darchildre: the master reading war of the worlds (reading)
Renfield ([personal profile] darchildre) wrote2022-05-27 03:06 pm
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As previously mentioned, I have been rereading Pet Sematary. I finished it today, and have mostly learned that my vague 10-years-ago impression was correct and that I don't really care for it. I mean, it's not bad - certainly readable and entertaining enough. Just doesn't quite work for me. However! It has allowed to figure out a way to articulate why it doesn't work for me, which is useful.

So, a work of horror fiction is trying to produce certain emotions in the reader/viewer/whatever: suspense, dread, disgust, shock, horror, terror, etc. These all fall broadly under the larger umbrella of "fear", but different works mix them together in different ways and proportions, so you get a different-tasting cocktail of fear every time. Pet Sematary has a little horror, a little suspense and disgust, but it mostly runs on dread. Which I'll define for my purposes as "a Bad Thing is inevitably coming, there is no possibility of avoiding it, but we're going to drag out the time between now and the Bad Thing arriving as long as we can, because that will create tension in the reader."* With a side of "the Bad Thing will be brought about by the protagonist making a Bad Decision, and you get to feel dread about that too".

Pet Sematary wants to make the reader experience dread and it's very good at it. And that's why it doesn't work for me - I hate dread. The rest of the fear emotions I listed are things I enjoy experiencing in the context of horror fiction. They're why I'm a horror fan. But I don't find dread enjoyable on any level. Dread sits in my stomach in the same place that I experience real-life anxiety. It's not fun at all.

Contrast that with Misery, which I read right before Pet Sematary. Misery runs mostly on suspense (with a little horror and disgust) and that was fun - I tore through the book, I chose reading it over other activities, I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Pet Sematary, on the other hand, felt like a slog. I had to make myself read it, because the fear emotion it produced was so different and so dread-ful. There were a couple of times that I almost decided to stop reading - had it not been Stephen King, who is always engaging for me even when I don't care much for the particular book I'm reading, I would have. I've definitely given up on books before because they contained too much dread** and I couldn't make myself turn the page.

(Also the ending is anticlimactic and resurrected!Gage is uninteresting. Timmy Baterman, in the flashback, was interesting - Gage is a baby with a knife, like something out of a not-very-good slasher film. You get the silly slasher stinger ending too.)

Anyway. Just doesn't work for me. Also, again: none of the horror in this book would have happened if the characters were responsible pet owners who kept their cat indoors. Keep your cats indoors! It's better for the environment, it's better for the cat, and it lessens the possibility that you might try to resurrect your dead son as a horrible slasher movie monster.







*The difference between dread and suspense, to my mind, is that suspense is "a Bad Thing might be coming - is the protagonist going to be able to escape/prevent it?" Suspense allows the hope, however miniscule, that the dice will roll in the protagonist's favor. With dread, the protagonist can only roll a nat 1.

**The particular flavor of "I know this character is going to make an awful and self-destructive decision and I have to specifically dread that for age" will make me drop a book quicker than basically anything else.

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