“This is really fucking terrible”: the Stephen King story so dark he called it “just awful”
An author who became an icon and one of the bestselling writers in history for specialising in scary stories realistically shouldn’t be left troubled by their own work, but there’s one exception in the Stephen King back catalogue that left him deeply disturbed with what he’d created.
Every bit as prolific as he is popular, it’s remarkable that King even continues to come up with new stories on such a regular basis, with Hollywood always lurking around the corner, ready to swoop in and pick up the distribution rights to his latest prose.
The results haven’t always been stellar, and there are plenty of adaptations that King likes a great deal more than others, but he would have been experiencing mixed emotions when a haunting tale so dark he could barely comprehend the fact he’d even written it became a regular source of live-action inspiration.
His bibliography contains plenty of ghouls, ghosts, and creatures, many things that go bump in the night, a hefty assortment of supernatural entities, a smattering of serial killers, and voluminous amounts of death and despair, but even King was forced to concede he’d crossed a line entering into the realms of infanticide.
The inspiration – for want of a better word – behind the 1983 novel Pet Sematary came when he was working at the university in his home state of Maine, with the family home sitting close to a major motorway where various household pets had a habit of being turned into mush by oncoming traffic.
As fate would have it, the King clan’s own four-legged feline became a puff of red mist on the roadside, forcing him to issue a devasting explanation to his daughter before burying the cat in their back garden. Letting his mind wander off into a tangent, he wondered what would happen if the cat returned to life, albeit forever altered by its sojourn to the afterlife.
Taking things several steps too far as he realised in hindsight, he then pondered what would become of a child who was killed in a road accident and then mysteriously reappeared in the land of the living. The end result was Pet Sematary, which finds young Gage Crandall being buried in the titular plot of land.
Despite the ominous exposition intoned by local veteran Jud Crandall, Gage’s grieving father, Louis, ignored his advice and went ahead with trying to resurrect his dead son. As tends to be the case in any horror story, it’s a decision he ultimately ends up regretting to a significant degree.
It quickly entered King’s legend that he branded Pet Sematary as being too frightening to publish and sell to a mass audience, with the author confirming the rumour’s authenticity to Entertainment Weekly. “No, I mean it’s true,” he said, before revealing his unsavoury memories, which had been dredged back to the surface by listening to an audiobook version narrated by Dexter star Michael C Hall.
“You know, I hadn’t been near it in 20, 25 years,” he offered.
“So I listened to it, and thought, ‘My god, this is just awful. It’s just as dark as can be’. I just had the greatest time writing the book until I was done with it. And then I read it over and I said to myself, ‘This is awful. This is really fucking terrible.'”
Not from a literary standpoint, though, but thanks to “all that stuff about the death of kids.” It didn’t stop the movie business from adapting it in 1989, again in 2019, and then once more for a prequel in 2023, which would have seen King benefit financially three times over from a novel he was disgusted with himself for even conjuring in the first place.
Darkness is inherent to the type of stories that made him a household name, but even someone as experienced as King can find themselves overcome with shock and horror at the words to emerge from their imagination and make it onto the page.
