Digging Where We Shouldn’t: A Review of Pet Sematary

There’s a reason Pet Sematary sits like a gravestone in Stephen King’s catalog. It’s one of his darkest novels, the one that feels most personal, the one that creeps into your bones and whispers: What would you do if you had the chance to undo loss?

On the surface, the plot is straightforward. Louis Creed moves his family to Maine, discovers a burial ground with the power to bring the dead back, and learns —very quickly— that sometimes dead is better. But the real horror of Pet Sematary is grief. Plain, raw, unbearable grief.

I’ve known grief, maybe not in the same way as Louis, standing over his child’s coffin, but in the quieter deaths; relationships that collapsed, dreams that rotted before they bloomed, people I loved who walked out of my life like ghosts. You don’t bury them in a graveyard, but you still carry the weight. And if someone offered me a patch of earth where I could dig up the past and make it breathe again, would I take the shovel? I’d like to say no. 

But I know better.

King understood this temptation, and that’s what makes Pet Sematary so vicious: it holds up a mirror to every one of us who’s ever said, “If only I could go back.” We refuse to accept that sometimes the story ends, and we don’t get to rewrite it.

When I read Pet Sematary, I thought about Amalia, one of my earliest stories. A woman trapped in cycles of violence and trauma, making desperate choices to survive. Amalia couldn’t bring the dead back, but she lived with ghosts all the same. Ghosts of her past, of the men who hurt her, of the choices that stalked her long after they were made. Writing her was my way of picking up the shovel, of digging up what I’d buried in myself.

Louis Creed digs because he can’t stand the silence of loss. I write because I can’t stand it either. We’re not so different. What makes the book devastating is how ordinary Louis feels. He’s a doctor, a husband, a father, not a mad scientist or a wannabe demigod. He’s just a man who loved too much and couldn’t let go. And that’s the trap. When grief consumes us, we become reckless. 

And then there’s Jud Crandall, the neighbor with his country drawl and weary eyes, who delivers the book’s most chilling line: Sometimes dead is better. That line hits harder than any jump scare because you know he’s right. And you know Louis won’t listen. The ending is inevitable and unbearable, and the horror lies in the slow, awful realization that Louis will dig, and dig, and dig, until the earth swallows him whole.

So, is Pet Sematary worth reading? Absolutely. But don’t go into it looking for a cheap scare, because this is the kind of book that lingers, like a funeral song you can’t get out of your head. It forces the question: What would you resurrect, if you could? An old love? A broken dream? The person you used to be? And if you did, what kind of thing would come crawling back?

Sometimes dead is better, but tell that to the part of us that still wants to dig.