Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 4

Free Day:

Those Terrific Teens

and their Hot Rod Machines

As I’ve already mentioned during Blog-o-weens past and present, I’m from Western Pennsylvania. More specifically, I’m from a small, rural area twenty-five miles to the north of Pittsburgh. I hesitate to use the term “town” to describe where I’m from. There is no Main Street, no town hall, no center around which everything else revolves.

I’ve used the narration from Robert Persons’s 2009 documentary/poem General Orders No. 9 in Blog-o-weens past. Persons’s film, a Chris Marker-esque rumination on the State (and state) of Georgia, is about the loss of identity and innocence as life moves from the rural to the urban, or as Persons’s says in the film as “deer trail becomes Indian trail becomes county road becomes interstate.” The narration for the film has been transcribed as a poem here, and there are a few stanza’s at its beginning that describe the sense of place I am trying to capture:

Where the roads of the county intersect, there is a town.


The town is at the center of the county.


From the center, the town extends 
for one mile in every direction.

It’s a pattern, a pattern of point and periphery, 
star and satellite, being and witness.

The courthouse is at the center of the town.


It’s a brick building on a granite foundation.


It has a clock tower and a weather vane.


The clock tower has four faces 
addressing each of the principle directions,
 and the weather vane is high above, 
brutal in its aspect and high in the air.

The building stands in the middle of the square 
and the square is formed by four streets 
running north and south, east and west.


Here, there is a sense of order 
from above and below, from within and without.


This shall be the center post of the world,
 the pillar of Heaven.

This is exactly what Economy Borough, PA, is missing: a sense of order, a center, a pattern. Other areas of Beaver County had that “courthouse in the center of town,” but not us. We had farmland, mobile home parks, and auto garages spread out over eighteen square miles. If we wanted Person’s sense of centering and meaning (or James Joyce’s sense of “omphalos”), we had to go elsewhere. And that meant having access to a car.

(You were wondering where I was going with all that, weren’t you? Not to worry, Blog-o-weeners, I have a graduate degree in English, so I know how to bloviate. I mean… who the hell else is gonna use the term “omphalos” when discussing Stephen King’s Christine, hmmm?)

Unlike Dennis and Arnie, I never had my own car as a kid. In fact, I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was eighteen years old. I never felt that drive (pun intended!) for freedom and escape. I was also not a “gearhead.” I was not (and am still not) the type of person to drop a wad of dough on some used junker and spend my time (and more money) fixing it up. The inner workings of a car were (and still are) a complete mystery to me.

So how did I, like the good American teenager that I was, explore the world outside the confines of my hometown? Well, I had friends with their own licenses and permission to borrow their parents’ cars who were happy to swing by and pick me up on the way to the mall or the movies or the local Eat’n Park or (if we were feeling particularly daring) the big city of Pittsburgh. (Not to worry… I chipped in for gas!) In that way, we were no different than the generations of American teenagers that had come before us: we used the mobility of the car to push against the boundaries (and sometimes the envelope) of what we were used to. The car was like a spaceship that gave us access to new, undiscovered worlds.

Not only was a car the gateway to the world without, it also allowed us to get in touch with the world within. The car was our internet chatroom. Imagine four or five teenagers piled into a Nissan Sentra, radio blaring, talking incessantly about school, girls, work, girls, the future, and… well… girls. The car allowed us to cement the bonds of friendship, as well as to define what that friendship was. It set boundaries around our friend group — there was “us” in the car and “them” outside of it.

The car was the key to economic freedom. Having access to a car meant getting to a job on time and making money that could be spent at the mall, the movies, etc. It allowed us to purchase our own clothes, which in turn allowed us to better tell the rest of the world who we were.

For some, the car was also the key to sexual freedom, too. You could pick up a date, head off to the nearest drive-in theater, jump in the backseat (or the front seat — a lot of cars still had bench seating), and get a heavy petting session in while E.T. was phoning home. Didn’t have the money for the drive-in? There were plenty of out-of-the-way places in rural southwestern Pennsylvania to go “parking.” The car was a roving bedroom on wheels.

The teenager qua “Teenager” didn’t really come into existence until the early 20th Century, when mandatory schooling removed young people from the workforce. Instead of becoming socialized to adults at a factory, they socialized with one another in another factory of sorts — the local high school. This allowed young people to develop their own rituals and customs and norms outside of the family. With the post-war economic boom in the 1950s, car ownership was within reach of teens. The used cars of the 1930 and 1940s could be purchased and fixed up easily. And those fixed up hot rods could, in turn, be used to defend American values from evils such as giant gila monsters, ghosts, and teenage werewolves.

My teenaged experiences with cars in the 1980s were essentially no different from millions of other kids over the previous thirty or forty years. Thanks to mass media (like Christine), I think the connection between teens and cars is a more or less universal one. You may never have owned a car in your life, you may not even be from the United States, but thanks to movies like American Graffiti or Van Nuys Blvd. just about everyone understands what the car means to a teenager.

I think Stephen King is playing with these teenaged tropes in Christine. Sometimes he plays them straight and other times he tips them on their ear. One of the things I’d ask you to keep track of is how Christine, instead of acting as a lifeline to freedom for Arnie, is actually alienating him — from his parents, from Dennis, from Leigh, and from himself.

Well, that’s enough of that. Time to hit the books again, Blog-o-weeners. For tomorrow, why don’t you read Part 1: Chapters 8, 9, & 10. I think you’ll dig ‘em. We get our first look at a staple of Stephen King novels. I think you know who I’m talkin’ about: the high school bully with a chip on his shoulder, a switchblade in his mitts, and not a thought in his head.

But, hey, let’s not be too hard on the high school bully. Let’s try to understand where they are coming from. After all…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 3

Part 1: Chapters 5, 6, & 7

After leaving LeBay’s, Dennis finds Arnie parked on one of Libertyville’s side roads with a flat tire. A local housewife and her rugrats are less than happy to see Christine sitting in front of their house. Dennis, good friend that he is, runs off to buy a new tire. When he returns, Arnie and the owner of the house, home now from work, are standing nose-to-nose spouting witty repartee at one another. Dennis intervenes, Christine is fitted with her new tire, and they drive off in a cloud of exhaust.

Arriving at Darnell’s Garage, Arnie and Christine are not greeted warmly. Will Darnell dresses Arnie down in front of everyone, and Arnie, much to Dennis’s consternation, accepts it. Christine is left at Darnell’s, and Dennis takes Arnie home.

On the way, Arnie breaks down. The day was just too much for him. In between his sobbing, he promises that he will get them all, that he will make them all pay. Dennis doesn’t like the sound of that.

That night, Dennis has a nightmare. He is back at LeBay’s. Standing in front of the open garage door, Dennis sees a rejuvenated Christine. Her engine revs up, but there is no one behind the wheel. Christine urges Dennis to go cruising with her; Dennis refuses. The nightmare ends as Christine lunges forward, her engine screaming her fury… 

As someone who just finished writing a novel set in Pittsburgh (cough, cough… shameless self-promotion…), I know that it is difficult to render the Pittsburgh accent into print. I think what hurts its chances of being generally understood by your average reader is that it isn’t as well known as your Noo Yawk or Bahston or even your, like, Valley Girl accents. If you say a character is from Boston, and you write “Let’s go park our cars down in the Harvard yard!” most readers will know how to hear those words. But if I write “When are you clowns going to learn not to fool around downtown?” would you know how that is supposed to sound in Pittsburghese? No? Well here is a primer for all of you non-Western Pennsylvanians. Listen to this, and then go back to Chapter 5 and re-read the dialogue spoken by the family who wants Christine “aht of dere yard” and Will Darnell, who warns Arnie not to “screw arahnd” with him.

Actually, now that I think of it, everyone in Christine should be speaking like that. I mean, they’re all from the Pittsburgh area, no?

There’s a nice moment — probably the only nice moment in the chunk of text that we read for today, Blog-o-weeners — where Dennis feels the passage of time and realizes that a chapter of his life is soon to end:

“By the time I had the mounted tire back in my trunk… the early evening light had become the fading purple of late evening. The shadow of each bush was long and velvety, and as I cruised slowly back up the street I saw the day’s last light streaming almost horizontally through the trash-littered space between the Arby’s and the bowling alley. That light, so much flooding gold, was nearly terrible in it strange, unexpected beauty.

“I was surprised by a choking panic that climbed up in my throat like dry fire. It was the first time a feeling like that came over me that year — that long, strange year — but no the last. Yet it’s hard for me to explain, or even define. It had something to do with realizing that it was August 11, 1978, that I was going to be a senior in high school next month, and that when school started again it meant the end of a long, quiet phase of my life. I was getting ready to be a grown-up, and I saw that somehow — saw it for sure, for the firs time in the lovely but somehow ancient spill of golden light flooding down the alleyway between a bowling alley and a roast beef joint, And I think I understood then that what really scares people about growing up is that you stop trying on the life-mask and start trying on another one. If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.” (44-5)

That’s probably the deepest emotion ever expressed in the shadow of an Arby’s.

I barely remember what I was feeling at the start of my senior year at Ambridge Area High School. It was probably some form of confusion. “Being a grown-up” was the furthest thing from my mind. It still is. (Which explains a lot about my current lot.) I think that if I could tell Dennis anything, it’s that “being a grown-up” doesn’t necessarily mean “learning how to die.” If anything, thanks to modern science’s penchant for finding new ways to extend human life, it’s probably more important than ever to keep trying on the life-mask — try on as many as you can with the time that you have. Remember, in the timeless words of Motorbooty magazine…

We only get a brief introduction to Will Darnell, but it’s a doozy, ain’t it? He’s only around for four and a half pages, but you get who the man is instantly: your run-of-the-mill mobster/grifter. The kind that every town has. He’s the guy who seems to know everyone worth knowing. He’s the guy who can find things for you… for a price. He’s the guy to track down, as Dennis mentions, if you wanted illegal fireworks for the Fourth. There are whispers that Darnell deals in stolen cars and other illicit activities more dangerous than contraband cherry bombs.

Somehow Arnie bringing Christine to Darnell’s does not bode well, does it, Blog-o-weeners?

And now we come to the most horrifying moment in the entire novel. I am not talking about Dennis’s nightmare — which is a jim-dandy. Is there anything worse than being trapped in a dream where something — a car, a dog, a bear, a shark, a falling building, etc. — is coming at you, and you can’t move, and you can’t move, and you can’t move? Ugh. As terrible as that is, it is nothing compared to what happens in this snippet of text:

“I turned the radio to FM-104, where the Block Party Weekend was continuing, and got Bob Segar and the Silver Bullet Band singing 'Still the Same.’ The serendipity was just a little too hideously perfect, and I dialed away to the Phillies game.

“The Phillies were losing. That was all right. That was par for the course.” (57)

Did you catch it, Blog-o-weeners? Did you see what fresh horrors Mr. Stephen “I just loves the baseball!” King introduced to the story? No? Then let me hip you to something, kiddies:

There is no way — NO FLIPPIN’ WAY! — that any teenager who lives a scant ten miles from Pittsburgh is going to give a frog’s fat ass about the Philadelphia Phillies. No way, Jose! Dennis Guilder is going to choose the Phillies over Dave Parker, over Jim Rooker, over WILLIE FREAKING STARGELL?!?!

Just how far east of Pittsburgh do you think Dennis lives, Mr. King? Do you think Philadelphia is just over the hill in the neighboring county? It’s on the other side of the for-cry-Pete state! It is 257 miles away. Boston is only 190 miles away from New York. By that logic, no one would care if someone was a Yankees fan in the middle of Red Sox Country, right Stevie? No one — and I mean NOOOOOOO OOOOOONNNEEEE! — in Pittsburgh would give two shits on a shingle about how the Phillies were faring. Jeepers, it’s like those morons from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia wrote this lunacy.

And what radio station would dare to broadcast a Phillies game in the Pittsburgh area? That little escapade would result in justifiable arson. There wouldn’t be a judge in the land who would hear the case, and if they did, there wouldn’t be a jury who would convict the mad-dog mob that took justice into its own hands and burned down that station. They had it comin’, coppers!

In 1978, the Pittsburgh Pirates finished second in the division, one and a half games behind the Philadelphia Phillies. (So, maybe Dennis is a fair-weather fan. Which makes me hate him even more.) The following year, 1979, the Pirates won their division (fourteen games ahead of your beloved Phillies, Guilder, so put that in your pipe and smoke it!), knocked off the Cincinnati Reds for the pennant, and, thanks to the pulsing disco beat of Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” won the World Series over the Baltimore Orioles.

And you’re telling me Dennis Guilder would rather side with a bunch of people who booed Santa Claus? They booed Santa Claus, for the love of Mike!

I think I need to pull over for a little while, Blog-o-weeners. Get out of the car and cool my jets. In fact, why don’t we all do that? Tomorrow is Sunday, so let’s take our first “Free Day” of the season. There's no reading for yinz to do tonight. Instead, I'll wax fantastic on the roles teenagers and cars (and teenagers in cars) have played in the culture.

You know… I think the fresh air is doing me good. The red mist is lifting, and I’m beginning to see things more clearly. Maybe I’m being too hard on ol’ Stevie King. Maybe I should relax and hear him out. After all…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 2

Part 1: Chapters 3 & 4

It’s the next day, and Dennis picks Arnie up at his house. Arnie fills Dennis in on what went on with his parents after Dennis left the night before. Arnie played hardball with Regina and Michael, threatening to take vocational art classes his senior year instead of the college courses his parents want. At that, his parents backed off. Dennis is shocked at his friend's newfound ruthlessness.

After work, Dennis takes Arnie to LeBay’s to finish their transaction. While Arne and LeBay disappear into the house, Dennis steps into the garage to examine Christine. She is, as he feared, a mess. Things change, however, when he slides into her front seat and places his hands on the steering wheel. Somehow, the view through her cracked windshield shifts and what Dennis sees frightens him.

As Arnie drives Christine out of the garage and Dennis follows in his own car, Dennis gets one last look at LeBay. To his surprise, the old man is crying like someone over a lost love. Which, in a way, may be closer to the truth than Dennis realizes...

Before we really get started on the nitty and/or gritty of today’s post, I want to circle back to something that I didn’t quite get around to last time out.

Namely: just where in the heck are we? This ain’t your grandaddy’s King Country — you know… small-town New England, coastal Maine, people eatin’ lahbstah rolls, etc. Just where is “Libertyville”?

As stated yesterday, one of the dead-icatees (heh-heh-heh!) of Christine is the city of Pittsburgh. King and Romero had just finished their first collaboration — 1982’s homage to the horror comics of their youths, Creepshow. King was a big fan of Romero’s work, even making an appearance (with his wife, Tabitha) in Knightriders (1981). So in a way, it makes sense for King to set the action of his novel in Pittsburgh as a nod to his friend.

Libertyville, as Dennis states in Chapter Two:

“…is quiet and residential. It isn't ritzy, like the neighboring suburb of Fox Chapel (where most of the homes are estates like the ones you used to see every week in Columbo), but it isn't like Monroeville, either, with its miles of malls, discount tire warehouses, and dirty book emporiums. There isn't any heavy industry; it's mostly a bedroom community for the nearby University. Not ritzy, but sort of brainy, at least.” (16-17)

Fox Chapel and Monroeville are actual towns respectively nine miles to the northeast and fourteen miles east of Pittsburgh. They are separated by five miles (as the crow flies) and the Allegheny River. In between them is the township of Penn Hills. (Marked in red in the above map.) I like to think that, for all intents and purposes, Penn Hills is Libertyville.

Now that we’ve set the scene a little better, let’s move on to today’s reading…

The radio plays a big part in the lives of Dennis, Arnie, and their friends. It played a big part in my own teenaged life in the Pittsburgh area in the 1980s. Radio stations were like clubhouses. Your identity as a teenager was made up of a blend of ingredients that could include your clothes, your hairstyle, what part of town you lived in, the people you ran with, and what radio station you listened to.

There was a radio station for just about every personality type you can think of. Teenyboppers listened to all the Top 40 hits on B-94 (WBZZ-FM). At the far right of the FM dial was WAMO-106, which played soul, R&B, and early hip-hop. WDVE — 102.5 FM — took care of all your hard rock and classic rock needs. Old people listened to jazz on WDUQ, classical music on WQED, and news on the world’s first commercially licensed radio station, KDKA (1020 AM). My father — like Arnie will in chapters to come — listened exclusively to oldies on 3WS (WWSW). And for two glorious years, those of us whose tastes tended towards weirder fare could tune into WXXP for “alternative” music. (I remember hearing “TV Party” by Black Flag on XXP and being totally confused and enthralled.)

As Dennis says while he and Arnie make their way to LeBay’s,

“‘Dirty White Boy’ gave way to ‘Jukebox Hero’ by Foreigner. It was Friday afternoon, and the Block Party Weekend had just started on FM-104. When I look back on that year, my senior year, it seems that I could measure it out in blocks of rock…” (28)

In Chapter Four, we get our first taste of the horror to come. When Dennis sits in Christine and looks out that window, he is magically transported back in time to the 1950s:

“[F]or just a moment it seemed that everything changed. That ugly snarl of cracks in the windshield was gone — or seemed to be. The little swatch of LeBay’s lawn that I could see was not yellowed, balding, and crabgrassy but a dark, rich, newly cut green. The sidewalk beyond it was freshly cemented, not a crack in sight. I saw (or thought I did, or dreamed I did) a ’57 Cadillac motor by out front. That GM high-stepper was a dark minty green, not a speck of rust on her, big gangster whitewall tire, and hubcaps as deeply reflective as mirrors. A Cadillac the size of a boat, and why not? Gas was almost as cheap as tap-water.” (33)

I’ve stated before that part of what Christine is about is the Conservative Revolution in American culture and politics in the 1970s and 1980s. In the build-up to the 1984 elections that would see Ronald Reagan returned to the Oval Office for another four years, his campaign aired one of the most famous political ads on television:

“It’s morning again in America,” states the narrator calmly (to the point of somnolence), which suggests that there was a night and that before that night there was a previous morning. For Conservative America in the 1980s, the 1960s was a long national nightmare from which the country had finally awoken. In his book Happy Days and Wonder Years: The Fifties and the Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics, Daniel Marcus notes that the 1950s existed in the American mind “as an era of stable social relations, domestic property, limited government, and American economic and military leadership” (9). These values are contrasted against those of the 1960s, which conservatives sought to associate with “social chaos, a turn against patriotism, and wasteful government spending” (9). Filled to bursting as they were with myriad social upheavals and violent rebellions, the 1960s were considered by Reagan and his fellow conservatives to be the turbulent event that interrupted the more placid and secure life of that earlier era. In order to repair the rift the events of the 1960s caused in the social fabric, in order to return the nation to a feeling of strength and security, conservatives employed the 1950s in their speeches as a symbol of a national golden age when all was right with the world. The 1960s were the dark night of the nation’s soul, but not worry — it’s morning (i.e. the 1950s) again, folks!

(It’s not for nothing that John Carpenter placed that phrase in the mouth of the aliens in his 1988 film They Live.)

What Dennis sees through Christine’s windshield can be considered “morning again in Libertyville.” At this moment, Christine is a spent force, a rusting derelict, but beneath its ruins is the promise of new life. What Dennis (and the reader) will discover is that beneath that renewed life is the stench of death.

Dennis mentions something else when he climbs inside Christine:

“I looked at that amazing speedometer again, that speedometer which was calibrated not to 70 or 80 but all the way up to 120 miles an hour. No kilometers in little red numbers underneath; when this babe had rolled off the assembly line, the idea of going metric had yet to occur to anyone in Washington. No big red 55 on the speedometer, either. Back then, gas went for 29.9 a gallon, maybe less if a price-war happened to be goin on in your town. The Arab oil-embargoes and the double-nickel speed limit had still been fifteen years away.” (32-33)(emphasis mine)

The what now?

The first of two gas shortages in the 1970s occurred in the early 1970s due to both the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War (both between Egypt and Israel). After learning that the Soviet Union was aiding Egypt, President Richard Nixon requested $2.2 billion to support Israel. OAPEC (Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries) said, “Mmmmm… I don’t think so!” They cut their production of oil and placed an embargo on exports to the United States. (The second gas shortage — and the one I remember — happened in 1979 as a result of the Iranian Revolution.)

As usual, the average American’s reaction to a goods shortage was composed and reasoned — NOT! Panic took hold, and drivers tried to buy as much gas as they could in the same way they hoard milk and toilet paper during a blizzard. Gas stations responded by only selling gas to their “regular” customers, selling at specific times of day, or by instituting an “odd-even” rationing system: if the last digit of a car’s license plate was odd, it could only fill up on odd-numbered days and vice-versa. The fear that America could grind to a halt due to lack of petroleum was very, very real.

The National Maximum Speed Limit was part of President Richard Nixon’s response to the 1973 OAPEC oil embargo. By curtailing speeds to 55 mph for all passenger vehicles, it was hoped that the United States could better weather the gas shortage storm. The Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act (which included the National Maximum Speed Limit) was signed into law by Nixon on January 2, 1974. The maximum speed was bumped up to 65 mph in 1987 before being totally repealed in 1995.

The jury is still out over how much of an impact the national speed limit had on fuel conservation and road safety, but I think it was necessary to our country’s rock history. I mean, without it what would Sammy Hagar have had to moan about?

A few quickies before we pull into the local motor-inn parking lot and call it a night…

I won’t say that I call bullshit on Dennis having had a cat named Captain Beefheart when he was nine years old, but… c’mon. The good Captain was not a household name back then. Was he? Or is this just the author revealing himself in the story? I don’t know. I just can’t imagine Dennis and his parents sitting around listening to Trout Mask Replica.

I don’t know what kind of Raleigh bicycle the kid who yelled “Put it in the trash-master, mister!” to Arnie was riding, but I hope to heck that it had a banana seat. That was — and is — the only way to roll.

Not a bad bit of motorvating today, Blog-o-weeners, but we got miles to go yet. For tomorrow’s trip I need you to read Part 1: Chapters 5, 6, & 7. We’re headed to the local do-it-yourself garage to meet another player in our story, Will Darnell. I think you’ll like him. He’s sort of like Santa Claus, if ol’ St. Nick was a cigar-chomping low-level mobster who hated children.

Okay…okay… maybe I’m not the best judge of character, but just keep reading, because…