Hell hath no Fury…
I didn’t think he had any idea of the sinister way that old cars can suck money. They suck it the way a vampire is supposed to suck blood.
Stephen King, Christine
Stephen King’s 16th book overall, 13th novel and ninth under his own name, we are deep into the throes of his coke addiction. It makes for what would be arguably his worst written book so far, and yet compared to other weaker entries so far on this journey (The Running Man, Firestarter), it gets away with a whole lot by being eminently readable.
When people parody King, I think this is the book that started the template for what he has been mocked for. Up until now, there is a surprising amount of variety in his books considering his popular perception, and his last book before this, Different Seasons, shows his talent beyond just horror too. Yet, Christine is a about a spooky car. And that just sounds dumb. It’s what leads to hack jokes like this one from Family Guy, because at their core there is a kernel of truth. King, in his folksy Americana way, takes the everyday, like muscle cars, mobile phones, or clowns, and twists it by making it capital ‘e’ Evil. Cujo before it could be seen along those same lines, but a rabid dog is somewhat more believable than a spooky car.
But part of the reason this book is so readable is that King makes the spooky car stuff actually work. If you were to simply pitch the idea of the spooky car, it sounds terrible. In the hands of a lesser writer, it would be. But King makes it work, and takes it further by making it a potent metaphor. Criticising Christine is fair, but I would argue not for the story it tells.
But the things to criticise show that he just needed a more ruthless editor. The most obvious problem is one King himself has discussed. Before this, King had experimented with using first person narrators in shorter narratives in his short stories or the aforementioned Different Seasons. This is his novel-length attempt, and he, honestly, fails. His planning a novel usually amounts to creating characters and a scenario and letting the story guide him from there, but there’s little excuse for the corner he write himself into where he breaks the main character’s legs and puts him in a hospital for three months because of a football game that otherwise has no plot importance.
I honestly don’t understand how that could not have easily been written around. King’s solution, such as it is, is to switch to third person narrative. During that middle third, there is some subtle justification for it. It is implied that Dennis is being relayed all this information that he then relays to the reader, but it is weak and doesn’t cover chapters where he would logically have no way of knowing what happened. Then, for the final third, King switches back to first person. If any student of mine tried to pull that off, it would be sent back to be fixed. An editor should have sent this back to King and made him rewrite it to be consistent throughout, coming down hard on one person or the other, but King by this point is Stephen King, big selling author, and he gets away with this first-draft laziness.
Speaking of first-draft laziness, King’s weakness for story bloat is perhaps more apparent here than in other novel, even the longer ones. Something like The Stand, even in its extended form, keeps chugging along and a story about the end of the world justifies that sort of length. But here, we are subject to long stretches of writing and backstory that hold the actual story up. It takes four chapters until Arnie actually buys the damn car, and until halfway through the book for the car to come to life and kill anyone, in a book the specifically promises spooky car stuff. This sounds like the criticism of one of those awful horror fans who watch YouTube videos of films just to see the kills, but it doesn’t take that long for spooky ghost stuff to happen at the Overlook, and both that hotel and Christine have much in common. Again, a good editor should have overruled King and cut this far, far back.
Another of King’s indulgences is his use epigraphs for every chapter, quoting car-related songs. Epigraphs have their place, but for every chapter is the peak of indulgence. I can’t imagine what this would have been like in 1983 without easy access to these songs, but it does suggest a cool idea for modern electronic editions that could link to those songs, but it remains an indulgence on King’s part. In any case, I have taken the liberty of creating a list of all those songs including links for the interested to have a look at. Please do, it took me ages to make.
And yet despite those criticisms, the book is not badly written. On a line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph level, this is written well enough that it just about manages to paper over the cracks and distract you from the sandy foundation. The problems I have are more macro than micro. Plus, it has one very big thing in its favour:
A really cool spooky car.
Christine is one of King’s most iconic villains outside of his work: one of my favourite appearances is a page from a Simpsons/Futurama crossover comic where Christine (along with other iconic King villains) chases Futurama characters down the street. It makes sense in context. Genuinely one of my favourite pages from a comic, and I would love a print if anyone know where I could get one. Christine, like Jack Torrence, Pennywise, Carrie White or even the Children of the Corn to an extent, transcends their respective books to become a more universal boogeyman
Beyond the aesthetics of a cool car (which as the book points out was not a well-known car at the time and is only known now purely due to this book and film adaptation), the central use of the car as a metaphor is so potent that it bleeds through the pages like a cut brake line. In his discussion about the book on the Kingcast, Bryan Fuller again eloquently and brilliantly gives a queer reading of the book, though he says the queer reading isn’t perhaps as potent as his one for ‘Salem’s Lot, a bit more of a stretch. I disagree. I think Christine is a lot more obviously queer than ‘Salem’s Lot, but he still does a better job of explaining it than I ever would, so I’ll leave it to him (side note: I hope his new adaptation happens!).
So let’s look at some other interpretations. The most obvious one is Christine overall is a book about growing up and the changes one encounters when making that awkward shift from child to adult. You grow hair, your voice deepens, your sexuality blossoms and sometimes that means you want to fuck a car. Arnie’s relationship with Christine is like one I’m sure many people are familiar with (a comparison is even drawn in the book) of your buddy getting with someone who is just bad news for them. The book draws link with Christine being a four-wheeled vampire, ruining Arnie’s life and isolating him with all the hallmarks of an abusive relationship. Arnie is allowed to be shared, but only on Christine’s terms; otherwise, he is protected in the most brutal of ways. As this is a horror version of an abuse story, Arnie doesn’t make it out alive. It’s sad, but also true for so many who are in similar circumstances.
Perhaps is not so simple as to say this is just an abusive relationship between two beings, one where the abuser is a car. Though it is never really clarified, the reader should feel fairly certain that Christine’s malign influence is due to LeBay’s possession of the car. This sours that relationship a step more, turning Arnie into the victim of a much older man. Though not as explicitly coded as other stories (Rainbird in Firestarter, Denker in Apt Pupil), Christine/LeBay is another example of King having a pedophile as his villain, corrupting Arnie. Much of Arnie’s behaviour, including his angry outbursts, his secrets he keeps, and the self-destructive risk-taking, are all similar signs one could see in a vulnerable child who is being abused. His burgeoning sexuality with Leigh (and to an extent with Dennis) only furthers that, as he never gives enough time to any of his healthy relationships compared to the consuming, vampiric nature of Christine. The love of Arnie’s friends and family is not enough to save Arnie’s body, but there might be some hope, at least, for his soul. In the end, the only one who could save Arnie, or at least take that first step, is Arnie himself.
Christine can just as easily be read as a book about sexual potency and the male rage that is so often linked with it. How often has the joke been made about men, their cars, and their performance in bed? Arnie dies a virgin, technically (similar to Harold Laudner in The Stand), but the closest he ever gets to having sex with Leigh is in Christine, When he tries to get it up, the car stalls; failure to launch. But Arnie keeps working on the car solo, just using his own hands. King often has sexual undercurrents in his books, and though ostensibly Christine is about the spooky car, the way Arnie is constantly described as stroking and fondling the car in a way that is so obviously sexual and masturbatory, the car becomes a metaphor for masturbation as an expression of Arnie’s sexual frustration. He can’t get it going with a woman, but he at least rev his own engine. It turns into an obsession with typical masculine ideals embodied in Christine, and that obsession forbids him from touching a woman and wasting his essence on something unworthy. This may sound insane logic, but one only need browse a few articles on We Hunted the Mammoth to see the depth of insanity incels delude themselves into believing. He’s not quite an incel, but Arnie is certainly on the road to being one and has the wheels to take him there.
Finally, Christine is, as so many of King’s writings at this point, a metaphor for drug abuse. King is deep into his cocaine use by this point in his life, and the drug metaphors are pouring out of him like flop sweat. His parents worry about him in the same way a parent worries about a teen who discovers weed or coke for the first time, spending all night out and getting in with a rough crowd. His friend tries but can’t stop him, and even though that drug initially seems to help (Arnie’s complexion clears up for a while and his confidence builds), all it does is drive him deeper into addiction and end up breaking his body (the echoing back brace, the premature ageing). He has an addiction to Christine and how Christine makes me him feel, which links Christine as a drug and abuser in the same way that the first drug is always free. Christine, it seems, contains multitudes as well as ghosts.
Christine is not King’s best written work, and despite the power of that central story it’s the poor writing and editing decisions that stop this being an all time classic. But the powerful icongograhpy of that spooky car stops it from being a car crash of a book too. Ultimately, as much as I have many problems with it, I can’t really bring myself to call it a that bad a book because I didn’t find it boring. It is so readable, enjoyable, scary, and haunting that despite everything, you just have to enjoy the ride.
Observations and Connections
Christine has a cameo in the uncut version of The Stand, where a Plymouth Fury without a driver is found and a keyring with initials A.C. (Arnie Cunningham) in the ignition.
A meta-textual reference for the Dark Tower fans is that Dennis’ big accident that puts him out of action for the second third of the book happens during chapter 19, the recurring haunted number.
This is a rare book for King considering its setting. At this point, his fixation with Maine as his setting was just about solidified (especially Castle Rock), but with occasional excursions to New York or Colorado. This is set uniquely in Pennsylvania, and King makes frequent references to nearby Monroeville. Romero would shoot many of his films in Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, including Dawn of the Dead at the Monroeville Mall, and these references (coupled with King’s dedication to Romero) suggests that though John Carpenter would go on to make the film, it was written with King’s buddy George Romero in mind to direct. This is nothing but wild speculation on my part however.
In case you missed it above, here is a list of the songs King uses throughout Christine.
UP NEXT: King’s shortest single published work, Cycle of the Werewolf.
Deeper Thoughts for the Horror Inclined 