Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 28

Part 3: Chapter 49

It is Friday, 19 January 1979. After getting the keys to Darnell’s Garage off of Jimmy Sykes, Dennis drives to school to wait for Arnie. This is the prelude to the end game that Dennis knows is coming.

Slouched down in his car, Dennis lets Arnie walk past him in the parking lot so that he can get between his friend and the car — the drug — that has destroyed him. Springing out from his hiding place, Dennis tries to push through LeBay’s facade to reach Arnie. He taunts the ghost of the older man until, finally, Arnie’s face changes and LeBay appears.

Dennis tells LeBay that he and Leigh know the truth, and that a whole lot of other people are beginning to put two and two together, as well. LeBay lashes out at Dennis, knocking him to the ground. Arnie, horrified at what he has done, comes back to himself and begs Dennis to help him. He tells Dennis that LeBay is always with him… except when Christine rolls on her own. At those moments, Arnie is finally left alone, and LeBay joins Christine.

Dennis challenges LeBay to one last duel at Darnell’s Garage. Winner take all…

Didn’t I tell you this chapter was good’un? I love a good confrontation scene before the big showdown, when the hero finally gets the nerve to stand up to the blackhat and say, “No more.”

Dennis mentions that LeBay, in death as in life, is “extraordinarily good at getting through to people, at finding their soft spots” (454). It must be said, however, that Dennis is equally good at finding the chink in LeBay’s armor, that one place through which Arnie can still be reached:

“‘How’s your cunt, Dennis?’ [LeBay] asked…

I took two shuffling steps forward on my crutches while he stood there, smiling with the corners of his mouth down.

‘How did you like it when Repperton called you Cuntface?’ I asked him. ‘Did you like it so well you want to turn it around and use it on somebody else?’

Part of him seemed to flinch at that — something that was maybe only in his eyes — but the contemptuous, watchful smile remained on his lips…

‘Or what about in fifth grade, when Tommy Deckinger used to call you Fart-Breath?” I asked, my voice rising… ‘Did you like that? And do you remember when Ladd Smythe was a patrol-boy and he pushed you down in the street and I pulled his hat off and stuffed it down his pants? Where you been, Arnie? This guy LeBay is a Johnny-come-lately. Me, I was here all along.’” (454)

The memories of the bullying that Arnie endured and the one friend that stood next to him throughout it begins to chip away at LeBay’s defenses. We know Arnie is in there, somewhere.

But so, too, is LeBay. Dennis keeps poking and prodding until the ghost of the old man is forced to come to the fore, and we get a moment of body horror worthy of a David Cronenberg film:

“And he did [come out]… but in Arnie’s face this time, and that was more terrible that all the skulls and skeletons and comicbook horrors ever thought of. Arnie’s face changed. A sneer bloomed on his lips like a rancid rose. And I saw him as he must have been back when the world was young and a car was all a young man needed to have; everything else would just automatically follow. I saw George LeBay’s big brother” (455)

Later, when Dennis uses their shared memories of the ant farms they kept together, Arnie and LeBay begin fighting and the battlefield is Arnie’s face:

“And suddenly the calm hardness broke. His face — his face roiled. I don’t know how else to describe it. LeBay was there, furious at having to put down a kind of internal mutiny. Then Arnie was there — drawn, tired, ashamed, but most of all, desperately unhappy.” (456)

It is moments like these that bring back the memory of another desperately unhappy addict who is being pulled in two directions at once: The Shining’s Jack Torrance. Towards the end of that novel, Jack chases his son, Danny, through the hotel, threatening to kill the boy with a roque mallet. Cornered, Danny reaches through the Outlook Hotel’s ghosts to touch his father’s heart one last time. Jack comes to himself, briefly, telling Danny to run away. The ghosts take over, forcing Jack to smash his own face — as well as his identity, and his humanity — with the mallet.

Whereas Jack Torrance was an alcoholic (and the hotel used his addiction against him), Arnie’s addiction is for Christine. We’ve seen plenty of moments where he runs back to her open arms like a alcoholic does to the bottle. In this chapter, Arnie is desperate to get back to Christine, but Dennis blocks his way. This is a kind of intervention, in a way.

Dennis tells LeBay that more and more people are beginning to suspect the truth behind the murders that have been happening in Libertyville. LeBay tries to laugh it off, telling Dennis, “And where will that get you? The asylum over at Reed City?” (457).

There is no Reed City near Pittsburgh, but there was an asylum nearby in the late-1970s. When I was kid, if we thought a friend was crazy, we would tell them that the men in white coats were coming to take them away to Dixmont.

Built in 1862 in Emsworth, Pennsylvania, (just down the road from where I went to high school), Dixmont State Hospital was once a state-of-the-art institution for caring for the mentally ill. From its beginning, it was completely self-sustaining. It had its own farmlands, livestock, rail station, and post office. Also part of the facility was a water treatment plant, a sewage treatment plant, and electricity generating facilities. They had their own butchers, bakers, farmhands, electricians, laborers, pipe fitters, botanists, chefs, and even a barber and a dentist. The hospital’s campus sprawled over 407 acres. It’s main building was called Reed Hall, so perhaps that is where King came up with the name of Reed City.

A decline in funding for state hospitals and changing philosophies in psychiatric care caused the hospital to finally close in 1984. The campus was abandoned for two decades. Reed Hall burned in a fire in 1995, and the rest of the site was demolished in 2006.

For a time, Walmart was preparing the site for redevelopment, but excavation destabilized the hillside and landslides covered Pennsylvania Route 65 and the Pittsburgh Line railroad tracks on the Ohio River side, shutting them both down for weeks. Kilbuck Township residents feared another collapse, and Walmart decided not to build on the property. As of 2007, the land was left to return to nature.

One wonders what… or who… caused that landslide…

I like that Dennis assures LeBay that he can’t keep getting away with using Arnie as a stalking horse because people in the 1970s are more credulous than they were in LeBay’s time:

“‘Oh, we won’t be taken seriously at first,’ I said. ‘I give you that. But that stuff about how they put you in the loonybin as soon as you start talking about ghosts and demons… uh-uh, LeBay. Maybe in your day, before flying saucers and The Exorcist and that house in Amityville. These days a hell of a lot of people believe in that stuff… It’s going to happen… People are only rational on the surface. They still toss salt over their  left shoulder if they spill the shaker, they don’t walk under ladders, they believe in survival after death.’” (457-8)

That hits LeBay right where he lives. Who knew you could scare a ghost just by watching In Search Of… and picking up a Time-Life series of books?

Whoa! I was having such a good time today that I darn near drove past the motel. While I do a U-turn up at the light, lemme mention one last reference that Dennis makes.

When he first gets out of the car to confront Arnie/LeBay, Dennis says that he feels “a little bit like Fred MacMurray in that old picture Double Indemnity” (453).

Who now?

Born in 1908, Frederick Martin MacMurray was a film actor and TV star with a career that spanned nearly fifty years. He played in mostly light, comic roles until he starred in Billy Wilder’s 1944 adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel Double Indemnity. In that classic film noir, MacMurray plays insurance man Walter Neff who plans the murder of a Mr. Dietrichson with the man’s wife, Phyllis, played exquisitely by Barbara Stanwyck. The set-up to the murder (and what Dennis is referencing) is that Neff, while pretending to be an injured Dietrichson, hobbles around on crutches on board a train. Neff leaps from the back of the slow moving locomotive, and he and Phyllis throw the dead body of her husband on the tracks.

From 1959 to 1973, MacMurray also appeared in numerous Disney films, including The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, Follow Me, Boys!, and The Happiest Millionaire. At this time he also starred in the television series My Three Sons.

Can you believe we only have three chapters remaining in Christine? Actually… it’s only two chapters and an Epilogue, if ya wanna get all pedantic about it… and you know I do. Tomorrow is gonna be another quickie. Part 3: Chapter 50 is only around six pages long. We finally learn what Dennis plans to use to combat LeBay and Christine, and I must say that it looks like he’s gonna go hog-wild on the two of them for what they did to his friend. No shit!

In the meantime, since you don’t have a lot of official reading to do, maybe it’s time for you to bone up on other supernatural goings-on. I’ve brought my copies of Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown along for the ride. Just in case Dennis fails in his bid to defeat Christine, I think we should be prepared for anything. After all…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 27

Part 3: Chapter 48

It is later the same day. Dennis drops Leigh at home. He tells her that he doesn’t expect anything to happen to them so long as Arnie is in town. LeBay and Christine dare not make their move with their alibi (Arnie) still around.

At home, Dennis starts putting his still amorphous plans into action. First, he calls up his old boss from PennDOT, Brad Jefferies. Dennis asks if he knows anyone willing to rent a certain piece of equipment to a teen. Surprised, Brad tells Dennis to give Johnny Pomberton a call.

Next, Dennis calls Arnie’s house, but not to talk to Arnie. Instead, Dennis asks Michael to call him if Arnie decides to go out of town for any reason. Michael promises him that he will do so.

Dennis calls Johnny Pomberton and makes an appointment with the man for the following morning. Dennis is going to pick up something special… something that requires knowledge of driving a stick shift.

Dennis then calls Jimmy Sykes. Jimmy has been out of a job since Darnell’s Garage closed. Dennis tells Jimmy that Arnie left something behind at the garage, and he needs Jimmy’s keys to retrieve it. Jimmy is hesitant at first, not wanting to break a promise he made to Darnell about not loaning out the garage keys. In the end, wanting to do his friend Arnie a favor, Jimmy agrees to give Dennis the keys — so long as he returns them. They are, he says, all he has to remember Will by.

Lastly, Dennis calls up Leigh and lots her know his plan. She needs to help Dennis convince LeBay that what he is planning isn’t a trap. She agrees, and Dennis hopes that he can keep Arnie from getting killed one more time…

Boy, this last week of Blog-o-ween is gonna be a breeze, ain’t it? I could take my hands off the steering wheel, so to speak, and let the blog drive itself, huh?

Well, maybe not. I think I’ll keep my hands on the ol’ ten-and-two, if you know what I mean. Still, there are a few points-of-interest I’d like to illuminate for you…

For instance, when Brad Jefferies suggests to Dennis that he should talk to Johnny Pomberton, he says, “He’s got more rolling stock than Carter’s got liver pills.”

Say what now?

Developed in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1868 by Samuel J. Carter, Carter’s Little Liver Pills were marketed as a cure-all. Advertisements claimed that the pills would take care of ailments as varied as headaches, digestive issues, and “torpid liver.”

After nearly a century of marketing, it was discovered that Carter’s Little Liver Pills actually had nothing to do with the liver. The United States Federal Trade Commission made the company remove the word “liver” from the name, and it’s been Carter’s Little Pills ever since. Nowadays, the pills are purchased as sodium-free laxative.

Carter’s advertisements were so ubiquitous that the name entered into the everyday language of millions of newspaper readers, radio listeners, and tv viewers. Indeed, to this day some people  (older people, I’ll grant you) still use the phrase “so-&-so’s got more [blank] than Carter’s got little pills.”

We are at the sharp end of Christine. We only have five more chapters to go. It is time to focus on the job at hand: killing Christine. There isn’t any room for error or time for any shenanigans. It’s January 1979, and the baseball season has been over for three months, so there shouldn’t be any silliness about Dennis cheering on the Phillies, right?

Think again.

When Dennis calls his old boss up, Brad is genuinely glad to here from his old employee. He mentions the two of them getting together and hanging out:

“‘Dennis Guilder, scourge of the turnpike extension project!’ Bard Jefferies said heartily. ‘Good to hear from you, kiddo. When are you gonna come over and watch the Penguins with me again?’

‘I dunno,’ I said. ‘I get tired of watching handicapped people play hockey after a while. Now if you got interested in a good team, like the Flyers—’

‘Christ, have I got to listen to this from a kid that isn’t even mine?’ Brad asked. ‘The world really is going to hell, I guess.’” (445)

I can sorta kinda forgive Dennis in this moment. The Philadelphia Flyers were the scourge of the National Hockey League during the 1970s. Known as the “Broad Street Bullies” they punched, kicked, and bit their way to two Stanley Cups in 1974 and 1975.

They scored a few goals, too, I suppose.

The Pittsburgh Penguins, on the other hand, were a bunch saps in the 1970s. Coming into the league at the same time as the Flyers (during the 1967 expansion of the NHL from six teams to twelve), the Penguins’ fortunes weren’t as rosy as the Flyers’. Though they put up some impressive offensive numbers from the likes of Syl Apps, Lowell MacDonald and Jean Pronovost, they just weren’t as complete a team as the Flyers. The Penguins wouldn’t come into their own until the mid-1980s when they drafted a certain 6 ft. 4 in. French Canadian center forward from Montreal, Canada.

Brad also asks Dennis when they are going to get together and “peel a few cans” (446)

Brad, Dennis is four years underage and a high school student. You, on the other hand, are a grown man. Get a life!

Is that our motel just ahead? Are we there already? Man, time is flying during this last week of Blog-o-ween. Tomorrow, we got another short trip along the highways and byways, but I think the view, so to speak, is one of the best in the book. Why don’cha read Part 3: Chapter 49 to see what I am talking about.

Dennis finally comes face to face with LeBay, and it is maybe my favorite moment in the entire book. We may even finally get some closure when it comes to figuring out what kind of monster Christine is. (I know I say that a lot, but I mean it this time!)

Is Dennis making the right decision confronting LeBay? Well, we shall see. Even if he’s making a monumental mistake (and the stains on the road that are Buddy Repperton and Moochie Welch certainly suggest that he is), we can still take some learn from his example, because…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 26

Part 3: Chapter 47

It is 18 January 1979. Dennis and Leigh are sitting in Dennis’ car (a Plymouth) in the Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot. Between bites of fried chicken and bouts of smooching, they discuss how they can kill Christine. They are wondering when is the best time to approach the problem, when Arnie and Christine make their decision for them.

Without being seen (but also without seeing Dennis and Leigh), Arnie parks in the same parking lot. On his way back to Christine with his hands full of chicken, Arnie finally catches sight of the two young lovers. Dennis attempts to hobble after Arnie before he can make it back to Christine. Arnie beats him to his car. As Christine roars forward to run Dennis down, both he and Leigh see Arnie’s face turn into a skull… LeBay’s fleshless, grinning face…

We are gonna make short work of this chapter, Blog-o-weeners. It is only eight pages, after all. Not a lot happens, but it is the springboard from which the rest of the novel (only five chapters to go!) lurches forward.

My family was not a Kentucky Fried Chicken household. I am not sure why. Maybe there just weren’t any in our general area. There were plenty of Burger Kings, McDonald’ses, and (my personal favorite) Wendy’ses. (Is that the plural form of a possessive?) In fact, I can’t recall if any of my friends ever ate at the Colonel’s. Alls I know is that every time I saw one if those red-and-white buckets on TV, I wanted to sink my teeth into some extra-crunchy.

Fun fact: in 1991, Kentucky Fried Chicken officially changed its name to KFC. Many assume that this was done so because the trend in the culture was moving away from fried and fatty foods and to more healthful alternatives. Having the word “Fried” right smack in the middle of the name was not helpful.

This is only partially true, however.

Another issue at play was the fact that KFC was looking to expand into other, foreign markets. A shorter, simpler name would do wonders for the company in places like China, for instance.

(Fun fact within the original fun fact: KFC has a different name in Quebec. There, it is known as PFK, short for “Poulet Frit Kentucky.”)

Another reason (and one that I’ve never heard before) is that in 1990 the Commonwealth of Kentucky (the full, actual name of the state — fun fact within a fun fact within a fun fact… Pennsylvania is also a Commonwealth) trademarked the name “Kentucky.” What this meant for the company is that the Colonel would have had to start paying for the right to keep using the name of the state. It’s a compelling explanation — Kentucky trademarks the name in 1990, the restaurant becomes KFC in 1991.

Speaking of chicken…

I thought we had cleared up the whole chicken/egg argument about where the evil in Christine came from. I feel like we landed once and for all, definitively on the Roland D. LeBay side of things. He poured his rage and jealousies and hatred into his car, sacrificed a few loved ones within it, and this allowed his spirit to remain to reside with in it and Arnie.

Done and done.

Dennis remarks that Arnie’s having found the two lovers in each other’s arms in a fast food restaurant parking lot was

“Nothing but a coincidence — a grisly, hideous coincidence. Except that even now a part of my mind is coldly convinced that it was Christine… that even at that turn, Christine led him there.” (440)

If it is Christine that knew about Dennis and Leigh, and it was Christine that drove Arnie (pun intended) to choose the Colonel’s chicken over the neighboring Kowloon Express Chinese restaurant, where does that leave LeBay? When he is with Christine, Arnie is LeBay essentially. So when Arnie sees Dennis and Leigh licking each other’s fingers, is it he that is shocked and hurt by the betrayal… or is it LeBay?

It is a conundrum.

And it is a problem that we can work out at that motel up ahead. I told you it was going to be a short run today. Our next leg of our journey through Christine is also going to be a quickie. For tomorrow read Part 3: Chapter 48. Dennis knows he and Leigh have to act fast now that the Unholy Three of LeBay-Arnie-Christine know about their affair. What are they going to do? How are they going to defeat that demon on wheels?

I know this is a case of closing the barn door after the horse has escaped, but… c’mon, Dennis and Leigh… with all the death surrounding you guys, you couldn’t have been a bit smarter about where you chose to neck? How about that Arby’s that Dennis drove by in the beginning of the novel. No one goes to Arby’s.

Well, Blog-o-weeners, I guess it is up to us to learn the lessons that young lovers are too distracted to learn. After all…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 25

Free Day:

There Are Other Worlds

Than These

Whelp, Blog-o-weeners, here we are — our last “Free Day” of Blog-o-ween 2026. It’ll be a quick one today. As I write this on Saturday afternoon, I am trying to mentally and physically prepare myself for the American Cinematheque’s Horrorthon at the Aero Theater. Starting at 7 p.m., it’s gonna be 12 straight hours of horror movies, absurd A.I. generated filler, killer washing machines, candy (from Randy) thrown into the crowd, riffs (from the audience) shouted at the screen, and all of it hosted by such luminaries as Telly Savalas, Juan Bear-enguer, and, of course, Corn Gorn, the Living God.

Pray for me.

As I said, this is our last “Free Day.” We’ve rounded the last curve, Blog-o-weeners, and from now until this Saturday, we are on the straightaway to the finish line. Let’s hope we make it to the end in one piece.

For our previous free days, we’ve looked at the place that cars have in the world of teenagers, the influences on King while writing Christine, and the adaptations that others have made of the novel. Today, I thought we’d look at a few of the places where Christine has reappeared in King’s work. You can’t keep a good killer car down, after all.

Now, I am going to be honest with yinz — I am not a fan of so-called “Easter Eggs.” Whether it’s the painted variety hidden in the backyard for children to find or the dumb, winking-at-the-audience kind modern filmmakers love to pepper throughout their work, I got no use for any of it. The ecstasies that some viewers go through when they catch sight of these visual echoes just leaves me scratching my head. But… to each his or her or their own, I suppose.

Many of Stephen King’s own works — be they characters, places or things — act as “Easter Eggs” in his own writings. Most of these eggs are laid at the foot of The Dark Tower. The quest of Roland the Gunslinger to find the Dark Tower comprises 4,250 pages spread over eight novels and one novella. The adventures of his ka-tet (ka-tet being a High Speech term for a group of people drawn together by ka… ka being the will of Gan… Gan being — ahhh, fuhgeddaboudit… it’s weird High Fantasy shit, okay?!) take place mainly in Mid-World (which is a reflection of our world… sort of), but also in our world (which is also the world of Stephen King and his novels).

Again… it’s weird High Fantasy shit, so just go with it.

Characters move between books in The Dark Tower series, as does their author himself. (Keep repeating, “It’s only weird High Fantasy… It’s only weird High Fantasy…) Some of the books that breakthrough into the Dark Tower are It, The Stand, ‘Salem's Lot, Insomnia, Hearts in Atlantis, Black House, The Eyes of the Dragon, The Shining, and Cell. For instance, Father Callahan, the disgraced clergyman who fails to stop Barlow the vampire in ‘Salem’s Lot, reappears in The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla.

It isn’t only The Dark Tower series that draws King’s creations to it. Sometimes, a character from one book will just pop up in another for no particular reason. Dick Hallorann, for example, was first introduced in King’s novel The Shining. Later, in It, he is mentioned as being one of the founders of The Black Spot bar in Derry. Why? Why not?

Christine, like Mr. Hallorann, motorvates from place to place, from book to book. Why? Well, I think you know the answer to that one, Blog-o-weeners.

One of the books that Christine makes an appearance in is It. The corpse of Belch Huggins drives a Plymouth Fury to pick up Henry Bowers so he can reach the hotel where the grown-up members of The Loser's Club are staying.

...and with Charles Grodin as "Jack Torrance."

It is also mentioned in The Shining that the car Dick Hallorann drives away from the Overlook is a Plymouth Fury, albeit a beige and not a red and white one.

Throughout the novel 11/22/63, time traveller Jake Epping sees the same car — a Plymouth Fury from the mid- to late-1950s — sitting in a lot when he goes back in time to 1958.

In 1978, Stephen King's novel The Stand was published. At 823 pages, it was his longest work to date. Originally, it was to be much longer, but publisher Doubleday told him that that the book's size would make it too expensive for the market to bear. So, he cut nearly 400 pages from his manuscript. In 1990, King was the “King of Horror.” The market, it was discovered would bear whatever he wanted to publish. So, a 1,152 page, unabridged edition of The Stand was published and called The Complete and Uncut Edition.

Take that, Doubleday!

Within that unabridged edition, we get a moment where Stu Redman and Tom Cullen, on their way back to Boulder, CO, from Las Vegas, NV, find a Plymouth Fury. Inside, they find the keys to the car attached to a keychain with the initials AC engraved on them.

My favorite “Easter Egg” (ugh), however, happens in the novel Christine itself, and it has nothing to do with the car.

We haven’t gotten to this moment yet, but soon Dennis will take a drive over to Jimmy Sykes’s house. Jimmy, if you remember, worked at Darnell’s Garage. With Darnell dead and the garage closed, Jimmy (always a little on the slow side, kinda like Tom Cullen in The Stand) is out of work. But, he has the hopes of future employment:

“I guess I’ll go for bein a janitor, or somethin like that. My Uncle Fred’s a janitor up to the college, and he says there’s an op’nin, because this other janitor, he disappeared, just took off or somethin…” (449)

That janitor may be the one who found a crate under the stairs of the science building at Horlicks College. He seemed to think it was filled with old issues of National Geographic, but I’m not sure if that’s true. I wonder what was in there…

All righty, Blog-o-weeners, it’s time to call it a day. I’m a little nervous now that we’ve established that it’s pretty easy to slide back and forth between books when you’re dealing with Stephen King. I’m going to make sure the map we’re using doesn’t all of a sudden send us up to Derry, Maine, or down to Duma Key, Florida. Contending with a killer car is enough for one trip, don’cha think?

While I’m plotting our route, why don’t you read Part 3: Chapter 47? It’s another short chapter with a lot happening in it. For one thing, Dennis and Leigh are eating fried chicken in a KFC parking lot. (And that is not a euphemism for anything!) Unfortunately, Arnie and Christine also get a hankering for the Colonel’s secret recipe.

I’ve said this before, but… oh, Dennis… oh, Leigh… you two lovebirds had one job: stay outta sight of Christine. Let this be a lesson to all of you Blog-o-weeners out there. If you are gonna engage in hanky-panky behind your friend’s back, don’t do anything that is finger-lickin’ good in a public place. Thankfully, we have Dennis and Leigh to show us why that’s a bad idea, and, as always…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 24

Part 3: Chapter 46

It is 5 January 1979. Dennis receives a postcard from Richard McCandless of the Libertyville American Legion. On it is printed the address of George LeBay. From it and a few calls to the telephone operator, Dennis is able to find LeBay’s phone number. He can’t bring himself to call it just yet.

The next day, Dennis’s mind is made up for him by the news that someone — or something — has killed Rudolph Junkins. The Pennsylvania State Police Detective was driven off the road near Blairsville. That night Dennis calls George LeBay.

LeBay is not happy to hear from Dennis. Dennis relates to the man everything terrible thing that has happened to Arnie and to Christine and the people who have crossed them. Dennis wants to know more about Roland LeBay, about his fury, and about something that George seemed he wanted to tell Dennis those few scant months before. George, it seems, believes that his brother was responsible for the deaths of at least four people who had made fun of his as a twelve-year-old child. He also suspects that his brother may have sacrificed his daughter and his wife to Christine, allowing them to die inside of her.

LeBay asks Dennis what he plans to do. Dennis tells him he plans on destroying Christine. George LeBay warns him that by doing so he may be destroying his friend as well…

This is short chapter, but, boy, do I love it. The last time George LeBay sat with us, I said that I loved a good “secret history” reveal in a horror story. I promised then that George would be back to tell us more, and — whew! — his story is a doozy, ain’t it? Murder, mayhem, ritualistic sacrifice — oh, my!

Those of you who have been with us for Blog-o-weens past know how much I love physical media. (I used to work for a audio-visual preservation company where I handled all sorts of odd film and video formats. It was my all-time favorite job.) Be it old books, old films, old audio tape, I’m as much fascinated by the form as I am the content of our shared past.

The ability to shrink photographic images down has been around almost as long as photography itself. In 1839, John Benjamin Dancer was one of the first to produce such microphotographs using a daguerreotype process. He was able to achieve a reduction ratio of 160:1.

Between 1927 and 1935, the Library of Congress microfilmed more than three million pages of books and manuscripts in the British Library. In 1935, Kodak began filming and publishing The New York Times on reels of 35 millimeter microfilm. This method of information storage received the sanction of the American Library Association at its annual meeting in 1936, when it officially endorsed microforms.

Now, it should be noted that when Dennis does a deep dive into Detective Jenkins’s investigation into the deaths surrounding Christine, he is doing so on microfilm. But he also could have been using microfiche. What’s the difference? Well, like any good scientist in a 1950s monster movie, I have a film about it I can show you…

Dennis’s trip to the library also allows him to take part in the time-honored tradition of horror story characters looking at microfilm.

(If only it had been Leigh who went to the library instead!)

The information we get from George LeBay this time around is very disturbing. The last time out, George suggested that his brother was just a jerk with anger management issues. Now we learn that Rollie may have been a murderer to boot. Beginning at the age of twelve, Roland LeBay killed anyone who tormented him or injured him or stood in his way. This may have included, we learn, his own wife and daughter:

“‘Later, Veronica wrote [LeBay’s sister] Marcia a letter and hinted that Rollie had made no real effort to save their daughter. And that, at the very end, he put her back in the car. So she would be out of the sun, he said. But in her letter, Veronica said she thought Rollie wanted her to die in the car.’

[…]

‘And Veronica?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘The police verdict was suicide, even though there was no note. It may well have been. But the poor woman had made some friends in town, and I have often wondered if perhaps she had hinted to some of them, as she had to Marcia, that Rita’s death was not quite as she and Rollie had reported it. I have wondered if Rollie found out… There’s no proof one way or the other, of course. But I’ve wondered why she would do it the way she did — and I’ve wondered how a woman who didn’t know the slightest thing about cars would know enough to get the hose and attach it to the exhaust pipe and put it in through the window. I try not to wonder about those things. They keep me awake at night.’” (433-4)

I suppose in one way this answers the question once and for all of where the evil in Christine resides: in LeBay or in the car. For his 1983 film adaptation, John Carpenter chose the car, and everything in that movie flows from that choice. Arnie and Christine fall in love, and she kills anyone that gets in the way of that love. Here in King’s book, however, LeBay is behind everything, but not, as his brother tells Dennis,

“‘…in any conscious way… Not any more than I am suggesting that he consciously murdered [his daughter]. If you had known my brother, you would know how ridiculous it is to suspect him of witchcraft or sorcery or trafficking with demons. He believed in nothing beyond his own senses… except, I suppose, for his own will. I am suggesting that he might have had some… some intuition…’” (433)

I like the ambiguity of all this. It’s not as if Roland LeBay discovered some ancient spell during one of his tours of duty in the army. It’s not as if he joined some cult and gained special powers. In the hands of another writer that may have been the case, and we the reader would have been left with an answer but, oddly, without a real resolution to the problem. By leaving it up in the air — “some intuition” — we don’t have a standard boogeyman to blame. There’s no outside evil here — only the human will to survive death if for no other reason than just because you’re a real son-of-a-bitch.

Whelp… there’s the motel up ahead. Before we settle in for the night, I want to call up all the kids I may have bullied back in the day just to be sure none of them are planning to dump me into the nearest lake anytime soon. I also want to circle back to something George LeBay tells Dennis during their conversation. It doesn’t explain anything, but it adds another twist in the tale:

“‘My mother used to call Rollie her changeling… My mother said he was a perfectly good baby until he was six months old. And then… she said that was when Puck came. She said Puck took her good baby for one of his jokes and replaced him with a changeling.’” (432)

A what now?

According to folklore, a changeling (aka an auf or oaf) is a human-like substitute left by a supernatural being when it kidnaps a human being. Usually, the kidnapped human was a child; but there were cases, particularly in Scandinavia and Ireland, where adults were taken.

Just something else I gotta worry about, I guess.

In English folklore, The Puck (aka Robin Goodfellow, Goodfellows, or Hobgoblins) are demons or fairies which can be domestic sprites or nature sprites. They are famous for their mischievous pranks and practical jokes.

I’m not so sure letting your daughter choke to death in your car counts as a joke.

Though Mrs. LeBay is only joking when she calls her son a changeling, George states that the woman would never say it within earshot of Rollie. The changeling their doesn’t solve the problem, but it does add another delightfully creepy wrinkle to the source of LeBay’s power to inhabit Christine.

Okay… that’s all for today. Looks like the pool at the motel is still open. I’ll get us a couple of sandwiches and beers, and we can relax and watch the kids in the water cheat at Marco Polo. There is no reading for tomorrow. It is our last “Free Day” of Blog-o-ween 2026. This novel isn’t the only one where a Plymouth Fury motorvates across the page. Lots of Steven King’s books intersect and overlap. People and places from one story will show up out of the blue in another. You just can’t keep a good killer car down!

Man, I miss spending time in the school library doing research on a paper or some other project. There was nothing better than digging into the old newspaper and magazine archives and reading old advertisements and stories. Sometimes I’d forget to do the work I was there to do, and I’d follow a story from day-to-day and month-to-month just to see how it developed.

I think reading all those old Watergate-era newspaper and magazine articles on the Nixon administration really helped settle my stomach, so to speak, in terms of what we are going through today. What’s happening now is really nothing new. I think it would come as a great relief and a great source of comfort if you went back and read about those crooks of yesteryear. Believe me…