“Pet Sematary” is the first book I remember reading on my own from start to finish. I had heard they were planning to make a movie of it, a movie of unprecedented horror and life-wrecking trauma that house rules dictated I would not be allowed to see unless I first read the book. We were a cultured family; film was but a poor substitute for great literature. So I lifted a paperback copy from Albertson’s and holed up in the garage with it, a blanket, and a pack of hot dogs I cooked with a cigarette lighter. I was 7, and I was smitten.
As we become ever more urbanized, ever more removed from the rural, the secluded, the wilderness and everything it hides, the more those un-city places seem to become charged with mystery and power. Think of how often you’ve seen a barn or an ordinary pitchfork used in movies to induce dread, or how often the backwoods are the site for terror, populated by any number of depraved, incestuous mutants and cultish lunatics who thirst for blood. Those horror setpieces derive much of their power from the fact that they are now, for most Americans, wholly unfamiliar. A pitchfork is no more frightening than a spatula if you have to use one every day.
Which is, I think, part of why “Pet Sematary” was so enthralling to me. Living in Las Vegas, surrounded by the trappings of not just any city but of The City That Never Sleeps (the town motto we learned-I am not kidding-in 1st grade), I was thrilled and deeply spooked by the idea that living near the woods, away from the city, meant that it was possible to find an enchanted burial ground in your very own backyard. That a person could stumble upon such a place of cursed magic seemed possible only on the outskirts of human encroachment, in the woods, where that magic could hide and wait. Maybe that’s just a natural consequence of city life-when you live somewhere the lights never go out, you have to look elsewhere to find the terrors that creep in the dark.
Martha Stallman lives and writes in Austin, Texas.