Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary was published in 1983 and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for best novel in 1984. Stephen King has said he put the manuscript away after finishing it because he found it too unpleasant to publish, and it remains the book of his that readers most often describe as the one they wish they could unread. The title is spelled the way the children's sign at the cemetery spells it, which is a detail the novel keeps rather than corrects.

The story is a domestic horror novel with a small cast: a doctor, his wife, their two children, a cat, a neighbour and a road. King wrote it while he was teaching at the University of Maine and living in the town of Orrington, where the family house sat close to a highway that killed animals constantly, and the local children kept a cemetery near it. The burial ground beyond the cemetery is old in the story's terms, used by the Micmac, and the rule that governs it is never explained in supernatural terms; it simply works, and the book measures what that costs the people who use it.

Teddy, the family cat, is the first thing buried there, and the novel's escalation follows from how ordinary the first decision looks. King's interest is in grief as an appetite: the novel is not about a haunted place so much as about a man who cannot accept a particular loss and keeps choosing the option that is available to him. It was filmed in 1989 and again in 2019, and it has become one of the reference points for the domestic strain of American horror.