comprehension... and sanity.

Pet Sematary is more than vintage King. The author himself has confessed that the events of the novel left him terror-struck and showed him levels of blackness that he had "no desire to revisit'. With this account of one rational man's encounter with the forces of an unimaginable evil, Stephen King shows us that he is in a class of his own.