King's introduction to this novel tells a cute story: about how he wrote it, then found himself horrified by it. It was so wrong, so dark, he put it into a drawer and thought he'd never publish it. It was, he claims, too horrifying to put out into the world. Then he reached the end of a contract, and he needed to publish a novel. There was only this one left, and his wife persuaded him to publish it, maybe against his better judgment. But he wondered if this was right; if it wasn't just too unpleasant.

It's a good story: the master of horror finding something too scary to exist. Doesn't matter if it's true or not; what matters is, it's part of the mythos. If you read that proviso before you read the book itself, you're in the state he wants you to be: ready, willing, but apprehensive, slightly on edge about what exactly this book contains – the perfect state to read some horror.

Horror has something of a bad reputation these days, surrounded by constant claims that, as a literary genre, it's on its last legs: there are, after all, only so many ways you can tell a ghost story. King has a curious relationship with horror himself. While his work moves between genres and styles, horror – in its truest sense – is what underpins much of these early texts. The Shining, Salem's Lot, Cujo, Christine: they're all horror novels, in the most conventional sense of the word, the kind that is so unfairly maligned: haunted houses, vampires, possessed whatevers. But King knows that horror can be something else. It can, at its best, make us reflect on the darkness of the human soul. Sure, Pet Sematary is a story about evil from beyond the grave, reanimated animals, terrible physical injuries … But more than that, it's about what happens when we want something so much we don't care about the consequences.

I remember reading this book the first time around. I had only seen a few proper horror movies, because persuading my parents to rent them for me was easier said than done, but I already had a favourite: Poltergeist. I loved the idea that your house might have ghosts hanging around. It was so exotic, so unlike the Victorian house of nothing that I lived in. In Poltergeist, the house was built on top of a sacred American Indian burial ground, and the ghosts that ruined poor Carol Anne's life were affronted by the way the land had been dug, supplanted, ruined in a quest to build affordable modern housing. I loved that idea so much: revenge, hundreds of years later, and based on traditions and notions that we, so ignorant and modern, cannot understand. I found that burial ground again in the film of The Shining: an excuse for the actions of the Overlook Hotel, and of Jack Torrance himself. Terror, driven by these ancient spirits, desperate for revenge. So when I began reading Pet Sematary, and found a mention of the titular cemetery being built on Micmac Indian land … well, I was prepared. That way lies death; that way lies horror.

I was wrong, of course. Never let it be said that King gives the reader what they expect. In King's world, the Indian burial ground somehow means life. And those movies, and most of the horror I had read up to that point (King, Dean Koontz, James Herbert – even the gateway drug that was Christopher Pike), focused their ideas on central figures representative of evil: bad guys, if you will. So I expected this horror-proxy to make an appearance in Pet Sematary too. I read about Louis Creed and his family, moving to Maine so he can start a new job; and about Jud, their neighbour, a nice old man who knew something about the Pet Sematary up the hill; and about their cat, Church, being killed by one of the many speeding trucks on the road outside; and how Louis and Jud buried the cat in a secret, locals-only burial ground; and how the cat came back. There wasn't a hint of anything truly evil – just something wrong, and a feeling of inevitability. A darkness there, waiting: in Louis's two children; in the road; in the warning that you should never try to bring a human back, because that is a wrong-step too far. More than any King book – more than any supposed horror, full stop – I kept thinking about it, dwelling on it. It reverberated. Other books were scary; Pet Sematary was true horror.

Coming back to the book after nearly 20 years, I was faintly nervous. I remembered how the book made me feel, even if I didn't necessarily recall its content. It's curious: scares don't stay with me, not really; but horror (something that makes you question beliefs, emotional and moral responses, yourself even) hangs around. And reading it now, it was exactly how I wanted it to be. Still only the vaguest hints of something malevolent, still no terrifying bad guy. Yet still that terrible inevitability, even though I knew it was coming. The teasing of it. It's a hundred pages before the cemetery is even introduced; it's another hundred before the cat dies and then comes back. It's not until the novel's final hundred pages that Louis's youngest son, Gage, is hit by a truck and dragged down the road; and even longer, closer to the climax, before he stumbles back to the house, dead behind the eyes, grinning.

The book is built from the subtlety of behind-the-scenes malevolence, constructed slowly and forcefully, and so beautifully paced that you cannot help but be pulled in. King was facing his own demons at the time, but they don't present themselves here. Here, he shows how subtle his hand can be. Louis Creed is a weak man who thinks that he's strong; a man who finds excuses, blames his failings on things he doesn't understand. And they're not even failings that are specific to him: we all have them.

When the novel reaches its conclusion – one that terrified me then and still does now, frankly – and its heart is revealed to be the same as that of the classic WW Jacobs story "The Monkey's Paw", we're prepared for it. But not that prepared. Because there's a hope that Louis will make a different decision: that he'll be the conventional hero we expect in fiction. But Louis's desires are the same as ours: to keep those we love safe and close, and to ensure that they have the best life possible.

There's a lesson in the tale: sometimes it's better to let things go, no matter how much it hurts. As Jud says, earlier in the novel: "Sometimes dead is better." And while we know that, in Louis's position we might do exactly the same as him. That's the skill of true horror, I think: finding our weak spot and making us wonder.

Connections

There's a brief section in the later part of the book where Rachel Creed, Louis's wife, drives past Jerusalem's Lot as she races back to her husband; in Insomnia, there is a suggestion that Atropos (long story short: bad guy related to fate) killed Gage, as he has taken the little boy's trainer as a keepsake; and there's a nice moment early on in the novel where Louis says: "All work and no play make Jack a dull boy," which of course was a common phrase long before Stanley Kubrick filmed The Shining, but took on a very different meaning afterwards.

COMING NEXT: Stock up on silver, it's Cycle Of The Werewolf