While the horror genre has evolved a lot since the turn of the 21st century, many Americans still turn to Stephen King as the master of the genre, capable of transforming any situation into a frightening exploration of the unknown. His first novel, Carrie, has spawned three movie adaptations, one sequel, and an upcoming television miniseries from Mike Flanagan. Subsequent novels have become hallmarks of the horror genre, including Salem’s Lot, It, and The Shining.
But one story stands out from the rest of his body of work, due to both its disturbing content and how intimately it is told. According to King’s website, Pet Sematary is the scariest story he ever wrote, and it disturbed him enough that he was initially unwilling to finish writing it, much less allow it to be published.
Why would the Master of Horror be so frightened by his own story? In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, King explained that it was in large part because “Everything in the book up to the point of the supernatural stuff is true.” More than any other story he had written, Pet Sematary was inspired by his real life, with entire scenes mirroring real-world events. Read on to see how he transformed many of his own traumatic memories into a story that haunts both its author and its readers.
Pet Sematary Plot Summary
For those who haven't read or watched Pet Sematary, we've provided a brief plot summary to showcase just how much King's real life influenced the story. The book begins when Louis and Rachel Creed move to a small town in Maine with their children, 5-year-old Ellie and 1-year-old Gage. Their new home is next to a busy highway, which has killed many small animals. After the family cat, Church, is hit by a car, Louis learns that their new home is located next to two graveyards: the titular “Pet Sematary,” where local children bury their lost pets, and a forgotten Miꞌkmaq Indian burial ground.
According to their neighbor, animals buried in the latter graveyard come back to life, though they may not act the same as they did before. Hoping to spare his daughter some pain, Louis buries the cat in the supernatural plot, and Church comes home the next day. When Gage is later killed by a truck, the family gives him a respectful burial at the Bangor cemetery. But Louis is unable to process his grief, sending his wife and daughter to Chicago while he digs up his son’s body and reburies him at the Miꞌkmaq burial site. The child that comes back is no longer Gage, and he wreaks devastation upon the community, forcing Louis to reckon with the idea that “sometimes dead is better.”
The Real-World Inspiration
Now that we have a better understanding of the final story, it's time to look back on the events that led Stephen King to write it. He had burst into the publishing sphere with an incredibly successful debut novel in 1974, proceeding to release at least one book in each subsequent year. He was also prolific in his personal life, as he and his wife Tabitha had three children in the 1970s: Naomi (born 1970), Joseph (born 1972), and Owen (born 1977).
Our story starts in 1979, when King was offered the chance to be a writer-in-residence at the University of Maine in Orono. He and his wife packed up their children and moved to Orrington, Maine, where they rented a house connected to a busy road. As a neighbor explained, the truckers constantly driving through had killed so many animals that the local children had made a cemetery to honor their lost pets. The book's title, "Pet Sematary," comes from the misspelled sign placed in that neighborhood cemetery.
While the location alone might have prompted creative exploration, the true inspiration for King’s novel came from two events that took place at the Orrington house.
First came the death of Naomi’s cat, Smucky. After their neighbor informed King that a truck had struck and killed the cat, he and his wife debated whether or not to tell their daughter what had happened. She was too young to truly understand death, but they felt it would be wrong to lie to her, so they eventually told her that the cat had died. They buried Smucky in the pet cemetery, and Naomi marked the grave with a cross labeled: “Smucky—he was obedient.”
Later that evening, they overheard Naomi screaming in the garage that God couldn’t take her cat. In his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King explained that he frequently began his stories with a “what if” question. After hearing his daughter rage at the audacity of God to steal her cat, King was struck by a new question: “What if you buried stuff in the pet cemetery, and it came back?”
A few days later, reality sent him the final piece in the puzzle. While the family was playing outside, their youngest, Owen, took off running toward the road. As King tells it, a lorry was on the way, and his sole mission was getting to his son before the truck. Thankfully, he was successful. But the fanciful “what if” of zombie cats had been supplemented by the horrific “what if” of that moment. What if he hadn’t gotten there in time? How far would a man go to keep his child, even when death had already taken them?
In addition to these incidents, Stephen King based his book on the 1902 W. W. Jacobs short story “The Monkey’s Paw,” in which a man acquires a talisman that grants its owner three wishes—which are granted so cruelly that they cause the death and unnatural resurrection of his son. While the short story’s influence on King’s writing is clear, the true events of 1979 are responsible for the novel’s compelling yet terrifying core.
A Locked Drawer on the Long Road to Publication
Due to the personal tragedies—real and imagined—that prompted King to write Pet Sematary, the story almost never saw the light of day.
He told Entertainment Weekly that he had initially fallen in love with the idea of a cemetery where the beings that get buried in it came back to life. As he worked to expand it, he integrated elements of Indigenous culture that he had read about to explain why only some animals come back and what entity was allowing their resurrections. From there, the plot came surprisingly easily, with him telling Playboy that one of the novel's most grotesque scenes “almost wrote itself.”
But as he worked on the story, falling in love with the little family—so similar to his own—that he had created, the writing process grew harder. He knew that the story needed Gage to die, but as a father of a young son, it was difficult for him to depict such a loss. His earlier works had seen death as a punishment or as an aesthetic choice, but Pet Sematary made him think about how he would actually respond to the death of his child.
He finished the first draft in May 1979, promptly throwing the manuscript in a drawer to be forgotten about. His first full read-through had horrified him, and he told the Telegraph that he believed, “I had finally gone too far.” Rather than having his wife read the manuscript, as he usually did, King hid it away and shifted his attention to writing Christine, a far less personal story.
At the time, King decided that the book should never be published. But he soon found himself in a tricky spot, financially. He’d previously signed a deal with the publishing company Doubleday, which limited him to an annual income that was far less than his books had actually earned. But if something happened to him, his family could be forced to pay taxes on all of his books’ earnings, despite not actually receiving the money from them.
His agent advised him to make a deal where Doubleday would get one more book out of him, on the condition that they fixed the financials. Reluctantly, King pulled Pet Sematary back out of the drawer. Although his wife and a fellow writer seemed wary of publishing the book, he felt he had no choice. He rewrote it in 1982 and sent it to Doubleday, which published it in November 1983.
In the years immediately after its publication, King continued to claim that Pet Sematary never should have been published. It was too personal, too nihilistic, and too disturbing. Although he has come around to it in the decades since, Stephen King continues to call it his darkest novel ever. Considering the contents of the 60+ other novels he has released, that’s saying something. And it all goes back to a busy road in Maine and the little graveyard that children had created in response to their first experience with death.