[.ca] Pet Sematary (ISBN 0743518446)

Amazon.ca:
Renowned for its superior productions, BBC radio may have outdone itself by adapting Stephen King's Pet Sematary to audio. A clamorous cacophony of talking, whining, whistling, and howling, Pet Sematary is a quick, entertaining earful for those who don't have other auditory distractions to contend with, such as a car full of talking whining, whistling, howling children. However, the melodramatic prose marries well with the acting; such is the case when one reader--whose voice bears an uncanny resemblance to Kramer's from Seinfeld--tells another about the effects of the Pet Sematary: "Heroin makes junkies feel good when they put it in their arms, but all the time it's poisoning their mind and body--this place can be like that and don't you ever forget it!" (Running time: three hours, two cassettes)

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King bored me to sleep with this one:
God this was not scary. i was expecting to be up for nights. But I wasn't. It wasn't scary at all. It was pathetic. Read IT or Phantoms by Dean Koontz.

King At His Best:
If you look at the critical acclaim pages of nearly any Stephen King book, you will find that a vast number of sources probably proclaimed the work "Sheer Genius!" "Gripping and Terrifying" and, more often than not, "One of the Scariest Books I'd Ever Read". Ordinarily, I think it fair to say these claims are exaggerations--but not in the case of Pet Sematary. I've read a good deal of Stephen King's novels (more than half of them), and this one is by far my favorite. It has parts that you wouldn't want to read home alone late at night, but it is far more interesting than just monsters jumping out of shadows... What made this book so terrifying for me was that it was about human nature, and human reaction to death. The main character in the novel, Louis Creed, unleashes horrors into the world trying to ressurect his dead loved ones...and after the horrors are dealt with, he does it again. Pet Sematary is a deeply emotional book that explores just how far we would be willing to go to cheat death. If you read just one Stephen King novel, make it this one.

For me - this is the scariest book ever written:
Different people have different ideas about what is "funny" - same with "scary". If snakes or spiders or great-white sharks scare the peedoodle out of you, then your reaction to a story about them might be different than it might be for, say The Crocodile Hunter. Stephen King is prolific beyond belief. He is sometimes redundant. In Pet Sematary he wrote a story so compelling that I literally could not put it down, yet at the same time so horrifying that I practically screamed at myself NOT TO TURN THE NEXT PAGE!!!! King knows a thing or two about humans and human relationships, and in Pet Sematary he creates a realistic family that you care about.... then he does absolutely TERRIFYING things to them. Without giving anything away - I have to say that one of the reasons that this book affected me so deeply is that I had recently become a Dad back when this book first was released, and this book hones in on a new parent's worst nightmares, then just gets worse and worse and worse. If you like being scared by a book, and you can't think of anything worse than seeing your child killed - this book might hit you like it hit me. I repeat: This is the scariest novel I have ever read. As an aside: The "scariest book ever" was turned into a fairly cheesy movie. I give the book a solid 5 stars, but wouldn't rate the film any higher than 2 or 3. Another aside: My personal choice for "scariest movie" is "The Exorcist", while I found the novel of "The Exorcist" fairly bland and not paced well enough to scare me.

Fantastic:
Pet Sematary is probably my second favorite book from Stephen King. The story is good from the beginning until the end of the book. Read the book before listening the movie (the book is more interesting because there is more details than in the movie). If you like the books of Stephen King you must read this one.

Bloated, Not So Novel Novel:
(...)P>Others have commented on the fact that this novel borrows much from The Monkey's Paw. The idea of the Mic Mac burial ground is interesting, particularly the shadowy presence of the Wendigo, but growing up in New England as he did, it's difficult to determine just how much of the concept of Pet Cemetary was inspired, and how much was simply King putting a new coat of paint on an old short story with the obligatory childhood horrors, family mundanities, and heavy-handed foreshadowing thrown in for good measure. There were some interesting moments and ideas in this book, but few of them were realized, and what little was of interest was buried in 100 to 200 unnecessary pages of foreshadowing (someone's gonna get run over, we GET it!) and the obligatory King tales of childhood suffering. Top it off with a disappointing and (IMO) downright irritating ending (hmmmm, dead cat and kid are evil, let's repeat this mistake shall we?) and this is an annoying snoozer. Far too much build-up for no payoff.