An episode from 9/7/22: Tonight I spend an hour talking about Stephen King’s 1983 novel, ⁠Pet Sematary⁠. The anxieties attached to being a parent have rarely book put this memorably, cloaked as it is in the kind foreordained doom we expect from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Does the book also succeed so well because King’s usual strengths—gore and horror, sure, but also sheer entertainment, sentimentality, and suspense—have no place here, next to simple devastation?

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