Stephen King fans will have a whole new way to have chills sent down their spines with the upcoming audiobook of Pet Sematary, which will be narrated by former Dexter star Michael C. Hall. The audiobook version of the unabridged novel will be available March 27.
“Readers have been asking for this audiobook for a very long time,” King explained in a statement. “I know the listening experience will be worth the wait with Michael as narrator.”
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In the novel, a family moves to a small town in Maine and discovers a pet cemetery across the street, with a local resident claiming that animals buried nearby have been known to come back to life. Following a tragic accident in which a toddler dies, the father buries his son at this supernatural location in hopes of his little boy returning to the family.
“We’re thrilled to finally bring Pet Sematary to King’s audiobook fans,” Simon & Schuster Audio president and publisher Chris Lynch shared. “Michael C. Hall is a perfect match for this timeless story, which has long deserved an unabridged production.”
Hall was a breakout star on Six Feet Under before embodying the serial killer mentality of Dexter, a role which earned him the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Drama TV Series in 2010.
Pet Sematary was adapted into a film in 1989, earning a sequel in 1992. Stephen King‘s recent uptick in popularity, such as last year’s IT going on to earn over $700 million worldwide, has scored the novel another theatrical adaptation. The upcoming film will be directed by Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch, who directed 2014’s Starry Eyes and are currently working on the third season of Scream.
Like many of King’s books, the origins of the novel were rooted in his own experience. The inspiration for the story came from an incident in which King stayed at a house that was across the street from an actual pet cemetery. Stephen King’s website describes what it was about the house that inspired him to write the novel:
“Stephen was serving as a writer-in-residence at the University of Maine at Orono and living in a rented house in nearby Orrington that bordered a major truck route which frequently claimed the lives of dogs and cats. In the woods behind his house, local children had created an informal pet cemetery. One day, his daughter’s cat was killed by a passing truck. Stephen was faced with the task of burying the cat in the pet cemetery and then explaining to his daughter what had happened.” The site adds, “It was on the third day after the burial that the idea for a novel came to him.”
The latest Pet Sematary film is slated to hit theaters on April 19, 2019.
[H/T Entertainment Weekly]