Blog-o-ween 2026: Playin' Chicken with Stephen King's Christine — Day 30

Part 3: Chapter 51

It is nearly noon, and Dennis and Leigh point Petunia towards Darnell’s Garage. On the way, they stop at a phone booth to call the Cunningham house to find out if Arnie has made plans to leave Libertyville. Michael answers and is frantic. Arnie, he tells Dennis, has told Regina that he has finally come to his senses about college. He wants to visit Penn State — today! Regina is over the moon, and she agrees. The two of them are leaving that afternoon. Dennis tells Michael to talk to his own father, and then the two of them are to convince Leigh’s family  of what’s going to happen. Then, they are all to gather together at the Cabot’s sturdy brick house. He tells Michael to tell them all to stay off the roads when Arnie and Regina leave town. He also tells Michael that under no conditions should he approach Christine if he sees her.

While opening the garage door at Darnell’s, Dennis falls and re-injures his leg. The pain is excruciating. Unable to work Petunia’s clutch with his left leg, Dennis downs a handful of painkillers and builds a makeshift lever out of a mop handle. While they wait, Dennis lays out his plan: at dusk, they will open the door to the garage. When Christine enters Darnell’s, Leigh (hiding from sight) will step out of the garage as she hits the button of the automatic door opener. With the heavy duty door shut behind her, Christine will be trapped. Dennis will use Petunia to batter Christine to death.

Dennis falls asleep while they wait. When he wakes up, it is dark and snowing harder. Leigh exits Petunia to walk towards her hiding place. Before she can reach it, Christine, who was laying in wait just outside the garage, pins her in place with her headlights. Christine leaps forward to run Leigh down. Before she can, however, Leigh hits the button and closes the door. Christine is trapped inside, but so is Leigh.

Fighting the truck’s clutch, Dennis manages to protect Leigh, who wanders about the garage dazedly after hitting her head during her initial escape. After being struck by Petunia, Christine’s passenger door opens to reveal the corpse of Michael Cunningham. Dennis rams Christine again, and he sees the grinning face of Roland LeBay sitting behind the wheel.

As Christine tries again and again to get at Leigh, Dennis sees that all the damage he has caused her is quickly repairing itself. Dennis sends Petunia into Christine again and again, crushing Christine with every impact. LeBay screams his defiance, but Dennis keeps driving the truck into Christine until her engine dies. Then, he passes out.

Dennis comes to with Leigh leaning over him. While he was passed out, she tells him, she ran outside and stopped a snow plow. She told the driver to call the police. While they wait for the cops, Christine starts to rejuvenate, the dents in her chassis smoothing out, her tires inflating, her engine revving. Together, Dennis and Leigh get Petunia rolling again. Just as they set to batter Christine into submission one last time, the ghosts of LeBay’s wife and daughter appear. Ignoring them, Dennis smashes into Christine again and again and again until she is nothing but a spread-out pile of junk.

Days later, Dennis comes to in the hospital. Sitting in his hospital room is State Police Inspector Rick Mercer. Mercer gives Dennis the good news that his fall outside Darnell’s hadn’t re-broken his leg. He also passes along the bad news that Arnie and his mother were killed in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Witnesses seem to think that there was a fight happening in the car between Arnie and a third person. Police chalk it up to a hitchhiker the Cunninghams had picked up, but Dennis knows it was LeBay. Giving up on Christine when it seemed as though she was lost, LeBay had tried to take back possession of Arnie. Arnie, however, had fought him off and, being the consummate chess player he was, had at least earned a draw…

There we have it, Blog-o-weeners. Oh, I know we still have one more day to go, but that’s just the dénouement. For all intents and purposes, Chapter 51 is the real end of Christine — in every sense of the word.

I like that King gives Arnie one last chance to be something of a hero. Sacrificing himself (and his mother) to rid the world of Roland D. LeBay is a proper end. I think we had all known for some time now that things would not end well for him. He was just too far gone. So, at the end, as King would say in another, earlier novel, Arnie made his stand.

In John Carpenter’s film adaptation of Christine, because there is no Roland LeBay character, Arnie is more culpable in Christine’s murders. In fact, for the final showdown in the film, Christine doesn’t ride alone. Arnie is there with her as an active participant. I prefer the more tragic depiction of Arnie in the book. This isn’t to say that Arnie has no responsibility for what happened. He had plenty of moments of clarity, where he knew what he was doing was wrong. It’s just that his addiction to Christine was just too strong for him to fight. One wonders if this is the way that King himself saw his own addiction and his own end.

I mentioned before that in earlier editions of Christine, King used lyrics from rock’n roll songs as epigraphs at the heads of each chapter. These songs — by artists such Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, and Moon Martin (a new favorite of mine!) — were almost exclusively about cars in some way. Here, in Chapter 51, we don’t get a snippet of a rock’n roll song, we get an entire poem by Robert Creeley.

Who now?

Born in 1926, American poet Robert White Creeley wrote more than sixty books in his lifetime. He entered Harvard in 1943, but left briefly to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and India in 1944–1945. He returned to Harvard in 1946, but left again to earn his BA from Black Mountain College in 1955.

Located in North Carolina, Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 and ideologically organized around John Dewey's educational philosophy, emphasizing holistic learning and the study of art as central to a liberal arts education. While at Black Mountain, Creeley met and worked with a group of writers and artists who formed the core of the so-called Black Mountain poets. (Though many of their number thought the idea of their forming a special group or poetical movement ridiculous.) These poets formed the backbone of the American avant-garde and post-modern movement for years to come. They included Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn.

My favorite thing about Creeley was how supportive of any artist he was regardless of fame or affiliation. Being responsive to the needs of others appeared to be essential to his personal ethics, and he seemed to take this responsibility extremely seriously, in both his life and his craft. He believed in artists helping artists, I guess.

Speaking of literature, Leigh finds examples in Darnell’s bathroom of another great American literary tradition: the sex book. When Leigh presents Dennis with the mop handle, he asks her where she found it:

“‘In the bathroom,’ she said, and wrinkled her nose.

‘Bad in there?’

‘Dirty, reeking of cigars, and there’s a whole pile of moldy books in the corner. The kind they sell at those little hole-in-the-wall stores.’

So that was what Darnell left behind him, [Dennis] thought: an empty garage, a pile of Beeline Books, and a phantom reek of Roi-Tan cigars.’” (473-4)

Beeline Books began life in the early 1960s publishing racy, pop-culture books. (Think: sexy spoofs of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. entitled The Girl from B.U.S.T.) They didn’t get into the type of books that Leigh and Dennis discover in Darnell’s bathroom (Good lord! Choke!) until the late-1960s after other publishers such as Greenleaf and Grove Press had won their own censorship battles. Beeline continued to provide men who could read with one hand with a steady production of sex books well into the 1990s.

Another type of literature altogether is being read by Rick Mercer as he waits for Dennis to wake up in the hospital.

Born in 1916 in Sharon, Pennsylvania, (which is about 70 miles north of Pittsburgh, close to the Ohio state border), John Dann MacDonald was best known for his crime and suspense novels, especially those starring his character Travis McGee. MacDonald also wrote the novel The Executioners (1957), which was filmed twice as Cape Fear, once in 1962 and again in 1991, and adapted in this past year as a television series.

Stephen King is a big admirer of John D. MacDonald’s, calling him “the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.” King first encountered MacDonald’s work in 1959 with Murder in the Wind. He said that it taught him that it was possible to 

“[tell] the truth about life even while you were writing for the popular market, so often regarded by those self-esteeming English profs as a market made up of closet sadists, lowbrow truck-drivers, and bored housewives. But even at twelve, with no more experience of life than a rural upbringing could afford, I knew the feel of the real when it touched me in that book. How could I, or anyone, not feel it? Murder in the Wind did not reach out and touch you; it grabbed you, jerked you into a dark alley, and assaulted you.”

In the lead up to publishing his first collection of short stories, Night Shift (1978), King’s editor and mentor Bill Thompson asked him who he would like to write the introduction. King answered automatically, “John D. MacDonald.” Thompson thought that was a great idea, but King did not think it was likely to happen.

Much to his delight, however, MacDonald told him that he would read the stories and, if he liked them, would send along the introduction. A few weeks later, he did just that. Written at a time before Stephen King had become “Stephen King” and before MacDonald and King had ever met, King never forgot the man’s generosity. It is obvious that MacDonald’s short piece — a discussion of the art of writing, as well as the art of being a writer — was done because he honestly liked the stories, as well as the craft wielded by the man behind them.

I can’t believe that tomorrow is the final day of Blog-o-ween 2026. It has been one helluva long haul, but we finally made it. Well, almost… you still have to read the book’s Epilogue. It’s only six pages. You should be able to finish it up while I hit that bookstore next to the motel.

Don’t look at me like that. I just want to see if they have a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

One last thing before we call it a night… Dennis mentions that the triple funeral for the Cunningham family was

“reported [as] a tragic and bizarre fairy tale — father killed in driveway car accident while mother and son are killed on Pennsylvania turnpike. Paul Harvey used it on his program.” (496)

Who now?

Paul Harvey Aurandt was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1918. For over fifty years on ABC News Radio, Harvey’s broadcasts reached as many as 24 million people per week. He was carried on 1,350 commercial radio stations, on 400 American Forces Network stations, and in 300 newspapers.

Harvey’s most famous creation was a Monday-through-Saturday radio program entitled The Rest of the Story. That phrase — “…and now you know the rest of the story.” — had been a part of Harvey’s newscasts since before the Second World War. The Rest of the Story premiered on May 10, 1976. It consisted of true stories on a variety of subjects with some key element of the story held back until the end. These broadcasts always concluded with a variation on the tagline, “And now you know… the rest of the story.”

Unfortunately, Harvey was also a friend of both FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and US Senator Joseph McCarthy. Harvey would often submit copies of his radio scripts to Hoover for the man’s approval. Harvey was also a ardent supporter of McCarthy’s campaign to expose and expel communists from American society and government. So, I guess I can end this post by saying, “And now you know…”