Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 9

Part 1: Chapters 18 & 19

Sitting on the bleachers together in mid-October, enjoying a lunch of devilled eggs and cold meatloaf sandwiches, Arnie tells Dennis how he came to ask Leigh Cabot out. He also tells Dennis how he came to use the term “shitter.” LeBay had used the term in the kitchen when he signed Christine over to Arnie. LeBay blamed the “shitters” for making him sell his car. He also referred to Christine as “the Ace of Spades.”

That night, Dennis has another dream about Christine. In her front seat, Dennis sees Arnie behind the wheel and the corpse of LeBay beside him.

The following Saturday, in the third quarter, Dennis is sandwiched between three Ridge Rock players. He passes out from the hit and does not wake up again until two days later. In the hospital he is told the hit broke both of his legs, fractured his arm and skull, and came within a centimeter of paralyzing him for life. He will never play football again.

I am just now realizing, Blog-o-weeners, that not every edition of Christine comes with the lyrics at the head of every chapter. According to Bev Vincent’s biography Stephen King: His Work, Life, and Influences, King paid around $15,000 to obtain permission to print these snippets of lyrics. Vincent says,

“He was often quoted $50 for the use of the song per thousand copies printed. It didn’t sound like much until he realized there were going to be 300,000 hardcover copies and even more paperbacks.” (92)

I have a copy of Christine in mass market paperback that came out when John Carpenter’s adaptation was released. (And, yes, my book comes with the standard “8 Pages of Film Scenes” in its middle.) It has all of the lyrics. I’m also referring to a more recent edition of the novel that I borrowed digitally from the library. It does not have the lyrics. While the lyrics are not super important to the story, I like having them there. I’ve been using them as headers to my Blog-o-ween posts. (And will continue to do so.) Maybe I’ll leave a list in my post at the end of the month of all the songs King used for you Blog-o-weeners who have been missing out.

The lunch scene on the bleachers feels like the last good day for Arnie and Dennis. In the next chapter, Dennis is hospitalized, knocked out of both the football team and the narrative. (For a little while, that is.) Part Two of Christine will be told from a third-person limited (or is it omniscient? or a little of both?), and we will get to know more about what Arnie is going through. We will talk more about this stylistic choice on King’s part in later posts. For now, just realize that Dennis’s time at the wheel of the narrative (pun intended!) is coming to an end. He will no longer be in control. It’s almost as if the narrative begins to drive itself…

The bleacher scene is a nice one, though. Who hasn’t sat eating with a friend and one of you shovels a whole bunch of food into their mouth and starts talking? And who hasn’t stuck a finger into the side of a friend while they're eating? Long story short, this scene feels very real. There will be another scene of Arnie and Dennis breaking bread together in the Part Two that will feel equally as real and equally heartbreaking.

One of the moments that makes this scene feel real (outside of “side-noogies,” of course) is Arnie talking about asking Leigh Cabot for a date. Was there anything more nerve-wracking than building up the courage to ask someone out? What a nightmare! I sympathize with Arnie when he tells Dennis “[A]fter a while I started to think maybe she was interested in me… It probably took a lot longer for the penny to drop for me the it would for some other guys” (162-3) I’m right there with you, Arnie. Unless a girl wore a sandwich board with the words “Ask me” on it, I had no idea. (And I still don’t. I should have paid closer attention to those educational films when I was younger.)

We also learn that Arnie asked Darnell to make Christine legit so he could drive Leigh to the football game. That section of Arnie’s tale ends on a cliffhanger: “And he came through for me. Said he understood how important it was, and if…” (165). Dennis knows that he should be prying into that “if,” but he can’t bring himself to do it. We will learn soon enough what that “if” entails.

The news that LeBay referred to Christine as that “shitting car” and “the ace of spades” (166) is surprising. It’s also another clue as to where the responsibility lies for what is to come. We’ve heard George LeBay’s story about his brother’s life. Judging from what he told Dennis, we are to assume that it is LeBay who is the driving force (pun intended!) behind the horrors of the novel. Here, however, we get the sense that LeBay has been used by that ace of spades, that shitting car Christine. So which is it? We will learn more (and be confused more) in chapters to come. Keep this LeBay/Christine dichotomy in the back of your mind.

Is it necessary for the Libertyville High School French teacher to have a French name? I’m not saying that he isn’t French, and I’m not saying it isn’t possible for an American high school to hire a native French speaker, but… I don’t know… it seems a bit on the nose. Also the name “Leheureux,” which means “the happy one” in French, looks and sounds like “horror” to me. It’s not a complaint… it’s just… odd.

Want a complaint? You got it!

When Dennis wakes up in the hospital, he says, “That evening my aunt and uncle from Albany showed up” (169). This is kind of like the Monsieur Leheureux issue above. I’m not saying that Dennis doesn’t have family in Albany. And I’m not saying that given the severity of the injuries that Dennis suffered, distant relatives wouldn’t make a trip from out of town to offer support. I just feel like this is another issue that King has with geography in this novel. Albany, NY, is 350 miles from “Libertyville” (if we are using it as a stand-in for Penn Hills, PA) as the crow flies. By car, it’s 450 miles. That’s a seven to eight hour drive. I’m not saying that a concerned and loving aunt and uncle wouldn’t make that trip. I am saying that I don’t think King realizes the actual distances involved. Later in the novel, we will learn that Arnie is making “runs to Albany” for Darnell. Think of that: a seventeen year old high school kid is being sent 450 miles and across state lines by his boss.

No.

I call bullshit.

If Darnell wants to send Arnie to Cleveland, Ohio (about 160 miles away), or Wheeling, West Virginia (about 75 miles away), then I would buy that. I’m not buying Philadelphia, PA, or Albany, NY. Nope. No way, José.

Let’s end on a sweet note.

Yodels.

Say what now?

These are the snack cakes (in addition to Twinkies) that Dennis’s sister Ellie hides from him. Drake’s, the baking company responsible for Yodels at the time of our story’s action, also produced Ring Dings, Devil Dogs, and Funny Bones. These snack cakes were mainly available in the northeastern United States in and around 1978. Drake’s has since been gobbled up by McKee Foods Corp., and Yodels can now be found has far afield as the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern United States.

Yodels are similar to Hostess Ho-Hos and Little Debbie’s Swiss Cake Rolls. They are essentially a layer of chocolate cake covered in vanilla cream, then rolled up and dipped in chocolate. Any kid would be pissed if their older brother was swiping them from their special hiding place behind the breadbox.

For shame, Dennis, for shame!

So, how was that for a quick jaunt? It certainly isn’t like driving from Pittsburgh to Albany, that’s for sure. Still, I’m looking forward to hitting a rest area and seeing what kind of regional snacks they have in the vending machine. While I’m stocking up on Snyder of Berlin potato chips, Turner’s ice tea, and Klondike bars, I want you to read Part 2: Chapters 20, 21, & 22.

We’re leaving Dennis behind for a little while as he recuperates in the hospital. In his stead, we’re going to follow Arnie for a bit while he and his parents yell at each other. Then, we’ll take a trip out to the old Pittsburgh Airport. There, we will meet a minor character, Sandy Galton, who, unbeknownst to Arnie, is good friends with a major pain: Buddy Repperton.

Man, that Buddy is like a bad penny, is he not?

Good news! This rest stop has a snack bar that serves nothing but chip-chopped ham sandwiches! I remember one time I bet a friend that I could eat an entire chip-chopped ham sandwich in one bite. What happened? Well, it’s best that I don’t go into it while we’re eating, if you catch my drift? Let’s just say that everyone involved that day is just a bit wiser about the dangers of side-noogies thanks to me, because…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 8

Part 1: Chapters 16 & 17

Time passes. It’s the end of September. Arnie, to the consternation of every boy at Libertyville High, is pretty chummy with the new girl in school, Leigh Cabot. Dennis chalks it up to the new, improved Arnie that seems to be emerging from his teenaged, acne-scarred chysalis. Arnie’s complexion continues to clear, and now he is wearing his hair in a new, shorter — and more old-fashioned — manner.

Arnie’s love life may be changing for the better, but other aspects of his high school days remain the same: namely, Buddy Repperton. Buddy and the junior members of the Repperton Youth corner Arnie behind the shop building. Buddy pulls a switchblade. Dennis steps in and gets his balls squeezed for his troubles. Arnie disarms Buddy and stomps on the bully’s hand. Dennis hardly recognizes his friend, but he does recognize a word Arnie uses during the fracas: “Shitter.” A teacher breaks up the fight, and Buddy and his crew are sent to the principal’s office.

Another football game, but this time it is a win for Libertyville. (Go Terriers!) Arnie attends the away game to cheer Dennis on, and he does it in the company of his two best girls — Leigh and Christine. Christine may not be 100% street legal — even though the inspection sticker that Darnell “gave” Arnie gives it the right appearance — but she does look better. Arnie’s repairs do not look as “crazy-quilt-patchwork” as they did in Darnell’s Garage. After the game, Dennis inspects Christine more closely. He comes to the conclusion that he doesn’t like her, and maybe she doesn’t like him either…

The conservatism of high school is a topic near and dear to King’s heart. In his history of horror, Danse Macabre, he states,

“Monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative Republican in a three-piece suit who resides within all of us. We love and need the concept of monstrosity because it is a reaffirmation of the order we all crave as human beings… and let me further suggest that it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which these aberrations seem to imply.” (39)

King gives further shape to this idea by using the work of British writer John Wyndham as an example. Wyndham wrote many fine novels that fall between the borders of science fiction and horror — The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Midwich Cuckoos (1957).

His 1955 novel The Chrysalids (a.k.a. Rebirth), set in a post-apocalyptic future, tells the story of a community of survivors who must remain ever vigilant for deviations from the norm. Those deemed outside of the community’s standards are considered blasphemies and put to death. The main character’s home is festooned with plaques on the subject: “Only the Image of God Is Man,” “Keep Pure the Stock of the Lord,” “In Purity Our Salvation,” “Blessed Is the Norm,” and “Watch Thou for the Mutant!”

King likens this hyper-vigilance to the ways that high schoolers patrol the halls looking for outsiders. I don’t think you can name a clique of teenagers who isn’t sniffing the air for difference, deviation — in short, mutants!

(I mean, not for nothing does Rush’s 1982 song of the suburbs, “Subdivisions,” include the lyrics:

Subdivisions 

In the high school halls 

In the shopping malls 

Conform or be cast out

Subdivisions 

In the basement bars 

In the backs of cars 

Be cool or be cast out)

For much of his life, Arnie was the consummate outsider — the mutant. His runaway acne was a signal to the group-at-large that he was to be treated as a social outcast. But that acne has almost completely cleared up, and he has the most beautiful girl in school on his arm. It seems as though Arnie has decided to conform and be cool. Who’s the mutant now?

Well, in the eyes of Buddy Repperton, it’s still Arnie.

When I was in high school back, all the kids who smoked hung out across the street from school and got their nicotine fix before the first homeroom bell. We called them “The Cancer Club.” Libertyville’s chapter of The Cancer Club hangs out near the shop building.

I only ever took shop in junior high — and I have a mean Coke can lamp to prove it. In high school, all the Vo-Tech kids — essentially those students who would be looking for hands-on training in skilled labor like construction, maintenance, and engineering — bussed off-site to workshops that offered them the chance to get their hands dirty.

Buddy Repperton — dressed in the shop kid’s uniform de rigueur of tight white T-shirt and jeans — seems to be engaging in an independent study course in Fighting Dirty. Buddy is also armed with the Stephen King bully’s weapon-of-choice: the switchblade.

I’ve never personally seen anyone pull a switchblade out during a fight, but I have seen them up close in calmer situations. When that blade appears out of nowhere with a quietly lethal snik! — it is freakin’ terrifying.

What is it with Stephen King having men tying their long hair back with a hank of rawhide? Bill Denborough wore his hair (what little of it he had, that is) that way in the novel IT. Makes me think of another victim of late-stage male-pattern baldness who kept his hair pulled back: the late, great Reggie Bannister.

During the stand-off between Arnie and Buddy, we get Arnie’s first utterance of Roland LeBay’s favorite word: “shitter.” Dennis is immediately struck by it, as is the reader. Between that word and Arnie’s cool-as-a-cucumber-in-a-bowl-of-hot-sauce takedown of Buddy, Dennis (and we) begins to think that the changes that are happening to Arnie aren’t just on the surface.

Christine is a horror story, and we are reading Christine because we are fans of the genre. (I hope!) As fans, we know what to expect and where the story should go. We know that what is happening to Arnie is not just a case of him finally “winning the war against zits.” There is something more nefarious happening here.

We are getting the story of Christine straight from a single character. (For now!) We are limited to what that character — Dennis — is seeing and hearing and thinking. Dennis doesn’t know exactly what to make of Arnie and Christine. When he puts Arnie’s clearing complexion together with his purchase of Christine, he says,

“Buy an old car and it will what? Change your head, your way of thinking, and thus change your metabolism? Liberate the real you? I seem to hear Stukey James, our old high school math teacher, whispering his oft-repeated refrain in my own head: If we follow this line of reasoning to the bitter end, ladies and gentlemen, where does it take us?

“Where indeed?” (138)

We know damned well where it takes us, and (as readers) we want to get there as soon as possible.

One nice thing about how the novel is structured is that Dennis is telling us this story many years removed from when it took place. Four years to be exact. He already knows the outcome. He’s already followed that line of reasoning to the bitter end, and so he seems to create shortcuts for us from time to time, letting us know that our worst suspicions are true. Though he doesn’t dwell for too long on his doubts and dawning understanding of the situation, the story still demands that he bring us through every station of the cross, so to speak.

(“The Stations of the Cross” — that series of fourteen images and prayers depicting the crucifixion of Jesus so well known to Catholics worldwide — is also known as “The Way of Sorrows.” That’s a rather fitting title for what awaits us, Blog-o-weeners.)

As horror fans who may or may not be already familiar with Christine, we already know why Christine looks so good so fast. And we know why Arnie gets so mad at Dennis for looking at her undercarriage. (Pun intended!) We are beginning to suspect that it isn’t really Arnie looking out at us from behind his eyeglasses and caressing Christine’s hood. We will just have to keep that knowledge to ourselves and wait for Dennis to catch up with us.

In the meantime — Watch Thou for the Mutant!

Whelp… that’s about it for today, Blog-o-weeners. I see a flashing neon Vacancy sign on side of the road up ahead, so let’s pull off and get a good night’s sleep at that travel lodge before we put the pedal to the metal again. For tomorrow, let’s read Part 1: Chapters 18 & 19. That’s only ten pages! Easy-peasy!

It’s Dennis’s last football game. (Though not the team’s, as we shall find out!) We’ll eat some fig bars and Yodels and give each other side-noogies. In a way, it’ll feel like the last warm day before winter jumps on our backs with both feet. Enjoy it while you can, Blog-o-weeners!

What’s that? What social group did I run with in high school? Well, I was… hmmm… “accepted” is too strong a word… I was tolerated by all the strata in school: the sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads… they all put up with me. Why? Well, apparently they liked hanging out with me because…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 7

Part 1: Chapters 14 & 15

The school year is about to start up again, and the Cunningham’s head out-of-state for a long weekend vacation. Michael asks Dennis to look in on Christine while they are gone, to see how Arnie is faring in his restoration efforts. Dennis agrees, because he is as curious as Arnie’s father.

At Darnell’s Garage, Dennis finds that Christine’s complexion, like Arnie’s, is clearing, but in a rather haphazard, sloppy way. The radio antenna is brand new and the back seat cover has been replaced, but only one half of the front grill has been fixed. There are new windshield wipers on a car that is far from ready to drive in the rain. Arnie, who Dennis knows to be a very methodical thinker, seems to be working in a scattershot manner.

Dennis’s investigation is cut short by Darnell who demands that he hit the bricks. Darnell’s tune changes when Dennis says that he is Kenneth Guilder’s son. Darnell invites Dennis into his office, and there he shares his own misgivings about the way Arnie is restoring Christine. He also admits to recognizing the car, but he can’t remember where. Dennis informs him that Arnie bought it from Roland D. LeBay, and Darnell is stopped dead in his tracks. Darnell knows all about LeBay and Christine and the fate of LeBay’s wife.

School starts. Arnie is busy with Christine; Dennis is busy losing football games with the Libertyville High Terriers. The few times that he and Arnie get together he notices that his friend has picked up a back injury somewhere…

Looks like Arnie and Christine are reaping the benefits of the pow-pow-power of Clearasil!

In his 1980 history of horror, Danse Macabre, Stephen King talks about “‘the “myth-pool’ — that body of fictive literature in which all of us, even the nonreaders and those who do not go to films, have communally bathed” (50). For King, the most powerful and singular inhabitants of the myth-pool and the works of art that fixed them in our collective consciousness are The Vampire (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), The Werewolf (Robert Louis Stevenson’s  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), and The Thing Without a Name (Mary  Shelley’s Frankenstein).

(King admits that The Ghost is another important member of the myth-pool, but that there is no singular work of art that fixes it in our minds the way that the works of Stoker et al. do. That’s debatable…)

What are we dealing with in Christine? What is the central metaphor of this book, and which classic monster fits the bill?

In Salem’s Lot, the King Vamp, Barlow, gets younger and more beautiful the more he feeds on the inhabitants of the Lot. Perhaps Christine is a vampire? But then shouldn’t Arnie be aging or getting worse acne than usual?

In Oscar Wilde’s 1890 Gothic horror, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the titular character is kept young because his portrait is the one who ages. Is Christine like Dorian Gray? Then that would make Arnie the portrait. Perhaps, his bad back (so much like LeBay’s) has something to do with Christine’s reincarnation?

The Werewolf is another possibility, especially in the form of Jekyll and Hyde. They were (spoiler alert!) one and the same person, however. They were also completely different temperament-wise — Jekyll the kindly doctor, Hyde the monstrous brute. Arnie seemed like a kindly kid before the brutish LeBay sold him the monstrous wrecked car.

We will talk more about the myth-pool, its inhabitants, and which ones King is playing with in Christine as the month progresses. There is one text that I feel King returns to often in his work, but it isn’t as powerfully set in the public’s collective unconsciousness. I’ll be sure to point it out when it rears its head… or should I say its “brain”? (Heh-heh-heh!)

Another aspect about both Arnie and Christine’s clearing complexions goes back to what we talked about when I brought up the return of the 1950s in the 1980s. It seemed that no matter what you encountered — be it a rock’n’roll group’s song on the radio or a politician’s speech on the TV — if you scratched beneath the surface of said song/speech you would find a call to the return to fundamentals. What was punk rock if not a call to return to the angsty, simple, 4/4 beat, 3-chord shuffle of artists like Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and The Big Bopper?

When Dennis goes to Darnell’s to check up on Arnie’s progress with Christine, he is struck by how his friend’s repairs are like scratching beneath the surface of the car:

“I had looked at that new tire on that old car and thought it was as if a little bit of the old car had been scratched away and that the new car — fresh, resplendent, just off the assembly line in a year when Ike had been President and Batista had still been in charge of Cuba — was peeking through.” (122)

I don’t think it is an accident that Dennis brings forth historical figures when discussing what lies under Christine’s surface. Everything exists in a historical context. The forces that were at work when Christine drove off the assembly line were much more than the union line worker who built her. Ike and Batista were just as much a part of her construction. It is impossible to divorce an object from its historical context. When you pull something — a rock’n’roll song or a political speech — out of the past, the past doesn’t remain behind. It comes with that object, whether you want it to or not. Christine is a novel about the dangers of allowing an unexamined past to return to the present. There is always something just beneath the surface waiting to take advantage and return to life.

All right, all right… that’s enough fancy talk and hooptedoodle for one day.

There is no town near Pittsburgh called Philadelphia City. Why on Earth would there be? There have been several race tracks in the Pittsburgh area, but none have been called “Philly Plains.” These are just more examples of King either being lazy or completely unaware of geography. Either way, it makes my teeth itch.

And don’t get me started on Arnie and Dennis watching another Phillies baseball game together…

If you want to talk real car racing and the Steel City, then I wholeheartedly recommend checking out the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix. It’s held every summer in Schenley Park, which is a large municipal park bordering both University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Schenley Park is also home to Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, which, in turn, is home to a corpse flower named after Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero!

The Vintage Grand Prix offers many individual races throughout the event based on vehicle type and historical era. (My personal favorites are the “Preservation and Pre-War” cars.) Don’t want to stand behind the hay bales and watch the old timey cars zip past your nose? Then walk around the Bob O’Connor Golf Course and check out the thousands of cars — both old and new — on display. Maybe you’ll see a 1958 Plymouth Fury. Or a Volkswagen Thing — like the one Adrienne Barbeau drove in John Carpenter’s The Fog! Either way, it’s a great time.

If you need further incentive, then just know that you are breathing in all that carbon monoxide for a good cause: since 1983 the Vintage Grand Prix has donated nearly $7 million to autistic and developmentally disabled individuals throughout the Pittsburgh region.

If anything, it will make you forget “Philadelphia City” and “Philly Plains” for a little while.

I think that’s all for today, Blog-o-weeners. I got to blather about the myth-pool and the Return of the Repressed, and I got to engage in a little hometown civic boosterism — all in all, a pretty good day. Tomorrow, please read Part 1: Chapters 16 & 17. We will meet up again with that friend of the downtrodden, Buddy Repperton. But his reappearance will be balanced by our first look at another major player in our story, the lovely Leigh Cabot.

I wonder what character from the literary or cinematic myth-pool best represents me? Could it be the tragically romantic Erik from Phantom of the Opera? Or maybe the hyper-rational and logical Sherlock Holmes? What’s that? I’m more like Fats from the movie Magic? Well, laugh it up, Blog-o-weeners, the joke is on you, because…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 6

Part 1: Chapters 11, 12, & 13

Dennis and Arnie attend Roland D. LeBay’s funeral. They nearly outnumber the number of official mourners. One of the people standing graveside is Roland’s younger brother, George. Arnie approaches George to ask for permission to keep Christine at Roland’s garage until the house is sold. George forbids it out of hand and tells Arnie to junk the car as soon as possible. Sensing that there is more to the man’s refusal, Dennis (sans Arnie) admits to George that he doesn’t like his friend’s car, that he thinks it is bad for him. George tells Dennis to come to his motel that night. He has a story to tell.

Sitting outside his room at the Rainbow Motel, George tells Dennis about his brother, Rollie. About his neverending anger, his cowed wife, and the short and tragic life of their only daughter. Both Rollie’s wife and daughter died in proximity to Christine: Rita, his daughter, chokes to death on a hamburger  on the side of the road while the family was “motorvating,” and Veronica, his wife, mourning her dead child, commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in the car. At no time did Rollie consider getting rid of Christine. George tells Dennis that he believes that strong emotions can linger and live on in their surroundings, like a house or a car. Rollie, he says, was a deeply unhappy and angry man. George warns Dennis that Arnie looks equally unhappy.

Later that night, Arnie tells Dennis some “good” news: Darnell tossed Repperton from the garage for good. Christine doesn’t have to find a new home. In fact, Arnie says, it’s going to cost less to keep Christine at Darnell’s, because Arnie is going to work for the man. Dennis’s father, overhearing his son’s half of the phone conversation, tells his son that he used to be an accountant for Darnell. He warns Dennis that Darnell has his fingers in enough pies that if the I.R.S. or the police came snooping around, then he — and anyone associated with him — would be in big, big trouble…

I love a good “secret history reveal" in horror fiction, and Chapter 12 of Christine is one of my favorites. (Not to worry… this isn’t the only reveal in the book… there are more horrible reveals to come…) We got a good, albeit quick, look at Roland D. LeBay in the chapters before this one, but he wasn’t on stage for very long. He just seemed like an angry old man at the end of his days in those moments, but his brother, George, reveals to Dennis that that anger — his “unending fury” (95) — had been with him all his life.

It’s fitting that George’s recollections of his brother take place at a cheap motel. In Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, while explaining to Montag how their fast-paced and shallow world came to be, Captain Beatty describes

“[h]ighways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before.” (52)

I’ve always felt a little sad about hotels and motels. They are so momentary, so fleeting. People live in them, but they are home to none. George tells of his brother’s nomadic life in the army. Moving around the country and the world, never owning anything, never placing roots. The things in his life that should have been a foundation — family, home, work, friends — none of it held firm. All of those things were transient. Everything that mattered to Rollie was summed up in the cold metal shape of a 1958 Plymouth Fury sport coupe. His home sat on four wheels, and he could move it about unbothered by the rest of the world, the rest of the “shitters.”

Roland D. Lebay, gasoline refugee.

George LeBay also mentions a theory that shows up in quite a few of King’s tales: 

“I don’t believe in curses, you know. Not in ghosts or anything particularly supernatural. But I do believe that emotions and events have a certain… lingering resonance. It may be that emotions can even communicate themselves in certain circumstances, if the circumstances are peculiar enough… the way a carton of milk will take the flavor of certain strongly spiced foods if it’s left open in the refrigerator.”” (106)

If you were with us a couple of years ago when we read ‘Salem’s Lot, then this should sound familiar. Ben Mears has a similar theory about the Marsden House. In that book, he describes certain places as akin to psychic rechargeable batteries, in that they absorb the emotions spent inside of them. The Overlook Hotel in The Shining could be another of these charged sites. If George LeBay is correct, then Christine has absorbed every awful thing that has happened within her — LeBay’s anger, the deaths of his child and wife. As she begins to get in shape, what more will she need to absorb?

We will talk more later about where the evil resides — is it within LeBay or within Christine — and how deciding that will change how we understand the novel. There comes a moment in Dennis’s conversation with George when the older man says “People are mortal” (98), then pauses. Dennis thinks that George has something more to say on the subject but he chooses to keep it to himself. We shall see whether or not he is correct in that assumption later.

George LeBay brings up another age old theory about human endeavors:

“…[T]here are ‘times’ in human existence… [W]hen it came to be ‘steam-engine time,’ a dozen men invested the steam engine. Maybe only one man got the patent, or the credit in the history books, but all at once there they were, all those people working on that one idea. How do you explain it? Just that it’s steam-engine time.

“Comes the Civil War and all at once it’s ‘ironclad time.’ Then it’s ‘machine-gun time.’ Next thing you know it’s ‘electricity time’ and ‘wireless time’ and finally it’s ‘atom-bomb time.’ As if those ideas all come not from individuals but from some great wave of intelligence that keeps flowing… some wave of intelligence outside of humanity.” (105)

Dennis tells the reader that later he checked the back issues of the local paper looking for an ad from Roland LeBay about Christine. There was none. He rolled the car onto his front lawn and waited. Why? As Dennis says, it was just “sell Christine time” (105). George seems to agree with that assumption because, as he tells Dennis,

“Ecclesiastes says there’s a season for everything — a time to sow, a time to reap, a time for war, a time for peace, a time to put away the sling, and a time to gather stones together. A negative for every positive. So if there was ‘Christine time’ in Rollie’s life, there might have come a time for him to put Christine away, as well.

“If so, he would have known it. He was an animal, and animals listen very well to their instincts.” (105)

Yikes!

This theory, unlike the “opened milk carton” one, seems to sway responsibility away from LeBay and onto Christine. We shall see if that is the case.

Dennis also begins to make the connection between LeBay and Arnie. There seems to be a reason that it was Arnie who drove past LeBay’s house, saw the car, and fell in love with it. Both Arnie and LeBay are good with their hands. LeBay spent years in the Army keeping the decrepit vehicles running. Arnie, much to the chagrin of his parents, takes Auto Shop classes in school and excels in them. He took those classes over the protestations of his parents, displaying a stubborn streak as wide as LeBay’s. Arnie’s anger at all the people trying to stop him from keeping Christine mirror’s LeBay’s, as well. Let’s keep our eyes open for more of these echoes in the coming chapters.

One last thing before we pull over for the night…

Dennis’s dad mentions that he used to work for Darnell until he felt uneasy with the amount of mysterious cash showing up in the crook’s cooked books. So, Darnell got himself a more amiable and amenable accountant. The cash kept rolling in, and now that accountant — one Bill Upshaw — lives in a “$300,000 English Tudor in Sewickley” (113).

Where now?

The Borough of Sewickley sits along the Ohio River some 12 miles northwest of Pittsburgh (and Libertyville). I was actually born at Sewickley Hospital. Sewickley is, for all intents and purposes, very upscale and fancy. (Which is why I was born there, natch.) It is home to many professional Pittsburgh athletes and artists, including Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby, and Caitlin Clarke (not that Caitlin Clark).

As any devotee of SCTV can tell you, Sewickley has also dealt with tragedy and disaster, mainly in the form of bloodsucking monkeys from West Mifflin, PA.

Whoooo-nelly! I am pooped. It’s time to pull into that motor lodge up ahead and get some shut-eye. What’s that, Blog-o-weeners? You’re gonna take a swim in the pool then watch the free HBO that comes with our room? I don’t think so! I may be taking a break, but you’ve got some work to do.

For tomorrow, I want you to cast your eyes over Part 1: Chapters 14 & 15. We’re gonna learn a little bit more about the history between Darnell and Christine. We’re also going to take a peek at that most American of American high school experiences: the Friday night football game! 

After you finish your reading, then you can goof around in the pool. Don’t stay up too late playing “Marco Polo” though — and no skinnydippin’! This place takes a dim view of horseplay in the pool. How do I know that? Well… never you mind how I know that. For once just listen to me and do what I say because…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 5

Part 1: Chapters 8, 9, & 10

It’s the weekend, and there’s a ballgame on the radio, but Arnie doesn’t show up at Dennis’s to listen to it. He’s been too busy down at the garage spending time with Christine and running errands for Darnell. Dennis can feel the thin end of the wedge begin to make its way between him and his friend.

After work and over a pizza, a bruised and battered Arnie tells Dennis about a run-in with high school bully Buddy Repperton at Darnell’s garage. Little by little, day by day, Repperton has tried to antagonize Arnie into a physical confrontation, but to no avail. One day, however, Buddy finally succeeds not by attacking Arnie but by “accidentally” smashing one of Christine’s headlights with a jackhandle. This sends Arnie over the edge, and (as Dennis finds out from a mutual friend and not from Arnie himself) he jumps on Repperton and fights back with a vehemence that the bully did not expect. Darnell (who up until this point had mysterious split the scene) breaks the fight up and tells Arnie to turn in his toolbox key and hit the bricks.

In an effort to help his friend out of a jam, Dennis gets the bright idea that since Arnie is on the outs with Darnell, he could store Christine at LeBay’s house. The old man would be happy to see his old car again, and he probably wouldn’t charge as much as Darnell was clipping Arnie for. Arnie is not amused by Dennis’s suggestion. Later, Dennis discovers why: LeBay has died… suddenly… around about the time that Repperton took his jackhandle to Christine…

Ah… Buddy Repperton…

Stephen King must have been the target of some serious tormenting as a kid, because the guy really nails the banal, mindless violence at the heart of your average school bully. Chris Hargensen in Carrie, Richie Boddin in ‘Salem’s Lot, Henry Bowers in IT — every one of these creeps is a finely crafted study in the small-minded despots that set up shop in our lives. You know the type… like the ones who jumped Otter in Animal House…

Repperton is no different, and his schtick is immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent time on a school playground, in the back of a classroom, or in the locker room after gym. The idiotic strutting, playing to the “yes men” who guffaw at every dumb joke and putdown, the need to cull the weakest member from what Jean Shepherd would call “the nameless rabble of victims” — it’s all there on these few pages, and it all unlocks memories (in this reader, at least) of every jock or greaser who loved nothing more than flicking the ear lobes and slapping the necks of “nerds.”

Dennis has had his own run-in with this particular bogeyman. Four years earlier, at a school dance, Dennis fell into Repperton’s crosshairs. Here’s how sophomore Buddy looked then:

“He had a lantern jaw, a thick clot of greasy black hair, and little eyes set too close together. But those eyes were not entirely stupid; an unpleasant intelligence lurked behind them. He was one of those guys who spend their high school time majoring in Smoking Area.” (74)

I could probably pick a half a dozen felons… er, I mean, fellows… who match that description in my high school yearbook. I’m sure that you could, too. I’m sure they are CEOs and Senators now. We’ll keep an eye out for Mr. Repperton and his cronies. I have a feeling we haven’t heard the last of them.

We are beginning to see a change come over Arnie Cunningham. Namely, his complexion is starting to clear up. Up to now, when describing Arnie’s acne (say that ten times fast), Dennis has said that his friend’s face was “pimple city” (2) and that it looked like “a loaded pizza” (2).

Now, however, Dennis notes that Arnie’s “complexion seemed a trifle better than it had been lately” (69) and that

“[h]e sure must have been steering clear of [soda pop] lately. The slight improvement in his complexion I’d noticed on that overcast Sunday two weeks ago was definite now. He still had plenty of bumps and craters, but not so many of them were […] oozing.” (72)

So goes Christine, so goes Arnie’s skin and, it seems, his temperament. With Buddy Repperton’s attack on Christine’s headlight, Arnie (according to a eyewitness) “went after [him] as if the devil had blown a charge of red pepper up his ass” (78). Dennis recalls his friend’s anger after dealing with Darnell and the yinzer family, but chalks that up to the stress of the situation. This — a physical fight with a much bigger opponent — strikes Dennis as something else entirely. It’s like he’s possessed or something.

LeBay’s life is also somehow linked to Christine’s physical wellbeing. I think Dennis makes the connection between Buddy Repperton’s attack on her headlight and LeBay suddenly dying a little too quickly. I’m not saying it isn’t right or it doesn’t work, but Dennis leaps to that conclusion just a tad too fast. One wonders what had been happening to LeBay after Arnie drove her off his property. If gaining Christine has made Arnie’s face clear up, what had been happening in the LeBay household?

Why the heck are those kids standing so close to the road?!?!

Let’s hit the buttons on the radio and jump around the dial a bit before we get to the next motor lodge…

I called BS on Dennis having a cat named Captain Beefheart. His current cat is named after Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. I will allow that. It fits with the overall feel of the book, and Hawkins was a known quantity at the time. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s was the Alice Cooper of his day — emerging from a coffin onstage and using voodoo props — though he resented the exploitative quality of it all. His most famous recording, “I Put a Spell on You,” was released in 1956.

Arnie and Dennis head off to see a kung fu picture at the local movie theater that only charges a buck for a matinee program. Dennis says that they ended up seeing a Chuck Norris movie. I wonder which one it was? Movies moved around the country then very differently from today. A picture was opened regionally and often given time to garner some word of mouth. (A little independent ditty named Halloween would open in a single city — Kansas City, Missouri, on 24 October 1978, before taking off. Maybe Dennis and his cheerleader girlfriend saw it later — after catching Grease — as it made its way into Pennsylvania?) Dennis and Arnie would probably have gone to see Norris’s latest flick, Good Guys Wear Black (1978), but they could have also have seen the previous year’s CB radio-flavored goodie Breaker! Breaker! (1977). Either way, they sat in their seats, munched popcorn, and enjoyed watching someone get kicked in the face.

Dennis and Arnie have their heart-to-heart over pizza. That isn’t a difficult thing to do in Pittsburgh. There are three things that every little town in the Pittsburgh area has: churches, bars, and pizza joints. Sometimes that’s all they have. At one time, the town where I went to high school — Ambridge, PA — was known for having the most bars and churches per capita in the United States. (I don’t know if that is 100% true, but as the man once said, “It’s close enough for government work.”) Ambridge also boasts two of the best pizza joints I’ve ever ordered from — Police Station Pizza and (my personal all-time favorite) Frank’s Pizzeria.

Every Pittsburgh neighborhood I ever lived in had at least three pizza joints within walking distance of my apartment, and they were all good. It was like a city ordinance or something. One of the best pizza places in Pittsburgh is one that would not be too far from Libertyville: Forest Hills’s Vincent’s Pizza. I could see Arnie’s complexion bursting as well as his belly from a visit.

And, yes, there’s more Philadelphia Phillies nonsense from Dennis and Arnie. It has been noted. You know how I feel about that…

Well, we put some miles behind us today, did we not, Blog-o-weeners? Suddenly, I’ve got a hankerin’ for some pizza. While I go up to the counter and order us a couple of Vinnie pies (extra grease, if you please!) and a pitcher of Iron City, why don’t you get started on tomorrow’s reading — Part 1: Chapters 11, 12, & 13. We’re going to a funeral where we’re gonna meet Roland LeBay’s brother, George. He’s got a few things to tell us about ol’ Rollie and Christine.

Until then, keep your eyes peeled for Buddy Repperton. He said he was going to teach us a lesson. He doesn’t seem the booklearnin’ type, but who knows…