Yes, Pet Sematary Is Banned!

Stephen King has called Pet Sematary the book that scared him the most. Louis Creed moves his family to rural Maine, where a friendly neighbor shows him a burial ground beyond the local pet cemetery. Anything buried there comes back. When tragedy strikes Louis’s family, he faces a choice that the reader can see is catastrophic but that grief makes feel inevitable. King wrote the novel after his own toddler son nearly ran into the road in front of a truck, and that autobiographical terror saturates every page. Pet Sematary is a novel about the worst thing a parent can imagine, and what a parent might do when reason and love pull in opposite directions.

Pet Sematary has been challenged 7 times in Florida and North Dakota, flagged for violence, profanity, and occult/supernatural content. The violence is harrowing because it happens to a child, and King doesn’t look away. The “occult” objection is standard for any King novel involving supernatural elements. Like his other works, Pet Sematary gets removed from shelves as part of district-wide sweeps of his catalog. But this is arguably King’s most emotionally honest novel, a story about grief so total it bends reality. King himself put the manuscript in a drawer and didn’t want to publish it. His publisher convinced him otherwise, and the book became one of the bestselling horror novels of all time.