Awesome / Pet Sematary

• The scene where Ellie goes into a rage, worrying about Church's eventual death. "Let God have His own cat! Church is MY Cat!" Based on an incident in the author's life, when his daughter's cat died and he found her in the garage, stomping on bubble wrap and venting her fury. She delivered a nearly-identical speech. "Right on, beautiful."
• The earliest scenes of Jud, particularly when he calmly yanks the bee's stinger out of Ellie while everyone else screams.
• The almost total lack of Not Now, Kiddo from Rachel where Ellie's premonitions are concerned. When she gets the hang of the fact that the girl really spoke to Victor Pascow, she begins to take her seriously and rushes back to deal with Louis virtually on her orders. It's heavily implied that she would actually have been on time to prevent Louis' actions if the malevolent force of the burial ground weren't putting obstacles in her path. To put it another way: Rachel was winning the game and King had to take her out with a Deus Angst Machina.
• The entire novel's structure compared to most other horror novels (even King's own). There are almost no surprises, the audience sees almost everything coming from a mile away, and the narration often spells out how things will go wrong. So how is this book, published in late 1983, still considered his scariest? Specifically because we know what's going to happen. The reader spends the whole novel in a state of dread, waiting for things to get worse. Which they always do.

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