Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 11

Free Day:

All Roads Lead to Christine

Well, Blog-o-weeners, we have been making some pretty good time, have we not? It’s only Day Eleven, and we are very nearly at the mid-way point in our journey through Christine. As much as I’d like us to forge on and put some more miles behind us, I think we should take a little break from drivin’, don’t you? Let’s get out of the car, stretch our legs, behold the scenery… and maybe… just maybe… check out…

That’s still a no, huh? Well, can’t fault a fellow for trying.

Regardless, let’s worry a little less about what’s around the next bend, and more about how we got here. Just how did Stephen King come to write this novel?

Before Ol’ Stevie enters the picture, however, I feel it would be remiss of me not to talk about other “autonomous autos” in the culture. King is far from the first person to give sentience to a moving vehicle, after all. Perhaps one or more of these stories lodged itself in his mind as a kid and reemerged, unbeknownst to him, years later?

[In his review of the film The Running Man for the September 1988 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (and later collected in his book Harlan Ellison’s Watching), writer Harlan Ellison (natch) thought this was certainly the case with the film’s source material. According to Ellison, after King was outed in 1985 as being “Richard Bachman” (the author of five novels, including The Running Man), science fiction writer Robert Sheckley contacted Ellison and asked if he noticed any similarities between King’s book and his own 1958 short story “The Prizes of Peril.” Ellison said he saw a lot of similarities, but that Sheckley should first reach out to King and discuss it. He did, and King admitted that, as a voracious reader of science fiction’s a child, he had probably read Sheckley’s story. Sheckley accepted King’s explanations and the two men worked things out like the adults that they are.

[This “cribbing” of Sheckley’s story by King must certainly be chalked up to a phenomenon known as “cryptomnesia,” which occurs when a forgotten memory returns without it being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a tune, a name, or a joke. They are not deliberately engaging in plagiarism, but are experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.

[(Unlike what I did in the above paragraph, which was straight-up plagiarism from Wikipedia.)

[For more on cryptomnesia and plagiarism and so-called “originality,” I wholeheartedly recommend Johnathan Lethem’s 2007 essay from Harper’s Magazine, “The Ecstasy of Influence.”]

So what previous tales could have possibly primed King’s imagination, preparing it to unleash Christine on the world?

Isaac Asimov had a short story called “Sally” published in the May-June 1953 issue of Fantastic. The story takes place in 2057 at a time when the only cars allowed on the road are those with positronic robotic brains. As time passes, some of these “smart” cars age out and are retired to farm to live out the rest of their days. They communicate by slamming their doors, honking their horns, and revving their engines. The story ends with the main character — Jeff, the man who runs the farm — coming to the conclusion that the human race is doomed if the cars ever realize that they are actually slaves.

The Twilight Zone also dealt with sentient cars. (Of course it did!) The season five episode “You Drive” (written by Earl Hamner, Jr. — the creator of The Waltons) concerns a fellow named Oliver Pope who hits and kills a kid with his car. Instead of staying at the scene and taking responsibility, Pope hightails it home. Later, a co-worker of Pope’s is accused. What luck! It’s the same guy trying to take Pope’s position at the office. Looks like ol’ Ollie is in the clear. No one knows his involvement in the accident. No one, that is, except his Ford Fairlane. Seems that Pope’s car is a more conscientious citizen than he is.

Perhaps the most famous pre-Christine example of the “killer car” sub-genre isn’t a car at all. Written by Theodore Sturgeon, “Killdozer” originally appeared in the November 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The story takes place during World War II on a small island in the Pacific. There, a group of men are building an airstrip with the use of a large bulldozer one of the men has nicknamed “Daisy-Etta.” The men accidentally break open the resting place of an ancient alien power (natch). This alien force wakes up on the wrong side of its rock and possesses Daisy-Etta turning her into… KILLDOZER!

“Killdozer” was one of Sturgeon’s most popular stories. It later spawned a 1974 made-for-TV movie starring Clint Walker, an April 1974 issue of the Marvel Comics’ Worlds Unknown, and, in 1983, the greatest dirge-rock band of all time.

There are numerous more examples in popular culture of cars coming to life. You got The Love Bug, Knightrider, Speed Buggy, and (my personal favorite) My Mother the Car. But how does King fit into all of this? On what imaginative assembly line was Christine manufactured?

(I mean, I’d like to believe that he took one look at Jerry Van Dyke’s performance in My Mother the Car and Christine appeared fully grown like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, but…)

The original seed (or bolt if we want to keep our metaphors in line) came courtesy of the car that King owned in 1978 — a Ford Pinto. (That same car would be used in another King novel — Cujo.) In Bev Vincent’s Stephen King: His Life, Work, and Influences, King states:

“One night as I was turning into my driveway, I saw the odometer numbers on my car turn from 9999.9 to 10,000. I found myself wondering if there might not be a story in an odometer that ran backward… The kicker would be that, when the odometer returned to zero, the car, at the height of its beauty, would spontaneously fall into component parts…

“[T]he whole thing started out to be sort of a joke. It was like Happy Days gone mad: boy gets car, boy loses car, boy finds car. I thought it was hilarious until the kid started to run people down. Because some stories get out of control and they are like the car itself: They start to run by themselves and they don’t always turn out the way you think they are going to turn out.” (92)

What he thought would be a comical short story à la American Graffiti turned into a five hundred page novel about the dissolution of friendship and the return of the (undead) past. As with many King creations in the 1980s, one suspects that what is missing is a strong editor, someone who can say the one word that every over-rambunctious artist needs to hear from time to time: No. King’s well-documented battles with drugs and alcohol may have played their part, as well. 

As long and meandering as Christine might be, I think King captures the very American relationship between teens and cars. We’ve touched on this association in our previous “Free Day,” but it bears repeating how specific Arnie’s love for Christine is to American culture in the post-war period. In Albert Rolls’s Stephen King: A Biography, King is quoted as saying:

“I guess you’d say it’s a monster story. But it’s also a story about cars and girls and guys and how cars become girls in America. It’s an American phenomenon in that sense. Christine is a freeway horror story. It couldn’t exist without a teenage culture that views the car as an integral part of that step from adolescence to adulthood. The car is the way that journey is made.” (63)

One wonders if that is still the case. I don’t get the sense from my son that the car is as necessary a stage in the modern American teenagers’ burgeoning adulthood. Judging from the evidence of the internal combustion engine’s part in the climate crisis, perhaps that’s just as well?

Okay, okay… enough of all that. The car might not be important to the kids out there, but around here we like nothing better than getting behind the wheel and tearing up the asphalt on our way to who-knows-where. Sure, there are safer, more environmentally friendly modes of transportation, but no one I know has lost their virginity on the back of an electric scooter while at the drive-in. 

Speaking of… tomorrow we take a trip out to Libertyville’s Lover’s Lane. Arnie and Leigh are gettin’ a little frisky in Christine’s front seat. So read Part 2: Chapters 23, 24, & 25 to find out just what base Arnie reaches with Leigh before Christine calls him out.

You know… I’m rather shocked at all the negative reviews of Christine that I’ve found during my research. Sure, it’s a little unwieldy at times, but I’m having a pretty good time reading it. Let’s face it, critics at the time had their knives out when it came to Stephen King. Don’t let the bad write-ups keep you from enjoying the book. But don’t ignore the critics just because they dump on something you like. Remember…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 10

Part 2: Chapters 20, 21, & 22

Christine is street legal. And Regina Cunningham is none too pleased.

Arnie and his parents engage in another donnybrook about where Arnie can keep Christine. Arnie wants to keep her at home; Regina wants it kept just about anywhere else. Recriminations fly back and forth — Regina accuses Arnie of spending most of his college money on his car; Arnie accuses Regina of sneaking into his room and rummaging through his personal property. Tensions build until Regina slaps her son, and he storms out of the house.

Michael attempts to make the peace between his wife and his son. He asks Arnie to show him his car and to take him for a drive. The destination? The Pittsburgh Airport. There, Arnie can keep his car for less money a month than he was paying Darnell, and it also keeps Christine out of Regina’s sight. Arnie thinks the plan is ridiculous, but Michael is adamant. He’s seen how Arnie has changed over the past two and a half months. He’s seen the way he snipes at his mother. He’s seen how unreasonable Arnie is when it comes to Christine. Michael puts his foot down, and Arnie relents. The airport parking garage it is.

At the airport, sitting behind the glass of the attendant’s booth, is someone Arnie should recognize, but does not: Sandy Galton. Sandy is one of Buddy Repperton’s crew. Repperton, expelled from school because of his switchblade antics with Arnie and Dennis, has a lot of time on his hands. He is very interested in what Sandy has to tell him about how lonesome Christine is at the airport. Perhaps, he thinks, they can keep her company out there in the dark…

We are officially in Third Person Narration territory now, Blog-o-weeners. One of the things we will have to ask ourselves by the time this detour takes us back to the first-person (and it will eventually) is this: does Dennis know any of what we are privy to in Part Two? And if so — how does he learn it? I’ll talk more about why King chose this stylistic convention in later posts. In the meantime, let’s just enjoy scooting around and listening in on conversations that Dennis wouldn’t be aware of.

Man, Arnie and Regina… amirite?

I know that we are being set up to hear LeBay’s anger in Arnie’s words, but Arnie is just as much a chip off his mother’s block as he is LeBay’s. As Michael says to Arnie, “You and your mother. Everything will be fine if you do it my way” (187). Regina’s fury, while not as crude as Arnie/Lebay’s, is still hard as nails. She just will not back down. Neither will Arnie. Poor Michael is just stuck in the middle doing his best with his recorder.

Outside of arguing about the way Arnie and his mother are exactly alike, Michael notices something strange about Christine: her odometer runs backwards.

Uh-oh.

Michael is amazed at the work that his son has done on his car. He is equally amazed about the knowledge Arnie has about the cars of the 1950s. But he is also dismayed that his son would not realize that the speedometer and odometer do not run off of the same cable. Of course, we know why Arnie is being a bit daft here. And we know how he knows so much about cars from the 1950s. And we darn well know how and why Christine’s odometer is running backwards, don’t we, Blog-o-weeners?

Heh-heh-heh!

Again, this backwards movement is the central idea behind the novel — its engine, so to speak. (Pun intended!) Arnie isn’t pulling Christine towards him; Christine is dragging Arnie to her, backwards to the past. Heck, even Regina, while stirring her drink with a swizzle-stick, stirs it in a counter-clockwise motion (174). Regina is also interested in pulling Arnie into the past. She wants him to be a little boy again. A little boy that she can understand and (sadly) control. Keep your eyes peeled for more of these types of moments and metaphors, Blog-o-weeners… I’m sure this guy will…

I mentioned yesterday about King’s lack of sense in reference  to geography. We get it here again — the run over to Albany (176). The fact that Arnie says this to his parents, and Regina and Michael don’t have a bird over it, just proves my point. If I had told my mom and dad in high school that my boss needed me to drive to Albany, NY, they would have lost their minds. (Probably right after wondering why I was delivering pizzas out-of-state.) So, again, I call bullshit.

I’m also wondering why Michael chose the Pittsburgh International Airport to store Christine. The old airport sits some thirty miles away from “Libertyville.” Arnie is rightly angry about being asked to ride the bus to pick up his car. That’s an hour and a half long ride with two or three transfers. It ain’t worth it.

Another thing I’ll nitpick about (because I love doing this) is Arnie and Michael taking I-278 to the airport. That’s wrong on two counts. First, there is no I-278 in Pennsylvania. Interstate 278 runs through all five boroughs of New York City and parts of New Jersey. (Again with the New York!) Interstate 279, on the other hand, runs from downtown Pittsburgh to Franklin Park. (Which is nowhere near the airport.) It was the road my friends and I took to get to Pittsburgh when we wanted to get funky in the big city. That all being said, the second reason why these directions to the airport are wrong is that you only need one road to get there: I-376. You know, the road that Dennis and Arnie spent the summer working on?

Good ol’ Station Square gets a shout-out. (Although it lies fifteen miles to the west of Libertyville and not five like Michael says.) Sitting along the Monongahela River across from downtown Pittsburgh, Station Square is a tourist destination home to various restaurants, shops, and hotels. Built on the site of the old Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad Station, Station Square sits near a light rail station, the Monongahela and Duquesne Inclines (what other cities would call funiculars), the dock for the Gateway Clipper, and the Smithfield Street Bridge. Also nearby is the home to the current champions of the United State Soccer League, The Pittsburgh Riverhounds.

When I lived on Mt. Washington, I took the Monongahela Incline down to Station Square and walked across the bridge into downtown Pittsburgh for work. For play, I’d take the Incline down to Station Square so I could see my girlfriend who worked at a store called Sox Appeal. Good times!

One last thing before we pull over for the night: Texas Driver.

Say what now?

One of the things that I love about Stephen King is that he is not afraid of namedropping in his books — specifically product namedropping. He straight out names things — Arby’s, McDonald’s Yodels, Twinkies, Iron City.

I recall reading somewhere that King did this because he didn’t want to be like mystery writer (and Perry Mason creator) Earle Stanley Gardner, who went out of his way not to mention specific brands in his stories. Gardner claimed that doing so would mean not tying his story to a particular time, therefore making it more timeless and universal. King called bullshit on this theory. Saying that his characters specifically drive to Kentucky Fried Chicken and not some nameless “fast food restaurant” gives King’s stories a sense of verisimilitude that Gardner’s stories (as good as they are) do not possess. Sure, things change over time — Kentucky Fried Chicken becomes KFC (because, as everyone knows, not saying the word “Fried” makes it not fried) — but that doesn’t change the reader’s sense of knowing what these characters are like by the brands they use.

So, when you see the name Texas Driver on a bottle in the mitts of Buddy Repperton and his gang, you assume that it’s a real thing.

Sorry to say: it is not.

Maybe there was some legal issues at work here — after all, this is a wine and juice combo that a bunch of underaged ne’er-do-wells are drinking while driving. Elsewhere in Christine, King names Iron City beer by name, but somehow that’s different.

If you want to put a real brand name on this concoction, then maybe you should think of other fortified wines like Ripple Red or Lancer’s (which makes an appearance in Salem’s Lot). You could also imagine Buddy downing a bottle of MD 20/20, Thunderbird, Cisco, Night Train, Wild Irish Rose, or…

Never you mind how’s come I know so many of those names!

Let’s call it a night and check into that motel up ahead. It isn’t Sunday, so that means the local beer distributor will still be open. I’ll run over and see if I can’t scare us up a cold six-pack of Iron City or maybe even Duke.

We can take it easy tonight, because tomorrow is another of our “Free Days.” Instead talking about Christine, I’ll be talking about how Stephen King came to write his killer car story. We’ll look at the history of the autonomous auto in fiction and the movies, too. It’ll be a good time even if we are a little hungover.

Ah, the good ol’ days when a bottle of Mad Dog split between two or three friends was considered a hot time. Of course, after a few sips, you felt as though you were kissing the tail end of a mad dog, but that’s not important. It was the bonds of friendship that mattered. Well, that and the lessons you learned about dumping a couple bottles of fortified wine into an empty stomach. You learned those lessons the hard way, but you never forgot them either. You had a good teacher, after all, because that teacher was you, and sometimes…

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…