King of the Dark Episode 5: Pet Sematary

Welcome to King of the Dark, our summer-long road trip through Stephen King's America. We've arrived at Episode Five, and Louis Peitzman and Liz Braswell are back, this time to talk with Bill Tipper about what may be the most potent misspelling in horror, Stephen King's 1983 novel Pet Sematary, a book that the author himself has called one of his darkest. Pet Sematary was inspired, King has said, by his own experience living near a dangerous highway, which raised fears for his young son's safety and caused the local kids, who had lost beloved pets to speeding trucks, to created a homemade graveyard that was the basis the more sinister one in the book. What he delivered to readers was a story of grief, loss -- and an absolutely bone-chilling master class in horror.

We also hear from our special guest, award-winning TV critic Emily Nussbaum, who told us about discovering the allure of Stephen King by accident, and her own young attempt at writing fiction in his style. Nussbaum recently dropped in on the B&N Podcast for a conversation about her new book I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way through the TV Revolution.