I'm curious about using Pet Sematary as a kind of case study of the horror novel, and how the horror novel portrays its main emotion: fear. I'm interested in analyzing where the fear comes from—what cultural/societal/personal/etc events make this fear relevant—and how that fear is then portrayed in the novel and what reactions it is meant to invoke in the reader. Stephen King's Pet Sematary is an interesting example for such questions because of the forward wherein King describes the novel coming from a "what-if" scenario involving his own son's near death experience and King's fear of losing his family. This, though, would only answer in small part what the fear in Pet Sematary is of.
This would be a hefty question, to be sure, and so I would also need to ground myself in genre convention and definition, asking what would make a novel a horror novel as opposed to something else. Even further than this, I would do some at least preliminary look into how the novel format actually conveys fear, as media differ in the manner they affect their audience. I would probably also ground the analysis in the theoretical framework of Freud's Uncanny, as that particular brand of fear is focused on a return to childlike mindsets in adulthood and Pet Sematary is very concerned with the child within the adult as well.