Chapter OnePet SemataryIt’s the night before my first trip to the archives, and I still haven’t decided where I’m going to start. I open the Doubleday hardcover copy of
Pet Sematary I’ve just purchased at the Big Chicken Barn in Ellsworth, a vast consignment store full of creepy old dolls and spittoons—the perfect setting for a Stephen King story. It’s the same version I read in 1983, at age fifteen, when I took it out of the Witherle Memorial Library in Castine.
I’ve decided that to immerse myself fully in this project, I need to return to these originals. I want to re-create all of the sensory experiences that were a part of my first fearful encounters with King’s writing—to see the covers, smell the pages, and feel the unique heft of each book.
I burrow under my covers with
Pet Sematary and begin.
This edition has the face of a demonic, green-eyed cat on it: Church, the family pet that comes back to life after Louis Creed inters him in a Native American burial ground whose earth has gone sour. This Mi’kmaq land lies beyond the home in Maine into which Louis, his wife, Rachel, and their two children, Ellie and Gage, have just moved. After Church is killed in the road in front of their house, the Creeds’ neighbor, Jud Crandall, lets Louis in on the secret of the site’s power to revive the dead. The cat comes back—although he acts, feels, and smells a bit off. Then two-year-old Gage is killed by a speeding truck. Under cover of night, Louis digs his son up from his grave and relocates him to the Mi’kmaq site. The toddler returns in a monstrous form and murders Jud and Rachel. Louis, who continues to be pulled into the ground’s malevolent forcefield, buries his wife there as well.
The last scene in the book—with Rachel’s hand falling on her husband’s shoulder as her gravelly voice says
Darling—has stuck with me for four decades. I don’t have time tonight to get to the end, but my stomach twists just imagining it.
Returning to
Pet Sematary late at night, forty years after I first read it, I experience the first of what will become many eerie coincidences as I proceed with my work. I’d forgotten that Louis (just like me) had moved his family of four to rural Maine from a big city to take a job at the University in Orono. He’s the new head of University Medical Services. The student infirmary is where he’ll witness the first violent episode in the book, the death of Victor Pascow, a student who’s hit by a car. The campus may as well have been Oz for all I knew about it in 1983. But now, as a UMaine employee myself, I recognize the building and all of its surroundings as King describes them in the opening chapters.
Why was I being drawn to this story the night before I was starting my project? Did something want me to start with it? Because that can’t happen.
Right?It’s very late when I finally close the book and place it on my bedside table with the cover of Church the cat face down. So it can’t hurt me.
The next morning, I plug
47 West Broadway, Bangor into my Google Maps and it comes up as “The Stephen King House.” As I follow the directions, I realize that I’m being taken down the same road, Route 15, that the Creeds live and die on in the book. It’s also the same route along which Stephen and Tabitha had rented a home with their three children in 1978, when he worked for a year as a visiting writer and teacher at the University of Maine in Orono.
Now there were three UMaine employees living this story and traveling this road—two of us real, one fictional.
In his introduction to a 2001 edition of
Pet Sematary, King explains that the book’s premise was inspired by real-life events that happened during that year:
My wife and I rented a house in Orrington, about twelve miles from the campus. It was a wonderful house in a wonderful rural Maine town. The only problem was the road we lived on. It was very busy, a lot of the traffic consisting of heavy tanker trucks from the chemical plant down the road.
The family cat, Smucky, had been hit by one of these trucks, and the Kings’ daughter, Naomi, had taken the news especially hard, yelling at God to take His own cat—an episode that King would re-create in
Pet Sematary. (Ellie has a similar fit when it dawns on her that God will take Church someday.)
The Kings buried Smucky in an area behind the next-door house, identified by a hand-painted sign as a pet sematary. After that, they came very close to experiencing a major tragedy with their child Owen:
Our youngest son, then less than two years old, had only learned to walk, but already he was practicing his running skills. On a day not long after Smucky’s demise, while we were out fooling around with a kite, our toddler took it into his head to go running toward the road. I ran after him, and damned if I couldn’t hear one of those Cianbro trucks coming (Orinco, in the novel). Either I caught him and pulled him down, or he tripped on his own; to this day, I’m not entirely sure which. When you’re really scared, your memory often blanks out. All I know for sure is that he is still fine and well and in his young manhood. But a part of my mind has never escaped from that gruesome what if: Suppose I hadn’t caught him; or suppose he had fallen in the middle of the road instead of on the edge of it? I think you can see why I found the book which rose out of these incidents so distressing. I simply took existing elements and threw in that one terrible what if. Put another way, I found myself not just thinking the unthinkable, but writing it down.
He finished a draft of the book, let it rest for six weeks, read it over, and found it too “startling and gruesome” to pursue. Of all his books, this is the one that scares him the most, the one “I put away in a drawer, thinking I had finally gone too far. . . . Put simply, I was horrified by what I had written, and the conclusions I’d drawn.”
Wow. Even Stephen King needs to hide from his books sometimes. Now we had something else in common.
I’m thinking about all of these stories—King’s, Louis Creed’s, and my own—as I drive down Route 15, past the house in Orrington that the Kings rented that year. I know which one it is because the night before, in addition to rereading the book’s opening, I’d watched a video made by a superfan that identifies all of the locations associated with it. The Kings’ old rental looks an awful lot like the
Amityville Horror house with its creepy quarter-moon windows staring out at you.
I drive nine more miles, take a left on Union Street, another left on West Broadway, and turn through the open gates of their iconic Bangor home, the one that they purchased in 1980. I feel like a movie star as I roll past the security cameras and down the long driveway to the right of the red Victorian mansion. When Stephen and Tabitha were looking for a secure location for the archives, they decided to renovate the back extension they’d built onto their house years earlier for an indoor swimming pool and turn it into a climate-controlled space. This back area is where I’ve been instructed to park. It’s a cheerful setting once you get past the spider gates. Bright-colored flowers line the brick walk that winds around the garage and leads to the archive door.
I knock, and the Kings’ assistant of many years, Julie, greets me with a friendly, matter-of-fact hello. The interior is modern and light. The tiles from the space’s swimming-pool days still line the walls, and I can see a big conference table through the glass walls of the reading area. Julie introduces me to the housekeeper who keeps all of the buildings on the property in order. Her name’s Carrie. Of course it is.
Then she shows me how the digital database works, and I start searching. I find records for the earliest draft of
Pet Sematary, dated September 24, 1979, as well as the final draft, dated February 1979 to December 1982. I ask Julie if I can look at this last one first. She plugs in a code to unlock the door to the archives, then disappears behind it.
Copyright © 2026 by Caroline Bicks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
