“Let there be God, let there be Sunday morning, let there be smiling Episcopalian ministers in shining white surplices…but let there not be these dark and draggling horrors on the nightside of the universe.”

These are the thoughts of Louis Creed, the protagonist in Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary, as he carries the body of his dead son, Gage, through a densely forbidding forest in the middle of the night. His goal – to rebury the boy’s tiny frame in a forbidden burial ground so that he will live again. Along the way, he hears a sound. He suspects it to be the Wendigo, a large and lumbering creature of Native American legend described as turning men to cannibalism with a mere touch.

Even though the context suggests the main character’s fearfulness at the sound of this massive creature passing through the darkness, knocking down trees and coming within yards of discovering him, I wonder if Mr. King was actually doing what many authors do, that is secretively communicating a life experience. My guess is that King, sitting at his typewriter, just took a sip of the Glenfiddich 12-year-old.

I wonder.

As one of the best-selling single malt Scotch whiskies on the planet, this large and lumbering edition has the ability to turn its consumers into whisky cannibals – or so I’ve heard it said.

Okay, maybe not like people who eat human flesh. Maybe more like people who prefer things like raw meat and prefer to lick the blood from the plate afterward because they like salty, sour things.

Honestly, I don’t know why this whisky is so popular. The nose is barely sweet, giving over a very subtle floriated perfume, and the palate is dry, dreadfully sour, and difficult to swallow – like you just bit the heads off of the flowers you were smelling in the nosing. I’m almost concerned that this whisky is nearly as bad as Scoresby, except for some reason, in comparison (and I can’t believe I’m about to say this) Scoresby should be commended. While Glenfiddich lives a deceitful marketing life, working diligently and successfully to fool the masses into thinking that their 12-year-old edition is worth $30, Scoresby so honestly accepts its stature as a $10 bottle of sewage. It’s nice to know that at least one of the bottom shelf catch-basin cat-gut whiskies has this kind of integrity.

And before I get distracted by other more colorful terms that come to mind after a sip of the Glenfiddich 12-year-old, I must describe the finish.

Salty, like blood. Also sour. Vinegary. Ungood. Is “ungood” a word? Well, it is now, thanks to Glenfiddich.

No matter.

On second thought, it does matter. When you finally finish the bottle off, when it is dead and gone, whatever you do, don’t go up and past the Pet Sematary into the ancient burial ground looking to bury it in the ground that it might be reborn.

Some things need to stay dead. One of those things is the Glenfiddich 12-year-old edition.