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…

Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 12

Part 2: Chapters 23, 24, & 25

Arnie and Leigh are parking at the Embankment, Libertyville’s version of Lover’s Lane. All is going well until Leigh skedaddles out of Christine, leaving Arnie panting, frustrated, and alone. In tears, Leigh tells Arnie that while she wants to keep doing what it is they are doing, she cannot do it in Christine. She senses that Arnie loves Christine more than her. Worse… she senses that Christine loves Arnie right back… and hates her.

After taking Leigh home, Arnie cruises around in Christine. He begins to realize that Leigh may be right about one thing: he spends much more time with Christine than he does her. He also begins to realize that his relationship with Christine may be doing something to him. Just what, he doesn’t know. But soon, as the miles begin to accrue (or diminish if Christine’s odometer is anything to go by), Arnie’s doubts about Christine — as well as his senses of time and of memory — dissolve into the ether.

That night, Leigh dreams that Christine visits her. The car sits at the curb in front of Leigh’s house, her engine running. There is no one at the wheel. Leigh tells her to go away and leave her alone, and Christine abides, pulling away from the curve sans driver. Thinking it all a dream, Leigh falls back asleep. Outside, however, fresh tire tracks show in the snow.

A few weeks later, in the middle of the night, Buddy Repperton and friends pay Sandy Galton a visit at the airport. As the sounds of breaking glass, twisting metal, and moronic laughter drift down to his parking lot attendant’s booth, Sandy takes a slug of Texas Driver and wishes he’d never heard of Buddy… or Arnie… or Christine…

There’s a scene in Fred Dekker’s 1987 love letter to classic movie horror, The Monster Squad, where Sean (Andre Gower) sits on the roof of his house and, with the aid of a pair of binoculars, watches Groundhog Day, Part 12. (No, not that Groundhog Day.) Sean’s dad (Stephen Macht), bearing burgers and fries, soon climbs out on the roof and joins him, and the evening is complete as the two guys kick back and enjoy the flick.

Man, I love that scene! What kid wouldn’t want access to their very own drive-in movie theater? C’mon! Of course, seeing the movie is one thing and hearing is something else entirely. (Although, how much sound do you need to get the gist of Groundhog Day, Part 12?) Back in the day, you’d need to park close to a post that had a speaker hanging from it. You took said speaker and hooked it on the upper edge of your car window. Then, you rolled up the window to keep the speaker in place. The sound wasn’t great, but at least you could understand what was being said.

Unfortunately, the drawback to these speakers wasn’t just poor sound fidelity. (Although, to be honest, if you’re going to the drive-in movies, then sound fidelity is probably pretty low on the list of priorities.) Chances are that after a double feature, a bunch of trailers, a couple buckets of popcorn, a whole pack of hot dogs, boxes of Mike & Ikes, and enough root beer to give Godzilla heartburn, the last thing on your mind is gonna being whether you remembered to put the speaker back on its post. I don’t care how many warnings the theater posted before and after the pictures — you’re probably gonna drive off with a busted window or a useless speaker trailing its wires behind it.

For once, the eggheads in charge of inventing the useless garbage that fills our everyday lives actually came up with a good idea. Not only does it save you the cost of replacing your driver-side window, but it also solves the problem of crummy sound. Why use the lo-fi speakers provided by the theater when you can just bring your own sound system? The solution? Microbroadcasting.

Microbroadcasting allows individuals or businesses to broadcast a radio signal over a limited area. In this case, it’s a drive-in theater broadcasting a movie’s sound to its patrons, but the same technology is used by schools to transmit announcements to students across campus, by tour guides to make sure the folks in the back of the group can hear them, and by that guy down the street from you who goes overboard with his Spooky Season decorations every year and who wants you to hear the theme to Halloween over and over again as you drive past his house.

Unfortunately, for Arnie and Leigh, the Liberty Hill Drive-In does not use microbroadcasting to transmit the movie’s sound. It is 1978, after all, and the technology would not be used until the late-1990s when The Boulevard Drive-In in Kansas City, Kansas, became the first theater to broadcast sound digitally. From where they sit on the Embankment, F.I.S.T. (1978 Norman Jewison) might as well be a silent film.

(Although, I have the sneaking suspicion that neither Arnie nor Leigh are all that interested in what Sylvester Stallone has to say on the subject of rights for the working man.

November 4 seems a little late in the season to be enjoying a drive-in movie anyway. Drive-Ins in the Pittsburgh area usually operate from March to October. I’ve been to a couple of double features when the temperatures during the second movie have sunk into the forties. It’s times like that that you want a little company. Or some hot chocolate. Or both.

The way that Arnie negates Leigh’s feelings about Christine is infuriating. Of course, her not wanting to make-out with Arnie in the car because she feels that it — she! — is jealous of her sounds crazy under normal circumstances. This is a horror novel, however, so we know that Leigh’s feelings are completely valid. Calling her “crazy” for feeling that way, however, is an ad hominem attack that Arnie has used before (and will continue to use) on his parents and on Dennis. He is also quick to portray himself (and Christine) as the victim of everyone’s prejudices. These are classic techniques of the manipulator, and it is sad to watch Arnie turn to them… or is it even Arnie who is doing it? More on that later…

According to Merriam-Webster, the term “idiot light” entered the lexicon in 1966 to describe “a colored light on an instrument panel (as of an automobile) designed to give a warning (as of low oil pressure).” These lights were once called “tell-tales,” but “idiot light” rose in popularity with automakers’ use of the lights for crucial functions instead of gauges. Idiot lights let you know that something bad has happened; gauges let drivers know that trouble was on the horizon. Gauges allowed for the detection of trouble before it happened; idiot lights only told you after the fact.

That Arnie is disturbed by the term “idiot lights” (198) is, I think, important. It comes at a moment when he is, at last, beginning to question his relationship with Christine.

“He stood on the walk, looking at his stalled car, marvellously resurrected time traveller from the era of Buddy Holly and Khrushchev and Laika the Space Dog, and suddenly he hated it. It had done something to him, he wasn’t sure what. Something.

“The idiot lights, blurred into football-shaped red eyes by the moisture on the window, seemed to mock him and reproach him at the same time.” (198) 

Once inside Christine, however, Arnie seems genuinely unable to gauge (pun intended!) the damage that Christine has done to his relationships with his parents, with Leigh, with Dennis. Outside, he refers to the car as “it;” inside, Christine is “she” again. Riding in the belly of the beast, Arnie is no longer able to read those emotional gauges. All that matters is cruisin’ with Christine.

We don’t get the attack on Christine in the book they way we will in the movie. (We’ll discuss the key differences between King’s book and Carpenter’s movie in our upcoming “Free Day,” so stayed tuned, Blog-o-weeners.) King keeps the “rape” of Christine by Buddy Repperton and his gang off-stage. We will come to learn the horrors visited upon Arnie’s car tomorrow, but for now we remain with Sandy Galton, hearing what he hears:

“The wind was blowing toward him, and he could hear — too much, he could hear.

“A tinkle of breaking glass, muffled laughter, a loud metallic thonk.

“More breaking glass.

“A pause.

“Low voices drifting to him on the cold wind. He was unable to pick up the individual words; they were distorted.

“Suddenly there a perfect fusillade of blows; Sandy winced at the sound. More breaking glass in the dark, and tinkle of metal falling on the pavement — chrome or something, he supposed… It sounded as if some pretty bad stuff was going on down at the far end of that parking lot.” (207-8)

Pretty bad stuff is right.

I like that we stay with Sandy in this moment. Each sound he hears is separated in its own paragraph as if each one is carried by its own gust of wind. It allows the reader to imagine the worst.

On that note, Blog-o-weeners, I say with retire for the night.  We need to get our rest, because there’s a lot of road to traverse tomorrow. Read Part 2: Chapters 26, 27, 28, 29, & 30. In know that seems like a lot to lay on you so early in the week, but in terms of page count it isn’t all that more than our usual night’s work.

We’ll find out the extent of the damage wreaked by Repperton and his lackeys. We’ll spend Thanksgiving at the hospital with Dennis. And you know what? I think I’ll treat us all to a concert at the Pittsburgh Civic Arena. Jackson Browne is in town. (Say that in a Pittsburgh accent five times fast!) We might run into Moochie Welch while we’re there. Or should I say run over him? (Heh-heh-heh!)

Boy, I miss going to the drive-in. Doesn’t matter what’s playing, a trip to the drive-in is always a lot fun. I tried it out here in California, but it just wasn’t the same. Too much light leakage from the surrounding towns for one thing. For another, no one seemed to understand the rules of the drive-in — like shutting off your lights if you arrive after the movie has started. It was so frustrating! I don’t want to sound like Emily Post, but there are important rules of drive-in movie etiquette to be followed. Maybe I’ll share them in a future post. And if you take them all to heart, then you’re guaranteed to have a good time at the movies, because…

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…