by Jay Wilburn

The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process. As Richard Chizmar and Bev Vincent put up their posts on the official site, I will link those in the corresponding ones of mine on this blog, typically with the “After” posts.

You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.

Okay, let’s climb the deadfall … steady and sure …

My favorite review of this book is by Max Booth III, and he simply said, *cemetery.

I read this book maybe a year or so after I read my first Stephen King book in 1990, late Junior year of high school or early Senior year 1991. I checked this one out from the library. A lot of what I “remember” from the book has blended with a few viewings of the movie since then. I had checked out too many books for the time I had available for pleasure reading based on the school year’s demands at that moment. I read the others from the stack first which I barely remember. I started Pet Sematary last and stopped it, assuming I would have to renew it or check it out again later because of the time crunch. I ended up with a weekend free and read a good bit more. I thought I could finish, but then I came up short by about a hundred pages. Two days before I had to turn it back in, I plowed through the final pages in a frenzy between classes and even during classes. It wasn’t the best way to absorb the book obviously based on how little of it stuck in my head, but such is the reality of sporadic reading in my youth.

The losses in the book didn’t hit very deep for me in my first reading. They were just characters on a page. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the book. With horror early on, I read it the way I watched slasher films. They were good fun, but the blood wasn’t real. It was an act. I had no context for a parent’s fear of losing a child or a spouse except in an academic sense back then. I had lost pets when I was younger and had cried briefly, but that had been a long time before I was reading the novel in late high school. The person was in grammar school was significantly different to the kid I was in high school by almost the same degree to which I am different from that high school kid now.

I wonder if the story will strike me differently on this side of who I am. I’m also a writer by trade now and can tend to get metacognitive when I read work, trying to figure out what makes it effective or not as opposed to always immersing myself in the story like I tended to do during the early to middle phases of my life as a reader.

Let’s dig into Pet Sematary. My next post will be After Pet Sematary which you will find linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.

— Jay Wilburn, this is why I don’t have pets anymore

Jay Wilburn

Jay Wilburn has a Masters Degree in Education that goes mostly unused since he quit teaching to write about zombies. Jay writes horror because he tends to find the light by facing down the darkness. His is doing well following a life saving kidney transplant. Jay is the author of Maidens of Zombie Kingdom a young adult fantasy trilogy, Lake Scatter Wood Tales adventure books for elementary and middle school readers, Vampire Christ a trilogy of political and religious satire, and The Dead Song Legend. He cowrote The Enemy Held Near, Yard Full of Bones, and The Hidden Truth with Armand Rosamilia. You can also find Jay's work in Best Horror of the Year volume 5. He is a staff writer with Dark Moon Digest, LitReactor, and the Still Water Bay series with Crystal Lake Publishing.

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