Christine – Stephen King, 1983 ★★★½

Remembering My First Time with the King

Is Christine a clever chrome-plated gorefest a young and still-hungry Stephen King dashed off with deceptive ease? Or is it rather an early signpost of decline when the blockbuster horror writer was bottoming out on booze and coke?

Popular opinion favors the latter; I understand the argument. As for me, I love Christine.

This has little to do with it being a scary story about a demon car. For me, it’s something of a perverse nostalgia rush. I was in my last days of high school when I read this, my first King novel, and to say I related to the lead character, pathetic loser Arnie Cunningham, is an understatement. Every blow and insult directed at him echoed in my own memory well.

At least that’s the case in Christine’s first half. After Arnie starts swearing at cops and allows his girlfriend to choke on a hamburger, he’s pretty much on his own. Then Christine becomes another kind of story for me: How easy it is to lose friends when you are young.

“Now I guess I’d say it’s the way you feel when a friend of yours falls in love and marries a right high-riding, dyed-in-the-wool bitch,” mulls Arnie’s lone friend Dennis early on. “You don’t like the bitch and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the bitch doesn’t like you, so you just close the door on that room of your friendship. When the thing is done, you either let go of the subject…or you find your friend letting go of you, usually with the bitch’s enthusiastic approval.”

Just to be clear, the “bitch” Dennis refers to is that car.

Later on, an older man with experience dealing with Christine ties the situation even more directly to the human condition: “Love is the old slaughterer. Love is not blind. Love is a cannibal with extremely acute vision. Love is insectile, it’s always hungry.”

Think Christine is just a story about a vintage Plymouth Fury with a real devil under its hood? Think again. Christine is a rumination on the fear and fury of growing up in suburban America in the late 20^th century. As an adolescent angst-fest, Christine pushes more buttons than even King’s earlier and more famous nod in this direction, 1974’s Carrie.

It’s actually as a horror story that Christine falls a bit short. More on that later.

When I was a senior in high school, I looked out at the rest of my life with deep trepidation. What would college hold? Could I find a good job? Who would I marry, and what would she turn me into? I was on the brink of some abyss, it seemed, starved for distraction. That’s when I found a copy of Christine in the discard section of the library where I worked.

Christine tapped into these fears. It laid out in knowing detail the many tripwires I had been unsuccessfully negotiating for the previous three-and-a-half-years, of snarling adults and judgmental teens, where bullying and rejection were the basic admission fees and self-doubt a constant companion. Better yet, it was written in this very knowing, low-key way that brought out the humor in the situation.

“At heart, most high school kids are about as funky as a bunch of Republican bankers at a church social,” Dennis observes early on. “There are girls who might have every album Black Sabbath ever made, but if Ozzy Osbourne went to their school and asked one of them for a date, that girl (and all of her friends) would laugh herself into a hemorrhage at the very idea.”

In Dennis’s voice, King lays out the territory of teenagehood circa 1978 (the year in which most of Christine takes place, and when I turned 12). It’s a world of strict social conventions and steep costs for breaches of same. One can understand why Arnie would want an escape from all that. Enter Christine.

For such an otherworldly femme fatale, Christine’s entrance is rather humble. Arnie spots her lying in a heap in a front yard: “The left side of her windshield was a snarled spiderweb of cracks. The right rear deck was based in, and an ugly nest of rust had grown in the paint-scraped valley. The back bumper was askew, the truck-lid was ajar, and upholstery was bleeding out through several long tears in the seat covers, both front and back.”

As Luke Skywalker would have put it: “What a piece of junk!”

How hot a property was Stephen King in 1983? So hot that the movie adaptation came out the same year as the book. Like the novel, it gets a worse rap than it deserves, though the resonances aren't quite as deep. Image from https://horrornovelreviews.com/2014/02/09/stephen-king-christine-review/.

Arnie sees something in this ravaged roadster that sets him off right away, to Dennis’s growing bewilderment. The transformation is almost immediate. On the way home, Arnie parks Christine on a stranger’s lawn to replace a tire. He’s confronted by the lawn’s owners, a fat housewife and her bully husband. For the first time Dennis can recall, Arnie stands his ground and nearly risks a fistfight in order to make sure Christine doesn’t have to drive home on her rims.

Soon after, Arnie redlines again, this time with his parents. Mom Regina is particularly vociferous about Christine, saying Arnie’s unready for such a responsibility. Arnie doesn’t just disagree, he blows up at her, pointing out he’s lived his life according to her wishes in every other way. This time, it’s different: “I bought a car and that’s…it!”

I’m reminded of another King character, Jack Torrance in The Shining. In the novel The Shining, Torrance’s transformation is actually a more gradual thing, but I flash on Jack Nicholson in the Kubrick film adaptation, where he’s pretty much ready for his axe in the opening minutes. Arnie similarly doesn’t waste time here. Soon he’s ditching his old pal Dennis and spending all of his time and money fixing Christine in a local garage run by a shady character named Darnell.

This is another part of the book that rang true for me: Abandonment issues. I found myself going through those a lot in high school. Young people can change quickly, leaving those who count on them in the lurch. When I was in the ninth grade, my two best friends turned on me when they decided I was more fun to pick on than hang out with. It was a whim of theirs that lasted over a year.

Arnie’s whim is augmented by Christine’s otherworldly influence. For a while, Dennis tries to piece together what this car really is, having a bad feeling from the moment he first sat inside it. He makes contact with the brother of the original owner, who impulsively recommends Arnie ditch the vehicle.

Dennis recognizes that’s a non-starter. For Arnie, Christine is more than an old car. She is an avatar of Arnie’s budding manhood, a symbol of virility and potency. Within weeks of taking charge of Christine’s rehabilitation, Arnie’s acne vanishes and he becomes the boyfriend of the beautiful Leigh Cabot, a new girl in school who doesn’t know of Arnie’s loser past.

The sexual implications are amusingly drawn out by King, in the quotations from pop songs that begin each chapter and in the way Christine herself is described: “She would never argue or complain…You could enter her anytime and rest on her plush upholstery, rest in her warmth. She would never deny. She – she –

“She loved him.”

The book plays with the idea for a while; many more critically-minded readers say for too long. I quite enjoyed the clever send-up of car-crazy adolescence, the almost fetishistic focus King brings to this world of lug nuts, hemis, and spinner hubcaps. I also enjoyed the subtle way he paints Christine as a villain early on, with Dennis and others once close to Arnie feeling somehow uneasy in Christine’s presence. Is the problem really with the car, or the driver?

Eventually King makes his play, and the novel moves into a pure horror realm, which is where I was left disappointed. I know, what was I expecting, right? The thing is, Christine is a better novel when it subsumes the horror around a coming-of-age story about teenage lust and loneliness. By the time we get to the dénouement, and discover Christine is literally “a hellish haunted house that rolled on Goodyear tires,” something very real seemed to get lost, at least for me.

But like they say, your miles may vary. Christine is pretty hard for many to take seriously, but that may just make it more fun. Certainly it keeps you reading, both because of King’s storytelling flow and the sheer spectacle of wondering what he’ll try to pull off next.

At least for me, however Christine is that first time that still captivates, even at the risk of mild disappointment at the end.