Pet Sematary

Louis Creed moves his wife Rachel and their two young children, Ellie and Gage, from Chicago to rural Maine for a new job as a university doctor, and settles into a house across a busy highway from an old pet cemetery the local children maintain, its misspelled sign reading Pet Sematary. When Ellie's cat Church is killed on that same road, their elderly neighbor Jud Crandall leads Louis past the pet cemetery to a much older burial ground beyond it, once used, Jud says, by the Micmac people, as King spells the name, and helps him bury Church there instead of telling Ellie the truth. The cat returns the next day, alive but subtly, permanently wrong, slower, meaner, and smelling faintly of the grave, and Louis tells no one what he has learned about the ground's power. Months later Gage is killed by a truck on the same road, and despite Jud's warnings that the ground gives back only a twisted version of whatever it takes, Louis exhumes his son's body himself and buries him there too. What returns is not Gage: it kills Jud with a scalpel and murders Rachel, who has come home early sensing something is wrong. Louis, in his grief past reason by this point, kills the thing wearing his son's face with a lethal injection, then carries Rachel's body to the burial ground for one final attempt, and the novel ends with something that is not quite Rachel touching Louis's shoulder in the dark, a decision he has fully understood as a mistake even as he makes it again.

King writes the family's ordinary domestic life in unhurried, affectionate detail before the horror begins, so Gage's death, and everything Louis chooses afterward, lands with the full weight of a grief a reader has been given real time to recognize; King has said openly that of everything he has written, this is the one book that frightened even him.