Essay - Like Every Book that Hits the Bestseller List with Stephen...

Like every book that hits the bestseller list with Stephen King's name on it, Pet Sematary is a book full of horrors, the kind of book designed to m*****ke you draw up *****r feet and tuck them firmly underneath you while ***** are reading it just in case anything truly vile should find its way into your home and begin creeping across your floor in search of a tender bit of young, uncooked me*****t for a sn*****ck. King intends to scare us, and it's hard ***** imagine ***** anyone could read this ***** without at least a few episodes of goosebumps. And yet, while the book is certainly a model ***** competent writing and the effect is ***** spooky, it ***** have been a much stronger story had ***** been told from a different perspective. This paper examines the character of Victor Pascow as a way of delving into the important themes in the book ***** ***** ways in which the book might have ***** a more interesting one ***** ***** themes been given different weight.

In ***** quite compact nutshell, Pet Sematary presents us with the story of a pl*****ce that h***** been used as a burial ground since ancient times. For re*****ons complex and themselves quite ancient, ***** ground has acquired magical powers: Those things ***** are buried in it return to the world of the living, although not quite as themselves - and not transformed for the better as well.

***** story is possessed of a strikingly gothic sense of horror in part simply because of King's descriptions of things that go down into ***** earth and then - in a reversal ***** the natural order, in which things ***** are interred become over time one with the earth ***** come back out again instead. But the story is also frightening, and even more d*****turbing than it is frightening, ***** King uses this story to remind his readers of those ***** that humans are fundamentally and primordially frightened of - especially death of those that we love and ***** ourselves.

King reminds us in ***** book ***** we are indeed more paralyzed by fear itself than by any particular variety of ghoulie or ghostie ***** long-leggedy beastie. It is the unknown that frightens us, and one ***** the greatest of all unknowns ***** the exact nature of that transformation that occurs between life and death.

The story focuses on the Creed family, and it is more than anything Lou***** Creed's story. But we know ***** the very first paragraph ***** the book that Louis is not an entirely trustworthy narrator, at ***** from the perspective of those of us who do not live in Stephen ***** Maine where such people (at least if we are to be guided by h***** novels) m*****t ***** three-a-penny. The novel opens with ***** extraordinary statement ***** Creed, a statement that is important not only for its chillingly d*****turbing quality but because it takes us immediately to a pl*****ce in which the