BOOK REVIEW: Pet Sematary by Stephen King
Death is an all-encompassing syllable. The word, denoting nature's due release of the soul from God's created vessel, brings forth a barrage of meaning and emotions. Death can bring about bouts of sadness, misery, sour memories festering like wounds even after months of a loved one passing on. Death could also proffer wonderful memories with a loved one to be cherished with a feverish fervor, more than how they would have been cherished if they were walking the earth.
But what if death was just a rite of passing like graduating after highschool or maybe even being eligible to a driving license? What if you had the power of breathing back life into an empty vessel, would you do it? If you have conjured up such a thought, this book by Master of Horror Stephen King will set you screaming for the hills.
Dr. Louis Creed moves with his family to Ludlow, Maine. The rambling, old, unsmart and comfortable house looked right, felt right. A place where the family could settle; the children grow and play and explore. The rolling hills and meadows of Maine seemed a world away from the fume-choked dangers of Chicago.
Only the occassional big truck out on the two-lane highway, grinding up through the gears, hammering down the long gradients, growled out an intrusive threat.
But behind the house and far away from the road: that was safe. Just a carefully cleared path up into the woods where generations of local children have processed with the solemn innocence of the young, taking with them their dear departed pets for burial.
A sad place maybe, but safe. Surely a safe place. Not a place to seep into your dreams, to wake you, sweating with fear and foreboding. Louis's life just about goes downhill when he discovers what the MicMac burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary holds in store, when his pet cat, Church meets with an untimely death. Horror unfolds like a dark shadow as the plot gets thicker with zombified extremities.
Recently I had the privilege of watching the silver screen version of it and truth be told, was honestly dissapointed. The only similarity I could muster up was the name of the characters, and the resurrection of Church and Louis's dead child.
However, the plot was undeniably not as in the book. Louis's family was considered as a dysfunctional family, Rachel and Louis having a strained relationship and Ellie, his daughter, being the princess of all brats. But in the movie they are one happy-go-lucky, picture perfect institution.
Then even the sense of terror is misplaced when Louis tries to bury the dead bodies. In the story, Gage, the baby, gets run over by an Orinco truck but in the movie it's Ellie, Gage's elder sister who gets run over.
The story was more bone-chilling than the movie itself. Sure the movie had scenes where they had the Wendigo (a mythical Beelzebub look-alike in the story) show up through the mist, but it was a terribly miserable excuse of a creature that breathes life into the dead.
Probably the director also thought it more reasonable for a walking, talking child to be resurrected to wreak hell on earth compared to Gage weilding a scalpel in the book.
All in all, there were plenty of discrepancies that put me off the movie but made me appreciate the author's point of writing with a mind bent on the reader's sheer burst of adrenaline to read till the last page.
Hopefully readers who pick up this book have a strong heart and an even stronger stomach to hold in there as each gruesome event in the book conjures up vivid dreams of corpses and all things corporeal.
