15 Stephen King stories ranked from heartwarming to horrifying

11. Pet Sematary

This was actually the first Stephen King novel I ever read. As such, it’s remained with me to this very day. Pet Sematary is a haunting and often times brutal novel. For better or for worse, it was more influential to my 10-year-old brain than anything else I read that summer.

If children and animals in peril make you break out in hives, then you should quietly put Pet Sematary down and take a nice, peaceful walk. Even the strongest amongst you will likely feel affected by the pain and horror in this 1983 novel.

It all begins when Louis Creed, a Chicago doctor, becomes the director of campus health at the University of Maine. Louis and his wife, Rachel, along with their young children Ellie and Gage, move to small town Ludlow, Maine. Their new home is close to a highway. Their neighbor, the elderly Jud Crandall, warns them of the dangerous speeding trucks that take the road.

When Ellie’s cat, Church, is run over by one of the trucks, Jud takes a risk and shows Louis the pet cemetery. During an earlier walk, he had led Louis to a neat little plot on a nearby hill; however, this was not the “real” cemetery. Beyond the buried pets lies an ancient and evil place, previously used as a burial place by local Micmac natives. The duo buries Church there, despite plenty of ominous utterances courtesy of Jud.

Church, like previous animals buried at the “real” cemetery, comes back. Yet, he is changed. Church is slow and has a newfound taste for hunting, leaving the battered corpses of mice and birds around the house. He smells so awful that Ellie no longers wants to be around her cat.

Things become horrifically worse when Gage, Louis’s two-year-old son, is killed by a speeding truck. Louis buries the boy in the same ground where he buried Church, with even worse results. His beloved son returns as a monstrous, murderous beast intent on evil deeds.