Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 16

Part 2: Chapters 36 & 37

Buddy Repperton, along with Richie Trelawney and freshman Bobby Stanton, are cruising the back roads of rural Pennsylvania. The Texas Driver is flowing. In his Camaro’s rearview mirror, Buddy sees a pair of dual headlights in the distance. Whoever is back there, they are gaining on Buddy. No matter what speed he pushes his car to — seventy, eighty, ninety — that car chasing him is always gaining.

Christine bumps Buddy’s Camaro at well over 100 m.p.h. Buddy is thrown from his car as it strikes a concrete barrier. Bobby Stanton is killed instantly; Richie Trelawney is burned to death in the wreckage.

Buddy, his leg broken, crawls to the top of a snow embankment as he pleads for his life. Christine rams into the embankment over and over again. Just as she is about to bring Buddy down to the ground, however, she stops. Buddy looks up to see the corpse of Roland D. LeBay standing over him. Buddy screams at the top of his lungs.

Will Darnell sits in his office, waiting. Earlier in the evening, Jimmy Sykes said that Arnie’s car had pulled out of its parking space and left the garage. Darnell knows that Arnie is out of town with the Libertyville Chess Club. He also knows that Arnie’s best — and only — friend, Dennis Guilder, is still in the hospital and that Cunningham’s girlfriend, Leigh Cabot, doesn’t drive. So who took Christine out?

Later that night, Christine returns to the garage. Darnell walks down to her parking space. No one gets out of the car. Darnell opens the driver side door and is assailed by a rotten, earthy smell. Christine looks pristine, and her odometer is down to 52,000 miles. Darnell understands that there is something supernatural happening, and he wonders how he can use it to his advantage.

Suffice to say, there is no Squantic Hills State Park in the Pittsburgh Area. There are plenty of places with odd names — Monongahela, Susquehanna, Aliquippa, Connoquenessing — but no Squantic Hills. That sounds like something out of an H.P. Lovecraft story — "The dark and brooding Squantic Hills of Western Vermont." There are plenty of state parks in Western Pennsylvania with lakes and ski lodges, though. Buddy and his friends are near New Stanton, PA, (southeast of Pittsburgh and Libertyville) so they could be heading towards Keystone State Park or Laurel Ridge State Park.

During the car chase, Buddy turns his steering wheel with a “death knob that held one bobbing red die in alcohol” (288).

A what now?

A brodie knob (aka “suicide knob,” “knuckle-buster,” “wheel spinner,”  “granny knob,” and “necker's knob”) was invented by Joel R. Thorp of Wisconsin in 1936. The name “brodie knob” refers to well-known 19th century daredevil Steve Brodie, whose death-defying leaps from bridges made his name. Indeed, “to do a Brodie” entered the lexicon to describe any suicidal (and stupid) stunt.

Brodie knobs are attached to steering wheels in order to allow the driver more leverage when making tight turns. Unfortunately for Buddy Repperton et al. such was not the case.

Roland LeBay’s appearance outside of Christine throws another spanner into the works when it comes to figuring out just who is in control — the car or the owner. We’ve seen LeBay inside of Christine before. (Just yesterday as a matter of fact.) We’ve also seen the ways in which Arnie is taking on the personality of LeBay. Yet, we also had the moment when LeBay calls Christine “that shitting car” and “the Ace of Spades,” so at that time it felt that Christine was the controlling force. I’m not sure what to think now that LeBay has stood outside of Christine to taunt Buddy.

There’s a wonderfully creepy moment at the end of Chapter 36 when a cross-country skier, out for a jaunt under the stars, hears Christine’s engines roar with the thrill of the kill:

“Abruptly the skin on his back prickled into bumps, as if a goose had just walked over his grave, and although he know it was only a car somewhere on the other side — sound carried a long way up here on still winter nights — his first thought was that something prehistoric had awakened and had tracked its prey to earth: a great wolf, or perhaps a saber-toothed tiger.” (293)

His feeling that “something prehistoric had awakened” fits right in there with our overall theme of the past come back to life in the present, does it not, Blog-o-weeners?

Will Darnell is no dummy. He senses that there is something very wrong with Arnie’s car. He sees that the odometer has gone backwards, and chalks it up to the way that a used car salesman will turn the clock back (pun intended!) to make an old jalopy look newer than it really is. He saw the damage that Repperton and his gang laid on Christine, and Darnell knows that Arnie getting Christine back to the way she was before — better even! — is not possible. He knows that Arnie has not had very much to do (in the traditional sense) with either of Christine’s miraculous resurrections. Darnell sits in his office, cogitating and pulling together the many threads of Arnie’s time with Christine. The pattern that emerges is a distinctly supernatural one.

I like how King shows us the steps of Darnell’s thinking. Junkins is doing the same thing, but he seems unable to do what Darnell does: namely, make the leap that there is something “magical” at work. Darnell is not a credulous man, but when the facts in the case suggest something out of the ordinary, then he’s willing to accept that.

Today was just a short pleasure cruise compared to our past trips. Let’s pull into that motel up ahead and enjoy the evening. Maybe we could go up into the hills and go for a cross-country ski?

Before we do that, however, I want to talk about one last thing. Darnell, in his reveries of his high school years and his one true love Wanda Haskins, recalls

“he had had the lead part in the senior play. His part had been that of the minister who is driven to suicide by his lust for Sadie Thompson, the girl he has set out to save.” (305)

Who now?

The short story “Rain” by British writer W. Somerset Maugham was published in the April 1921 issue of The Smart Set. Set in the South Pacific, it tells the story of a group of people held in quarantine on the island of Pago Pago. One of the group, Miss Sadie Thompson, entertains men in her room. (Ooo-la-la!) It is mentioned that she came aboard the ship in Hawaii and that she is from Iwelei, the red-light district there. A missionary, Davidson, attempts to save Miss Thompson from herself. She is told by the island governor that she will return to the United States on the next boat. Fearing imprisonment in San Francisco, Thompson repents her ways and becomes a God-fearing woman. Days later, Davidson is found on the beach, his throat cut. Thompson is in the hotel, back to her old, debauched ways and laughing at the narrator and all the other men.

Maugham’s short story was turned into a stage play in 1922. It  was filmed many times over the years, most famously in 1932 starring Joan Crawford in the role of Sadie Thompson and Walter Huston as Davidson.

It’s rather sad to be in Will’s memory of his youth, remembering the taste of Wanda Haskins lipstick. In his own way, he ended up like Davidson at the end of the story: dead at the hands of his own worst impulses.

Well, isn’t that a bright and cheery way to end the day, Blog-o-weeners? Sheesh… sorry about that. I am sorry to say, too, that it isn’t going to get any better in tomorrow’s reading: Part 2: Chapters 38 & 39. Arnie is fighting for his life in the clutches of Christine/LeBay. Can someone help him? His parents? Leigh? Dennis? Anyone? We shall see, Blog-o-weeners… we shall see…

You know… another crazy moment is as Buddy Repperton gets bumped by Christine, it is said it is the first time that he ever put a seatbelt on. Although seatbelts had been in use around the world for as long as cars were on the road, there were no mandatory laws for their use in the United States until the 1980s. Many consumers were against them and cut them out of their cars. It seems crazy, I know, but a lot of people aren’t really keen on their own protection. Maybe we can use Chapter 36 as case study? After all…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 15

Part 2: Chapters 34 & 35

In order to smooth things over with Leigh, Arnie takes her (in Christine, natch) Christmas shopping at the Monroeville Mall. Ice cream is eaten, presents are bought, ice skaters are watched  — a fine time is had by one and all.

That is until, on the way home, they pick up a hitchhiker and stop at McDonald’s. While Arnie goes inside the fast food restaurant to get their order, the hitchhiker (a Pitt student on his way home for the holidays) tells Leigh that he senses “bad vibes” sitting in the backseat. He also asks her if she smells something bad. She says no, but the truth is she does smell it.

Arnie drops the hitchhiker off on JFK Drive, but before he can pull away from the curb, Leigh chokes on her hamburger. As she tries to cough up the bite of burger, Leigh sees Christine’s dashboard light up like a pair of eyes watching her die. Before Arnie can act, the hitchhiker pulls Leigh out of the car, performs the Heimlich maneuver, and saves her life. As they drive to Leigh’s house, the smell of rot and decomposition overwhelms her.

Once at her house, Leigh puts her foot down. She tells Arnie that she refuses to go anywhere with Arnie in Christine. Arnie, of course, tries to tell her that she is crazy and that she sounds just like his mother. Leigh is adamant. She goes on to accuse Arnie of letting her choke in his car because that is what Christine wants.

Infuriated with Leigh’s accusations and demands, Arnie runs off to motorvate with Christine… and someone else…

Things started off pretty well for Arnie and Leigh, did they not, Blog-o-weeners? Heck, Arnie was even charming the support hose off of Leigh’s mom. Even a trip to the mall during the height of the holiday shopping season wasn’t enough to poop the lovebirds’ party. I suppose it’s true: there’s nothing like a trip to the mall during the Christmas shopping season to fill the heart to overflowing even as it empties the wallet down to moths, amirite?

You know, that reminds me… there were a few other people who spent Christmas at a mall in Pittsburgh in December of 1978. Of course, they had the whole place to themselves. Business at the mall was… dead.

Heh-heh-heh!

Before the postwar boom in the 1950s, Monroeville, PA, (next-door neighbor to Libertyville) was mostly rural farmland. With the construction of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Interstate 376 (the road that Dennis and Arnie spent the summer working on), Monroeville had a growth spurt both commercially and residentially.

Come the mid-1960s, Don-Mark Realty proposed the building of a shopping mall on a site once known as Harper’s Mine. The mall was to be the largest in the United States. Construction began in 1967, and two years later the Monroeville Mall opened for business.

The Monroeville Mall had it all: 125 stores, a large clock tower that featured twelve animated puppets (each one representing an ethnic group in the Pittsburgh area — yikes!), a large skating rink with the picture windows of an Italian restaurant lining one side (so you could twirl your spaghetti while watching the skaters twirl their Salchows), a bank, several restaurants (including The Brown Derby — which was not associated with the more famous Hollywood eatery), pharmacies, and even a ministry center. Don-Mark Realty envisioned the mall as the indoor “town center” for the entire Monroeville community.

Which is why it made for the perfect setting of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the follow-up to his 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. While not a strict sequel to Night, Dawn follows the exploits of four people who are trying to leave modern society and the zombie revolution behind. Instead of pushing on to Canada, our fearless foursome stop over at the Monroeville Mall. Sealing themselves off from the rest of the world like a modern retelling of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” our heroes soon discover that having 24/7 access to everything they desire isn’t the panacea that they think it is.

Dawn of the Dead was filmed during the winter of 1977 at the mall. Romero and his crew filmed overnight, so that meant taking down then resetting all of the mall’s Christmas decorations every day. If you watch the movie, then you can get a sense of what Arnie and Leigh are experiencing — except for the gun shop. The mall never had a gun store on the premises. Romero filmed those scenes at a downtown Pittsburgh gun shop. I mean could you imagine… a gun store… at an American mall? That’s crazy!

Isn’t it…?

Sadly, things have not been as rosy for the Monroeville Mall as of late. In January 2025, it was announced that the mall had been sold to an anonymous buyer. A month later, the buyer was revealed to be Walmart, who planned on demolishing the building. Formal plans for this demolition (originally scheduled for April 2027), however, have not been submitted to the municipality, so who knows? The mall, as of now is still opened.

In June 2026, some 3,000 fans of Dawn of the Dead attended the Living Dead Weekend at the mall. In addition to the fans, there were more than sixty cast and crew members, including three of the four principal stars Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, and Gaylen Ross (sadly David Emge passed away in 2024). There is another Living Dead Weekend planned for THIS VERY WEEKEND! If you are in the Pittsburgh area (and not, say, in Burlington, VT!), get your tickets here and check it out.

Things go south for Arnie and Leigh after they leave the mall. It begins with them picking up a hitchhiker on the way back to Libertyville. He’s described as looking a bit like Charles Manson, with his wild shoulder-length hair. I like to think that this is King himself making an appearance. In his college days, ol’ Stevie looked a bit like the Prophet of Spahn Ranch.

Arnie and Leigh had originally planned to go to dinner at the British Lion Steak House. There’s no such place that I could find, but it does remind me of a steak joint that we used to eat at when we went to the Beaver Valley Mall: York Steak House.

York Steak House began in Columbus, Ohio, in 1966. A second link in the chain was opened in 1971 in the Maine Mall in South Portland, Maine. Somewhere along the way from its inception to it dissolution in 1989, a York Steak House opened in the Beaver Valley Mall. York had a “Ye Olde English” decor that matches with the idea of the British Lion Steak House that King references. 

Not having enough time for a “fancy” dinner, Arnie and Leigh decide to stop at that old stand-by, Mickey-Ds. Oddly enough, Arnie parks Christine and leaves Leigh with the hitchhiker while he goes inside the restaurant to order their food. Why didn’t they just use the drive-thru?

Long story, short: McDonald’s restaurants did not offer drive-thrus until 1975. In Sierra Vista, Arizona, soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Huachuca Army Base were not allowed to appear in public in uniform. Therefore, they could not do what Arnie does in this chapter: park their cars and enter the restaurant. In order to help these soldiers enjoy the freedoms of America, McDonald’s built their first drive-thru window. (Other restaurants had already been offering this service.) It was a big hit, and McDonald’s began building drive-thru windows at their other stores. It just may be that the Libertyville McDonald’s had yet to catch up with the times.

If there’s one thing I am squeamish about its anything to do with choking. Brrr! It freaks me out, so this scene may be the scariest scene in all of Christine for me. Lucky for Leigh (and me!), Barry Gottfried, the Manson-esque hitchhiker, knows how to perform the Heimlich Maneuver.

Dr. Henry Heimlich, the man credited for popularizing the “abdominal thrust” to save choking victims, didn’t publish his views until 1974. So, although Gottfried says he learned the technique at the University of Pittsburgh cafeteria, it was still a relatively new idea.

This isn’t to excuse Arnie from attempting what Heimlich himself claimed only lodged the foreign matter deeper into the windpipe — the back slap — but I think it ameliorates his part in the situation somewhat. He’s a seventeen-year old kid, after all. 

And, as I’ve mentioned before, this is a horror novel. We know the history of Christine and the fate of people choking in her vicinity. We know that the back-slap method was tried on six-year-old Rita LeBay, and we know the person responsible for applying that disastrous method was her father, Roland. And we know how that turned out for her. And because this is a horror novel, I think we all know who or what kept Arnie from doing what I believe deep down he knew needed to be done to save Leigh’s life. But he — like Leigh — was under the watchful eyes of Christine.

We get more of Arnie/LeBay’s gaslighting of Leigh and his/their negation of her feelings about Christine. Leigh, however, remains steadfast in her refusal to ever ride in Christine again. (Do ya blame her?!) Arnie takes her criticism that he “seem[s] to forget a lot of things in that car. Like how to be Arnie Cunningham” (276) with grace and dignity — NOT! He screams that he doesn’t need her, then runs back to the open arms of his one true love.

Together, Christine and Arnie go cruising, but it isn’t just the streets of Libertyville they traverse:

“The radio played. It was WDIL all the way across the dial. The news came on. Eisenhower had predicted, at the AFL/CIO conventions, a future of labor and management marching harmoniously into the future together. Dave Beck had denied that the Teamsters Union was a front for the rackets. Rock ’n roller Eddie Cochran had been killed in a car crash while en route to London’s Heathrow Airport; three hours of emergency surgery had failed to save his life. The Russians were rattling their ICBMs. WDIL played the oldies all week long, but on the weekends they got really dedicated. Fifties newscasts wow. That was

(never heard anything like that before)

a really neat idea. That was

(totally insane)

pretty neat.” (278-9)

Arnie, in those parenthetical asides, knows that something is desperately wrong. Arnie — the old Arnie — is still in there somewhere, and he knows that what he’s hearing isn’t some old time radio stunt. And if he didn’t know it then, LeBay’s appearance next to him as a rotting corpse surely helps him to realize it. That Arnie, however, is quickly put down as the new Arnie swims to the surface to motorvate though the streets of Libertyville and of time itself, thinking of ways to make the shitters pay.

Speaking of motorvating, I think we’ve done enough of it for one day. I see a motel up ahead. Before we pull in for the night, however, there’s one more fun reference I want to point out.

It’s mentioned that Sandy Galton, the look-out for Buddy and his gang when they beat the stuffing out of Christine at the airport parking lot, has disappeared. Some say he hightailed it out of Libertyville for the sun of Mexico. Others say that Buddy leaned on the young man to hit the road. No one seems broken up about his leaving. Not his mother and not his younger brother, “who pushed more dope than any other kid in Gornick Junior High (280).

Gornick Junior High is not a real school, but it is named after a real person. Michael Gornick was a longtime collaborator of George A. Romero’s. He was the director of photography on one of the best five picture runs in film history: Martin (1977), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Knightriders (1980), Creepshow (1982), and Day of the Dead (1985). Gornick was the director of Creepshow 2 (1987), as well as episodes of Tales from the Darkside and Monsters.

The lady at the front desk says there’s a York Steak House nearby. Let’s freshen up, then get us a couple of sirloins and baked potatoes, and then come back to the room and crash out. Well, I’ll crash out. You, dear Blog-o-weener, have some reading to do first: Part 2: Chapters 36 & 37. Our friend Buddy Repperton shows up again. He and some friends are out motorvating when he sees a pair of dual headlights in his rearview mirror. Oddly, no matter how much gas he gives his old Camaro, those duals keep getting closer… and closer… and closer… 

Man, I used to love our yearly trip to the Monroeville Mall during the Christmas season. It was a big to-do driving from Beaver County all the way to the east of Pittsburgh. Watching the skaters on the old ice rink (now the site of a food court) was the highlight of the visit. I thought ice skating looked like a lot of fun — and it looked so easy, too.

Sadly, such was not the case when I finally got to try it for myself at the North Park outdoor skating rink years later. Getting up on my skates was the easy part… staying there was a little more challenging. Turning before I hit the curved wall was also harder than it seemed to be. It taught me that you can’t always learn how to do things by watching people who are skilled at them. I probably should have watched a few people like me who didn’t know what they were doing, because… 

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 14

Part 2: Chapters 31, 32, & 33

It’s the next day, and Arnie stumbles around the house getting ready to go to Darnell’s. There’s work to do on Christine, after all. His parents ask if he knew the boy who was run down on JFK Drive. Arnie assures them that he barely knew Moochie. Michael tells Arnie that the police talked to him. It seems that a Det. Junkins think that the Welch boy had something to do with the destruction of Arnie’s car. Michael pleads with Arnie to get rid of Christine, but Arnie feels that he’s put too much into the car to sell her. Arnie knows deep down inside that he’s not talking about money, either.

Down at Darnell’s, Arnie loses himself in the flow of oldies playing on Christine’s radio. Daydreaming, he recalls the actual work he’d done on Christine — a new antenna, popped a few dents out. But where had he got the new windshield and the new seat covers? How had the damage done to Christine’s engine been fixed? And how had he really hurt his back?

Arnie’s reverie is cut short when Pennsylvania State Police Detective Rudolph Junkins appears next to him. Junkins has come to Darnell’s to talk to Arnie… and to look at Christine. With Arnie parrying all of his probing questions with pat answers, Junkins exits the interview stymied but suspicious. He knows that Arnie is lying about something.

Arnie knows he is lying about something, too. (How did you hurt your back, Arnie?) He calls Leigh, hoping that by talking to her — by confessing to her — that he can still be saved. But from what? 

How did Arnie hurt his back?

It’s a question that hagrides Arnie for much of Part Two of Christine. It could be that — à la Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain — the pain that courses through Arnie’s back is simply an echo of LeBay’s condition. (Ol’ Rollie wore a back brace.) Arnie’s conscience keeps asking the question, but just as his conscious self shines its headlights onto the answer, Christine causes him to swerve away from it:

“That night after he and Leigh had found Christine smashed to hell in the parking lot, sitting on four slashed tires… that night at Darnell’s, after everyone was gone…

“And he had tuned the radio in Will’s office to the oldies on WDIL… and he had… he had…

“Hurt his back somehow.

“What had he been doing to hurt his back?…

“Did he really want to know? He didn’t. In fact, there were times when he didn’t want the car at all. There were times when he felt he would be better off just… well, junking it. Not that he ever would, or could. It was just that, sometimes (in the sweaty, shaking aftermath of that dream last night, for instance), he felt that if he got rid of it, he would be… happier.

“The radio suddenly spat an almost feline burst of static.” (253)

In the Cunningham kitchen, Regina asks Arnie if he would ever buy anything from a drug-pusher. Outside, when Arnie asks his father if he wants to check his arms from needle-marks, Michael tells Arnie, “I don’t need to ask if you’re on drugs… You’re only on one I know of, and that’s enough. It’s that goddam car” (246).

Stephen King’s battles with alcoholism and drug addiction are well documented. Ever since taking his first drink at the age of eighteen, King spent much of his professional life as a writer in a haze. A mixture of booze, pills, and cocaine fueled his late-night writing spells. Is it any wonder, then, that many of  his characters are either alcoholics (like The Shining’s Jack Torrance) or are addicted to drug stand-ins (the cursed goods sold by Leland Gaunt in the novel Needful Things)?

There are times in Christine when Arnie is clearheaded enough to realize that he has a problem. The example above from Chapter 33 is just one. Those moments of clarity are few and far between. Before long Arnie finds himself running to Christine in order to sit in her and listen to the radio. Or, when reality comes too close, Arnie feels compelled to reach out and touch Christine. Dennis sees what is happening to his friend and labels it “obsession.” He could easily call it by its rightful name: addiction.

I often wonder if King was aware of what he was doing in novels like Christine or The Shining. When writing about Jack Torrance and Arnie Cunningham, did King see their actions as the consequences of his own demons or was he simply creating a problem to be overcome by his characters? Were these cries for help from King or did he see them as people with bigger problems than his own. A “There but for the grace of God go I” type of thing? I’m tempted to think it was the latter. Like Arnie and Christine, I’m sure that King’s addictions told him that everything was fine so long as you stick by me… get in, Big Boy, and let’s cruise…

I’m gonna look for a motel to stop at for the night. I think I am still run down from yesterday’s run. Speaking of runs…

“[Arnie] was running cigarettes across the state line into New York, he was running fireworks all the way over to Burlington, and twice he had run something wrapped in flat brown-paper packages into Wheeling…” (253)

A drive between Pittsburgh and Wheeling, West Virginia, is about an hour. It’s only sixty miles. Making a run across the state border into West Virginia or Ohio is no big deal.

Burlington, Vermont, on the other hand, is 597 miles away. That’s a ten hour long trip. One way.

I know I am beating a dead horse, and I know that I am preaching to the choir, but… THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL THAT A 17-YEAR OLD KID IS MAKING A 20-HOUR ROUND TRIP TO DELIVER FIREWORKS OR CIGARETTES OR DRUGS OR WHATEVER IN HIS BOSS’S CAR! IT AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN, STEVIE!

I have the sneaking suspicion that when King had originally started writing the book that it was to be set in his native New England. Then, at some point he moved the action to Pittsburgh. It’s the only way I can attest for the wonky geography. It’s just so wrongheaded, so dumb, and so easily fixed by picking up a freaking map and looking at it. I’m so tired of mentioning it, but I can’t help myself. It drives me bonkers, and…

Okay… I think I’m gonna jump straight into the motel pool to cool off. I many or may not change out of my clothes beforehand. While I sink to the bottom of the deep end and try to get a grip on my sanity, why don’t you read Part 2: Chapters 34 & 35? Guess where we’re going tomorrow?!

That’s right! We’re going to the Monroeville Mall! Leigh and Arnie will be there to do some Christmas shopping. We’ll do a little ice skating, maybe hit Chess King and Spencer’s Gifts (and look at the naughty posters in the back corner… wink-wink!), and then after, if you’ve been good, we’re all going to McDonald’s for burgers and fries… and maybe one of those apple pies!

There’s an understatement if I’ve ever heard one. “Hot” doesn’t really begin to describe the molten lava-esque filling in those pies. I haven’t had one in what must be forty years, but I’m sure the roof of my mouth still bears the scars. Take it from me, let that sucker cool off for a few hours before even thinking about taking a bite. Think I’m being hyperbolic? Well, don’t listen to me and see what happens. I’m sure we’d all like to see what happens. After all… 

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 13

Part 2:

Chapters 26, 27, 28, 29, & 30

Arnie and Leigh take the bus out to the airport after school. They plan on picking up Christine, then motorvating into downtown Pittsburgh to do some Christmas shopping. Their shopping trip never happens because of what they find in the airport parking lot: Christine has been utterly demolished. Arnie vows revenge on the “shitters” in a voice that Leigh does not recognize.

That night, Arnie returns home, exhausted, a shell of his former self. (Whoever… or whatever… that was.) Regina tries to apologize, but Arnie brushes her words away. He has to get some rest, he tells her, because he is going back to Darnell’s early in the morning. He has to fix Christine. Regina demands that Arnie worry more about school. Arnie threatens to quit school if she doesn’t get off his — and Christina’s — case. Later, after he’s fallen asleep, Regina checks on him and is horrified by what she sees. In the half-light of his room, Arnie looks like an old man.

Leigh visits Dennis in the hospital. She is distraught because Arnie drifts through school like a ghost. She tells Dennis that Arnie refused to call the police or report the crime. After Michael calls the authorities in his son’s stead, Arnie refuses to say who did it.

Thanksgiving rolls around, and Arnie, bearing gifts (turkey sandwiches, a six-pack of beer, and homemade apple pie), finally pays a visit on Dennis. Arnie and Dennis enjoy their repast, and then Dennis asks his friend about Christine. Arnie claims that the damage is not nearly as bad as everyone thinks. Dennis, however, can tell that Arnie is lying. To change the subject, Arnie shows off his newest fashion accessory: a back brace. Not as old-fashioned or dirty as the one LeBay wore, but a back brace like the old man’s all the same.

Before leaving, Dennis asks Arnie to sign his cast, telling his friend that his original signature had worn off. That is not altogether true. Later, Dennis compares this new signature to Arnie’s old one, which he had saved when the doctor had cut back much of the cast on his leg. To Dennis horror, the signatures different. It is as if they were written by two different people.

A week after Thanksgiving, Moochie Welch is making his way back home from the Jackson Browne concert. Hitchhiking to Libertyville, Moochie is dropped off on JFK Drive. While walking to the gas station where Buddy and his friends work and hang out, Moochie sees Christine. Worse, Christine sees Moochie. After running him over multiple times, Christine heads back to Darnell’s. The dents that Moochie’s body made in Christine’s magically disappear as she pulls into her parking space at the garage. No one exits the car…

I’ve brought up the issue of Arnie’s and LeBay’s connection to Christine before. (I’ll bring it up again and again as we go on.) Given how close the points of that particular lover’s triangle are to one another, I wonder why Arnie was not aware in some preternatural way of what was happening to Christine at the hands of The Buddy Repperton Glee Club. It is obvious from his reaction that he did not know what had happened. I’m trying to figure out if this is a blind spot on his part or if Christine took the beating knowing how Arnie would react and that it would bring them closer together — and drag him further away from Leigh and his parents.

During the conversation between Dennis and Leigh, he recalls an overheard comment his father made about Arnie’s parents:

“The final triumph, Dennis’s father had said once, standing at the window and watching Regina lead Arnie by the hand down the Guilders’ walk to whee Michael waited behind the wheel of the car. Arnie and Dennis had been perhaps seven then. Momism supreme. I wonder if she’ll make the poor slob wait in the car when Arnie gets married…” (222)(Emphasis mine)

Momism?

Say what now?

“Momism,” according to Merriam-Webster, is “an excessive popular adoration and oversentimentalizing of mothers that is held to be oedipal in nature and that is thought to allow overprotective or clinging mothers unconsciously to deny their offspring emotional emancipation and thus to set up psychoneuroses.” Man, if that don’t nail the Regina-Arnie relationship right on the head, I don’t know what does.

For as controlling as Regina can be (and thus far in this novel, she hasn’t been painted in the most sympathetic light), I really feel for her. As Arnie drags himself into the house after spending the day with Chrsitine, Regina knows that every decision she’s made up to that point concerning her son and his car has been the wrong one. She is unable to really make amends. She simply is not wired that way.

On top of that, she feels her son slipping further and further away from her. He is in her eyes (and the reader’s) becoming a person so different from her “good boy” that she does not — cannot - recognize him:

“A stranger… my son is a stranger to me. Is this really my fault? Is it? Because I only wanted what was best for him? Can that be? Please, God, make this a nightmare I’ll wake up from with tears on my cheeks because it was so real.” (217)

The nightmare, unfortunately for Regina, is only too real and is one that she may never wake up from.

I mentioned that the day Arnie and Dennis ate lunch on the bleachers together felt like the last good day of their friendship. Well, the Thanksgiving scene at the hospital gives that earlier scene a run for its money. Dennis really feels the passage of time as he and Arnie talk about their shared past. I think this is King at his best, when he is talking about friendship and love and how both change as time moves on. Maybe the best example of this is from his 1986 novel IT when…

…all of the surviving members of the Losers Club begin to forget each other in the wake of Pennywise’s defeat. Talk about heartbreaking!

Stephen King must have been a Wonder Bread freak as a kid, because he mentions it in several stories. I don’t think I ever ate the stuff growing up. My mom, like Arnie and Dennis’s mothers, made me eat whole wheat. (How dare she care about my nutritional health and listen to our family doctor!)

Created by the Taggert Baking Company in 1921, Wonder Bread’s overly processed, bleached white appearance was originally seen as a sign of its purity. At the time, people had a lot more faith in industrial factory foods. Wonder Bread was so processed that by the time it came out the other end of the factory all of its vitamins and nutrients had been removed. Believe it or not, the FDA saw this as a bad thing. These important nutritional elements had to be reintroduced to the dough later, which is where the term “enriched bread” comes from. Wonder Bread’s long shelf life was also seen as a boon to post-WWII moms. Unfortunately, this was due mainly to the amount of sugar that Wonder Bread contained.

These days, most consumers see Wonder Bread as a symbol of everything wrong with the American diet. The local, artisan bakeries, whose so-called “unhealthy” and “impure” practices  were supposed to have been surpassed by Wonder Bread’s industrial manufacturing processes, have gotten the last laugh, it would seem. Maybe Wonder Bread could stand to learn a little something about selling enriched bread? It’s all about putting more stock into specialty bread. You just can’t rely on your sweetdoughs anymore, don’cha know! 

Let’s go back to a discussion we started to have about a week ago about Stephen King’s idea of the “myth-pool.” In his history of horror, Danse Macabre (which, really, I can’t recommend highly enough — if you have any interest in horror, it’s as good an overview of the genre up until 1980 as there is out there), King identifies the myth-pool as “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). So even if you’ve never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and you should!) and if you’ve never seen a vampire movie, because Dracula has been absorbed into the universal consciousness, so to speak, you would still understand the power of that image. We pinpointed three (maybe four) members of the horror myth-pool: 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).

(The Ghost is also part of the myth-pool but, according to King, there is no single ghost story that really nails down that trope in our minds — although he does give an honorable mention to the Henry James story “The Turn of the Screw.”)

What even is this cover?!

I promised to let you know when we reached the point in Christine when King dips his toe into the myth-pool. When Dennis gets Arnie to re-sign his cast then compares the two signatures, King tips his hand as to which “modern myth” he is referring to. It is a text that he returns to again and again throughout his career, though it isn’t one that many people are familiar with nowadays: Curt Siodmak’s 1942 science fiction-horror novel Donovan’s Brain.

Dr. Patrick Cory, in time-honored “Mad Doctor” fashion, experiments with keeping brains alive after death. W.H. Donovan is a meglomaniac millionaire (is there any other kind?) under investigation for tax evasion and other criminal activities. Lucky or unlucky for both men (we will leave that up to the reader), Donovan’s private plane goes down near Cory’s home. The good doctor is unable to save Donovan’s life, but — waste not, want not — he is able to remove his brain and place it into a glass tank filled with an electrically charged, oxygenated saline solution (patent pending).

According to the machines to which the tank is hooked up, Donovan’s brain is still active. One night, Dr. Cory finally receives unconscious commands from the brain. (“Change my saline solution!” being one of them presumably.) Cory jots the commands down in a handwriting that is distinctly not his own.

(Now where have we heard that one before?)

Soon, Donovan’s will completely overpowers the doctor’s. Cory is a mere vessel for Donovan as the magnate continues his criminal activities. Cory is taken over — both mentally and physically by Donovan: he project’s Donovan’s paranoia and takes on Donovan’s limp.

(Sound familiar?)

Donovan conspires to kill a young girl who stands in the way of his plans. Cory, fed up with being Madame to Donovan’s Wayland Flowers, draws the line at murder. He fears that soon he will have no will of his own and that Donovan may usurp him in his own body. The doctor’s lab assistant, Dr. Schratt, comes up with a plan to destroy the brain when it is “resting.” (It seems that even a brain in a jar needs a good eight hours of sleep per night.) Donovan attempts to take over Schratt, but the lab assistant is able to fend off the brain’s hypnotic attacks by repeating the phrase “Amidst the mists and coldest frosts he thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.” The glass tank is destroyed, but before he finally dies, Donovan commands Schratt’s heart to stop.

Any of King’s Constant Readers will recognize the influence of Siodmak’s story on his work. Lifelong stutterer Bill Denborough in IT uses the phrase “He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts” to ward off Pennywise. Mark Petrie uses another rhyme — Bitter Betty bought some butter; “But,” said she, “this butter's bitter!” — to ward off the hypnotic commands of Danny Glick, Kid Vamp. These are just little touches that King uses here and there. With Christine, I think King goes full Donovan’s Brain.

Arnie’s personality is slowly undergoing a sea change. Everyone — his mother and father, his girlfriend, his best friend — sees it happening. The use of the word “shitter,” the back brace, the old-fashioned haircut, his very signature — everything about Arnie is different. It’s as though he were turning into someone else entirely. Like Dr. Cory in Siodmak’s novel, he seems unable to get out from under the will of LeBay. How long is it before Arnie is gone for good? And if LeBay is Donovan, is Christine the glass tank filled with an electrically charged, oxygenated saline solution (patent pending) that houses the old man’s “brain?” Can Dennis take an ax to her and save Arnie?

You will just have to keep reading to find out, Blog-o-weeners!

There’s a motel just over the next hill, and I for one am looking forward to a little shuteye. I am pretty pooped from all of today’s gabbing. Before we wrap up today’s trip, however, I’d like to talk a bit about Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena.

The concert that Moochie goes to — Jackson Browne — takes place at what King calls the “Civic Center,” but it’s really the good old Civic Arena. Built in 1961 (and called the Civic Auditorium at the time), the Civic Arena was originally the home of Pittsburgh’s Civic Light Opera. Later, in 1967, it became the home of the National Hockey League team, the Pittsburgh Penguins. It was the first major sport venue with a retractable roof. My mom said that when she saw Liberace there (no judgment!) they opened the roof. I myself saw The Beach Boys in the 1980s when they did the same. It was pretty cool.

I saw many great concerts at the Civic Arena during the 1980s — Triumph (my first ever concert), Rush, Iron Maiden, Dio, Journey, Heart, Ratt, Bon Jovi, Frank Sinatra (!). I wish they had opened the roof at most of those shows because things ended up getting a little “smoky” in the Igloo… if you know what I mean… and I think you do.

There was no show scheduled a week after Thanksgiving in 1978. Jackson Browne last played the Civic Arena in August of 1977 and wouldn’t return until 1980. Post-Thanksgiving, Moochie could have enjoyed Neil Diamond on 8 December. If he had, then he might have welcomed Christine dancing the Mashed Potato on his head on his way home.

I kid! I kid!

Whew! That was a haul, was it not, Blog-o-weeners? Five chapters! And we didn’t get to half of them. That’s okay. You can’t win ‘em all.

There’s no rest for the wicked, however. If Christine keeps truckin’, then so do we. For tomorrow, read Part 2: Chapters 31, 32, & 33. We’ll meet Lieutenant Rudolph Junkins, Pennsylvania State Police, Detective Division. He has some questions for Arnie. Ol’ Rudy seems to suspect something about Arnie’s girl… and I don’t mean Leigh. Junkins sees a line running straight from Buddy Repperton to Moochie Welch back to Christine. Look out, Arnie! He doesn’t seem like your average donut-eating cop.

In addition to all the concerts, I sat through quite a few indoor soccer games at the Civic Arena. The Pittsburgh Spirit were not a great team, but they were always entertaining, and I loved ‘em. I remember my dad taking me on my birthday to see the Spirit play the best team in the Major Indoor Soccer League, the San Diego Sockers. My dad was the guy who always wanted to leave the sporting event when there was still plenty of time on the clock, so he could beat the traffic heading home. The Spirit were down 3-0, and I could feel my dad getting antsy. I begged him to let us stay until the bitter end — it was my birthday, after all. We did, and the Spirit came from behind to win in overtime with a goal from my favorite player, Helmut Dudek. I was ecstatic! My dad… not so much. It took us what felt like hours to get out of Pittsburgh and back home.

I’m sure now he laughs about it, but at the time he must have felt like an object lesson for other parents in why you should put your foot down with your kids. “Study this moment well,” he’d tell his fellow fathers, “because…