Christine (1983)

When all the trucks become self-aware (plus a rogue lawn sprinkler, or a toy), the result was unintentionally comical. However, when one car goes psycho, then it is truly terrifying. Frankly, I would be more scared by a bunch of trucks. Heck, even one truck in a Duel style encounter would be pretty unnerving. So all credit is due to Stephen King for creating a cherry red Plymouth Fury with a real mean streak.

I think this book, like Cujo, gets misrepresented when one tries to boil the plot down to a couple sentences. As you may recall, to the uninitiated, Cujo is thought of as the book where a rabid dog runs all over town randomly killing people. Similiarly, Christine is thought of as the book where a possessed car drives all over town killing people. Really, the car gets a bum rap in these summaries. The really nasty guy is the ghost of Roland LeBay, the thoroughly unlikable fellow who sells lifelong loser Arnie Cunningham the car. Perhaps it is not obvious to the people she is running over (repeatedly), but Christine isn't acting alone. Of course making this into a simple "possessed car" tale is an easy crutch, as the movie, which came out in record time after the book, will show.

Let's talk about location. Christine is one of the least Maine-oriented books King had written. In fact, I don't think the state gets a single mention. This isn't his first foray out of the Pine Tree State, as anyone who has read The Shining of Firestarter can attest, but it is still the default location of a standard Stephen King horror novel. Instead Pennsylvania gets the starring role. I'm not sure what reason he had for moving it out of Maine except for diversity's sake, but location does not play a critical role in the plot. In some ways that's good for building the "it could happen anywhere" sense of dread in his readers.

The most interesting structural device of the novel is the shifting point of view. Our narrator, Dennis, Arnie's unlikely best friend, suffers a serious accident at the end of part one, one so bad he is "fired" from his role in the second part. If he hadn't been, readers would have been treated to a heart-pounding tale of being confined to a hospital bed for months. Arnie doesn't supplant him in the role, but he is the focus in the middle section, enjoying a Dorian Gray type of transformation from ur-dork to a 50's rocker. By the time Dennis gets his narrator job back in the third part, Arnie is too far gone. Dennis is probably relieved that he just had to "kill" the car and not his friend. It's a coming of age story with a twisted, ugly ending.

Final thoughts: Christine is one of the better Stephen King books. He tottered a bit in his post-Dead Zone novels, the first Dark Tower felt stitched together, and the 1980's Bachman books were mostly dreck. Different Seasons was a real shot in the arm that reversed the doldrums, but Christine showed that this mini-renaissance of the early 1980's wasn't due to avoiding the horror genre. Christine is every bit a horror novel, driven by supernatural forces of fate and featuring The Thing That Cannot Be Killed (thanks Danse Macabre!). Not much here can be explained by purely rational explanations, as we saw in Cujo and most of Different Seasons. However, Christine will be the last "normal" book for quite some time in this project. As we move into the next titles, I will try to explain why we aren't going to see a book not published under unusual circumstances, until we reach It, whenever that might be.