What’s a book or movie that genuinely scared you?
I tell myself I do not scare easily. I have stood on a roof in a Georgia thunderstorm, watched lightning split a sky over Cobb County, and kept working because the tarp was not down yet. Fear, in my line of work, is usually useful. It tells you to check the ladder, check the sky, get down.
Stephen King’s Pet Sematary scared me anyway. Not the way a jump scare scares you, for two seconds, and then you laugh at yourself in the theater. It scared me the way a bad diagnosis scares you: quietly, and then all at once, and then for a long time after you put the book down.
I read it late, after everyone else in the house was asleep. Giang was asleep. The three kids were asleep, which in this house is a small miracle and not something I take lightly. The house was quiet in that particular way a house gets at midnight, when every creak sounds like a footstep. I told myself I would read one more chapter. I read about fifty pages past that, because King knows exactly how to keep a tired dad turning pages when he should be turning off the light.
Here is the part that got me. It was not the monster. It was the father.
Louis Creed is a doctor, a smart man, a man who fixes people for a living. And then something happens that he cannot fix, and instead of accepting it, he tries to outsmart it. He finds a place in the woods where the dead do not stay dead, and he makes a bargain he knows is wrong. I sat there in the dark thinking: I understand that man. I understand him in a way I wish I did not.
My whole job is built on the opposite idea. A roof leaks. I find the leak. I fix it. Water stops. Order restored. That is the deal I have made with the world, and most days it holds. Pet Sematary breaks the deal. It says: here is the one thing you cannot repair, no matter how good your tools are, no matter how early you get up, no matter how many times you run it through Kirk’s drill. Does it last? No. What does it cost when it doesn’t? Everything.
That is a roofer’s nightmare, but it is a father’s nightmare first. I have three kids under seven. I spend my days making sure the roof over them does not leak, the doors lock, the truck starts, the pantry is full. I cannot protect them from everything, and I know that, the way every parent knows that and tries not to say it out loud at breakfast. King just says it out loud, for three hundred pages, without blinking.
The next morning I got up at 4:45 anyway. Mr. Coffee, Folgers, black, loaded the night before. Two mugs before the house detonated. Giang looked at me over her own coffee and asked if I had slept at all. I told her the truth, which is that I had slept fine and also not at all, because I kept listening for the kids in the next room, the way you listen for rain on a roof you just finished.
I am not saying the book ruined me. I finished it. I put it on a shelf where I can see it, which is either brave or stupid, I have not decided. I still climb roofs. I still tell homeowners, with a straight face, that most things can be fixed. Most things can. That is still true.
But Pet Sematary taught me the difference between a problem and a loss. A problem has a repair. A loss just has a door you learn to live beside, and you do not go opening it in the woods behind your house because you miss what is on the other side.
So if you ask me what book genuinely scared me, that is the one. Not because it made me jump. Because it made me check on my kids at midnight, and then check again, and then stand in the hallway for a minute longer than I needed to, just listening to them breathe.
Some fears you fix. This one I just live with, on the right side of the door.
I keep the longer, more personal writing over at andrewgoodrick.org.
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