Pet Sematary

The same argument with the grief made literal: a man who cannot accept a death uses a power he does not understand to undo it, and what returns is not what he lost. King's inheritance is Shelley's structure of consequence. Victor's creature destroys his family one by one; Louis Creed's decisions cost him his son, then his wife, and the novel ends at the moment he makes the same mistake a third time. Both books make the horror the MAKER's rather than the creature's. Filed MEDIUM: the debt is to the tradition Shelley founded, which reaches King through a century of retellings, rather than to a source he has cited.

King returning to his own structure and pushing it further. In both a family moves to an isolated place, the father is the one the place works on, and the danger is finally that he will do the harm himself. Pet Sematary is the version with the consolation removed. The Shining lets Danny and Wendy escape and gives Jack a moment of resistance; Pet Sematary allows neither, and King has said he put the manuscript in a drawer because he thought he had gone too far. Filed MEDIUM: an author's own development.