Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 1

Prologue and Part 1: Chapters 1 & 2

The year is 1983, and twenty-two year old Dennis Guilder wants to tell us a story. It’s a story as old as time. It’s about a lover’s triangle. Only, one corner of this triangle is occupied not by young woman or man — like the lovely Leigh Cabot and the awkward Arnie Cunningham, who occupy the other two corners — but by a car: a 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine.

Dennis’s reminiscing takes us back five years, to the late summer of 1978. While driving home from their job on the road crew building the extension to I-376, Arnie catches sight of Christine’s mouldering corpse in the front lawn of septuagenarian Roland D. LeBay. It is, as Dennis tells us, love at first sight — from both parties. Arnie wants Christine for his own no matter what, and it seems that Christine, incredibly and improbably, feels the same way. Arnie drops $25.00 right then and there into LeBay’s hands as a down payment on Christine, promising to return the next day with the balance of the $250.00 that the old man has asked for. Dennis tries to talk his friend out of the purchase, but Arnie only has eyes for Christine.

Arnie’s parents, Michael and Regina, are not happy when told about the newest member of the Cunningham family. They have, as Dennis oh-so-delicately puts it, had the run of Arnie’s life since day one. Arnie (with Christine behind him) is ready to push back. Only no one knows just how hard…

Rockabilly guitarist and singer Eddie Cochran recorded “Somethin’ Else” in July of 1959. He was twenty years old. Cochran died at the age of twenty-one. While on tour in England, Cochran and four others were involved in a high-speed, single car accident. Thrown from a private-hire taxi, Cochran suffered traumatic brain injuries and never regained consciousness. He died the next day on Easter Sunday 1960.

There’s a message in there somewhere…

King uses lyrics from old time rock’n’roll songs like “Somethin’ Else” as sign posts along the road throughout Christine. Every chapter has lyrics at its on-ramp. Nearly all of the songs are about cars. Those that aren’t are about obsessive love. Some are about both. It’s incredible how many of these tunes there are. And it’s rather disconcerting how many of the artists who recorded them died violent deaths — many times while behind the wheel.

I’ve always said that the horror movies of the 1980s that work best for me are the ones that use oldies in their soundtracks. (For the record — pun intended! — I mean those songs that were recorded and released before The Beatles oooooo’ed their first oooooo.) There is just something inherently creepy and weird about hearing The Chordettes sing “Mr. Sandman” over the burning corpse of Michael Myers in Halloween II. It’s a feeling that can’t be equalled by some heavy metal outfit’s tune blasting out of the drive-in speakers, so to speak.

(And this is from someone who considers himself to be a metalhead. I love Alice Cooper’s “Teenage Frankenstein” and “Dream Warriors” by Dokken. I just don’t need them playing during the movie.)

It’s only fitting, too, that it is the moldie oldies of the previous generation that play throughout Christine. The 1950s were back in a big way in the 1970s and 1980s. Oldies stations were on the radio. Bands like The Cramps and The Stray Cats were bopping along to the beat first laid down by Gene Vincent and  the aforementioned Eddie Cochran. American Graffiti was a big hit at the box office. On the small screen, “Happy Days” and “Sha-Na-Na” brought back pegged pants and leather jackets.

(I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that Arnie’s name is  a mash-up of the main character in “Happy Days” and the diner where the kids on that show hung out after school.) 

Nostalgia for the “simpler times” of the 1950s was not just happening musically or cinematically, but politically, too. It was to the 1950s that conservatives wanted the country to return — not the 1940s when punching Nazis was in fashion, and not the 1960s when everyone was tuning in and dropping out. The values of the 1950s were regarded as some sort of panacea for the ills of the nation. Never mind asking questions like “Which values?” and “Valuable to whom?” 

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner had somethin’ there. The past is an active force in Christine. Undead and hungry, it rises from the grave of history looking for fresh meat to feed upon. Unfortunately, Arnie Cunningham looks less like a zit-faced teenager to it and more like a double-decker cheeseburger and a chocolate malted.

This is something that I will return to again and again throughout the month. Keep it in the back of your mind, Blog-o-weeners. It’s important!

Speaking of living corpses… that Roland D. LeBay is a hoot and a half, ain’t he?

We will learn more about Mr. LeBay and his own love affair with Christine as the novel progresses, but for the moment let’s look at this first appearance.

LeBay the man is as important to this novel as Christine the car is. He could be the third corner of yet another lover’s triangle — with Arnie and Christine holding down the other two — though not quite, as we will learn in the weeks to come.

LeBay is as ravaged by time as Christine. When we meet him, Dennis regards him thusly:

“It was an old guy who looked as if he was enjoying—more or less—his seventieth summer. Probably less. This particular dude struck me as the sort of man who enjoyed very little. His hair was long and scraggy, what little there was left of it. He had a good case of psoriasis going on the bald part of his skull.

“He was wearing green old man’s pants and low-topped Keds. No shirt; instead there was something cinched around his waist that looked like a lady’s corset. When he got closer I saw that it was a back brace. From the look of it I would say, just offhand, that he had changed it last somewhere around the time Lyndon Johnson died.” (8)

His body may be falling apart — much like Christine’s — but his mind is something else. Dennis notes “something consciously dreadful” (11) behind LeBay’s manner, “as if a cold November wind could think” (12). 

Throughout this scene, in between Arnie and the old man’s haggling, Dennis goes on to notice they way LeBay treats Christine: the way he “touched the old, scuffed hood kind of bemused love” (10) and how the old man “kept one hand possessively on the Plymouth’s hood” (13). This physical connection between car and owner will, later in the story, become a metaphysical one… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Yes, I know that in the movie, this is not Roland LeBay, but his brother George. We'll talk more about that later.

One thing that I like about LeBay is that he isn’t some over-aged 1950’s greaser in love with the hot rod he had as a teenager. Far from it. LeBay, according to Dennis’s estimation, is seventy-one years old. LeBay tells the boys that he ordered Christine from the dealership in September of 1957. That’s a distance in time of twenty-one years. LeBay was fifty, a full-grown man, when Christine came into his life. I think in another, lesser writer’s hands, LeBay would have been a Bowser from Sha-Na-Na clone, a character who did nothing but talk about playin’ back seat bingo in his chariot with some real gone dolly he met at the sock hop. King knows that LeBay being older makes his relationship with Christine that much stranger and sadder.

I love that Roland D. LeBay is a fan of the daytime TV soap opera “The Edge of Night.” It’s a perfect fit for his character.

Originally intended as a daytime program to star author Earle Stanley Gardner’s popular defense attorney Perry Mason, “The Edge of Night” began on CBS television in 1956. Gardner withdrew his support from the show — as well as his creation — when television executives insisted that Mason have a love interest to placate female viewers. A year later, in 1957, the rift between Gardner and the executives would be patched up, and Perry Mason would get his own show, albeit at night.

“The Edge of Night” (sans Perry Mason) went ahead with production and stood out from the other soap operas at the time thanks to its focus on crime storylines. This noir-like focus drew in many male viewers who were usually home in time to watch the program thanks to its late-afternoon start time. It is estimated that at one time the soap opera’s audience was more than 50% male.

“The Edge of Night” ran on CBS from its inception until 1975, when it was cancelled by the network. Series sponsor Proctor & Gamble wanted the show to go on, however, and shifted the program to ABC, where it ran until 1984, ending on a cliffhanger.

Is there anything worse than being at a friend’s house when one hell of an argument breaks out? Ugh! So humiliating. I know exactly how Dennis feels. Just eat your cake, drink your milk, and keep your head down, buddy.

Arnie’s parents, Michael and Regina, are professors at local Horlicks University, which is not a real college. It is probably based upon George Romero’s alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. (CMU stood in for Horlicks in Romero and King's 1982 homage to horror comics, Creepshow. It’s where the monster from “The Crate” took a fancy to Adrienne Barbeau. Can you blame him?!) They are portrayed as people who love to get involved and to discuss things. They are liberal parents who encourage Dennis to call them by their first names.

This first fight between Arnie and his parents (though it’s mostly his mother, Regina, who squares up against him), however, pulls back the curtain on their polite, rational worldview. Friendly, rational discussion only goes so far. Regina is furious that her son didn’t consult with her before buying the car. She’s furious at Dennis for not stopping her son’s impulse buy. There’s a fury (pun intended!) just beneath her calm, collected, liberal veneer. I think this can be read as what was happening in the country as a whole. I don’t think you get landslide victories for both Nixon and Reagan without a lot of good liberal Democrats letting their collective fury loose and voting Republican.

This is a barf bag presumably.

What else now?

Oh, yeah…

King dead-icates (heh-heh-heh!) his book to two people: George Romero and Christine Forrest Romero. The year before Christine’s publication, King penned the screenplay to Creepshow, George’s homage to the horror comics of the 1950s. (Again with the 1950s… I’m sensing a trend here.) A few years before that — in 1978, mind you, when Christine takes place — George re-wrote the rules of horror cinema for a second time in his career, with the release of his zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. Dawn was the follow-up to Romero’s original horror gamechanger, Night of the Living Dead (1968). Dawn was filmed in Monroeville, PA, a town that, we will soon learn, sits next to Dennis and Arnie’s fictional hometown of Libertyville.

Christine Forrest Romero met George on the set of Season of the Witch (1973). They were married in 1981. She would work on all of his pictures as an actress and producer until they divorced in 2010. My favorite memory of her is as “Angie,” the grease monkey cum Once and Future Queen of the Motorhead Renaissance Fair in Romero’s Knightriders (1981) (my personal favorite movie of his).

(Knightriders would also showcase the acting abilities of another husband and wife tandem: Stephen and Tabitha King.)

There’s another name listed in the dedication of King’s novel. It isn’t a person, however. It is a town. And here begins a rant that will carry throughout this Blog-o-ween, one of which you will soon tire. You have been warned.

King dedicates Christine to the Romeros and to “the Burg.” The “Burg” in question is, of course, Pittsburgh. Please note the H at the end of the name — PittsburgH. As any yinzer will tell you, that H is important. It sets “da Burgh” apart from your run-of-the-mill Burgs. Anyone born and raised in Pittsburgh will correct you if you dare to drop the H from the name. Some ne’er-do-wells from the United States Board on Geographic Names tried that fast one in 1890, and got their collective asses hand to them by the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Senator George T. Oliver. By 1911, the Board saw the error of its ways and reversed its ruling. It was once again Pittsburgh, not Pittsburg.

What is the statute of limitations on getting a popular author to admit his mistake and fix this same issue?

The misspelling of Pittsburgh on the dedication page is, sadly, only one of many issues that I — or any other sane yinzer, for that matter — will have over the course of the next month with regards to Mr. King’s portrayal of the Steel City. Now is not the time or place to list these egregious errors. I don’t want to be that person just yet. But soon… I will be… oh, I will be…

Yeah, I just said that.

Sheesh.

Okay, okay… that’s enough jawin’ for one day. But before youse guys beat feet and split the scene, lemme lay tomorrow’s reading assignment on you hep cats. If’n ya wanna go cruising’ with me in my machine, then yer gonna have to read Part 1: Chapters 3 & 4. It’s less than twenty pages, but I think you’ll flip yer lid when you read it. It’s a real gas. It’s nifty. It’s neat-o. It’s…

Aaaah, that’s enough of that. Sure, I may sound like an idiot when I try to speak the kids’ lingo, but just remember…