Mario the lone bookwolf's Reviews > Pet Sematary

Let´s just ignore the rotten elephant in the room and pretend that we´re a normal, happy family for potentially forever

There are many spoilers, some with puns that are more dead than alive, so be careful. Seriously, it´s impossible to vivisect this work without revealing secrets, because they´re so essential to the plot.

Drifting into darkness
It´s one of Kings´smoothest darkenings of a happy group of people, accompanied by increasing signs of decline towards madness and despair, from animals to humans and mental breakdowns. A big bonus is the unusual precision and shortness of the piece, King distills (not booze) instead of driveling towards 1k pages, making this exceptional dense in atmosphere and action without any length. Maybe the reason was, once again, already not subtly alluded,

The substance abuse problem
that made him reduce what, some call too much unnecessary drivel for absolutely no reason, ahem, to the normal amount of words needed to create a book. Subjectively I deem writing this one under the influence of whatever mix he took at this moment more creepy than many of his other works, because it includes sweet pets and kids and has something of a unique, outstanding touch in his whole work. So less real violence, much suspense, and a dark ending make it something creeping the heck out of everyone.

Seems legit
Honestly one must assume that people will do everything for their loved ones, no matter how dangerous, sick, or disturbing it might look for other humans. And not just strange hardcore DIY fringe shamans without any real, proven necromancy competence and experiences shown on darknet social networks for both Satanists and necrophiles getting really hard on this stuff, but for sober, reputable people with backgrounds in science too. So before someone discriminates desperate family members that practice dark magic, blood sacrifice, or voodoo economics to get their loved ones healthy, wealthy, or alive again, they should stumble a few zombie steps in their shoes. Better a living corpse than a dead body as the saying goes.

Personal fears
King likes to put real life impressions and personal elements into his works, Shining is for instance strongly inspired by his experiences as struggling parent, teacher, and alcoholic. Thereby one can assume that the inspiration for Pet sematary could have been the parents' fear to lose a child and how far one would go to save a loved one.

Slow escalation
Happy family life is destroyed and the search for a new hope starts with small experimentations that escalate to the ultimate conclusion. Continuing this idea, one could end up not just with special families, but whole towns or states run by extraordinary people. Depending on their mindset, great or terrifying new societies could be built on the grounds of resurrection, as long as there is no daily or weekly limit or how much the sematary can handle or they run out of Charons´obols and go soul broke.

The punishment for misusing indigenous burial places
It seems fair, who sins has to be punished, eye for an eye style. But does that mean that it would be good with permission? Maybe, although then the saved personality may get demented or mad after a certain time, just giving a short, good revival, before returning to the state it would have been with instant blasphemy fueled curse ruining mental capacities and social skills. Better to wait for a mind upload or nanobot repair set for cryogenically frozen dead relatives, because techno optimism seems to be the far safer bet than voodoo zombie puppets.

A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real life outside books:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...