Christine was published in 1983 and is King’s 13th (lucky) book. The dedication reads: “This is for George Romero and Chris Forrest Romero. And the Burg.” George Romero was the legendary film maker (Night of the Living Dead), and his wife Chris (Christine) Romero is an actress and producer. The Burg is Pittsburgh, where the Romeros lived and worked. King wrote “Creepshow” with the Romeros, they became friends, and he was involved in the horror scene they had built in Pittsburgh. Very rad. And what do I think of the book? Well, let’s get into.

This story is set in in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, in 1978, and tells the story of a 1958 Plymouth Fury (as seen above, it’s important that you can picture this car) called Christine. Dennis Guilder and his loser friend Arnie Cunningham, two high school seniors, are driving to their summer job, when Arnie sees a rusted out heap for sale on the side of the road, and it is love at first sight. The car is owned by Roland D. LeBay, a bitter old man who wears a back brace (with no shirt, and it’s described as dirty), and Roland shakes Arnie down for $250 even though the car is really past saving, and beyond what a kid could manage to restore. Dennis hates the car and thinks Arnie is a fool for buying it, and Arnie’s parents, uptight liberal University professors, are enraged he bought this junker and refuse to let him park it at their house. Arnie ends up renting garage space from Will Darnell, a big fat criminal guy who owns a junkyard/garage and is the leader of a ring of miscreants in town (some of whom go to the high school), so he can work on Christine.

A word about the structure of this book, Part I: Dennis – Teenage Car-Songs is narrated by Dennis Guilder, in first -person witness after the fact. Dennis speaks directly to us, the reader. He tells us this story. He tells us Arnie is a acne ridden loser, and lifelong friend. He tells us that Arnie’s parents are uptight liberal snobs, who control Arnie (their only kid) within an inch of his life. And he tells us that he, himself, is a football player and popular fella, who loves and protects Arnie, his best friend. He tells us that he suspects that Christine is not a normal car, and that his friend Arnie is changing more and more as he spends time “working” on her. And he tells us that the miscreants are out to get Arnie after an altercation that gets their leader expelled.

Part II: Arnie – Teenage Love-Songs switches narration to third-person with a focus on Arnie. At this point Dennis is in the hospital after a bad football injury, so ostensibly Dennis doesn’t know this part of the story, he was out of the loop. The third-person narrator focuses on Arnie, but dips in and out of all the key players, showing us what is happening. Arnie is now dating the prettiest girl in school, Leigh Cabot, his face has cleared up, Christine is road legal and looks like a million bucks, even though Arnie has only actually fixed a handful of things on the car. We see that Arnie is doing illegal work for Darnell. We see that Arnie is changing, becoming angrier, picking up affectations of LeBay (who is now dead), and begins wearing a back brace for some mysterious injury he got while “working” on Christine. And for my money the best scenes in this book are in part two when we see Christine can fully drive herself, and begins hunting and killing people, starting with the miscreants that trashed her (the car) in revenge for Arnie getting one of them expelled. We also see that everyone around Christine dislikes the car and is suspicious of what is going on with it/her.

Then in Part III: Christine – Teenage Death-Songs we go back to first-person witness with Dennis once again narrating, now out of the hospital but on crutches. This was a bit of a mess for me, honestly. I didn’t like Dennis, so his narration which was all telling (show don’t tell, for the love of God) and was laden, (and I do mean laden, this book is way too long), with his stupid opinions, was a slog for me, and when we return to it in the third act I was frankly upset. I can show my hand here and say that I don’t like this book much, at all, but the best parts of this book are the middle sections. The scenes where Christine is killing people are excellent and truly terrifying. They are cinematic and engaging. No matter how many times (and it happens SO many times) Christine heals herself, regenerates after injury, I find it captivating. But all of Dennis’s damn opinions weighted the story down for me, especially in the last 100 pages, which I really struggled to get through.

Here are some examples of how Dennis talks about things:

“He moved like a ship under full sail, his white shirt billowing, the girth of his hips and backside amazing, improbable. Very fat people always affect me that way, with a feeling of distinct improbability, as if I were looking at a very good optical illusion – but then, I come from a long line of skinny people.” This is Dennis describing Will Darnell, and it is one of maybe six times when Dennis (a 18 year old football player) describes fat people with open disgust. He later says about Darnell, “Great rolls of fat bulged out of his neck and hung in dewlaps from below his chin. Asthma or no asthma, Darnell walked with the graceful, almost feminine movements of a man who has been fat for a long time and sees a future of fathood ahead of him.” Ok, Dennis, we get it. Good luck getting middle-aged, especially with your destroyed leg, can’t wait for some snot nosed kid to read you to filth when your 50lbs heavier in a recliner talking about Christine for the millionth time since it’s your only story to tell, all alone cause Leigh got sick of your shit.

“And I might not have heard the story at all if I hadn’t been waylaid by this greasy Irish wop named Gino just before we turned off Main Street. Back then Gino was always waylaying me – he could reach right through a closed car window and do it. Gino’s Fine Italian Pizza is on the corner of Main and Basin, and every time I saw that sign with the pizza going up in the air and all the i’s dotted with shamrocks (it flashed on and off at night, how funky can you get, am I right?), I’d feel the waylaying starting again.” The slur Irish wop stopped me dead, because I thought Dennis was calling a person (Gino) that. But after reading it a number of times I realized Gino’s is a place, a pizza place owned by an Irish guy (not Gino, Pat Donahue). I’m Irish and my mom grew up in an Irish/Italian neighborhood in Queens, so I really bristled at this whole section. But also, why is this here?! We needed none of this, the writing is confusing, and it made me dislike Dennis even more.

“I was struck again by the simplicity of her good looks – her lovely girl’s figure outlined in dark blue pants and a sweater of a lighter, powdery blue, an outfit that made me think about skiing. A cornfed American beauty you would have said, except for the high cheekbones, which seemed a little arrogant, bespeaking some older, more exotic heritage. Maybe some fifteen or twenty generations back there was a viking in the woodpile.” This is Dennis describing Leigh while Leigh is trying to tell Dennis that Christine is a monster and is killing people. To be fair Dennis already knows that Christine is driving around killing people while Arnie is out of town, but there are so many serious conversations that Leigh and Dennis have where Dennis is commenting at length about her looks/body. I get it, he’s a horny teenager, but it was excessive and overwrought to the point of being kind of hilarious.

Sorry for that digression, I could keep going as Dennis talks on and on in this book to the point where I was saying “wrap it the fuck up” out loud as I read, but I think you get my point. The dialog is also particularly bad in sections of this book, reminding me a bit of the purple prose of Firestarter. I get that King is leaning into a style of book, a teenage thrasher/horror vibe, and that he is writing Dennis to be this guy on purpose, but it did not work for me. When I read this as an actual teenager 30 years ago I did not like it much, and what I mostly remembered about it was that if a person dies from carbon monoxide poisoning from car exhaust their corpse has a rosy, almost healthy, look to it. That was my big take-away.

So Arnie is being possessed by Roland LeBay, and the car Christine is also possessed by LaBay (who as I said is dead, dying shortly after Arnie bought Christine). Any enemy of Arnie’s becomes Christine’s victim, and these attacks/vehicular murders happen when Arnie is out of town. Everyone, from Arnie’s parents, to Denis’s parents, to Darnell, to Leigh, to the cops, dislike Christine, and fully wonder if something supernatural isn’t going on with her. Which I found interesting. Christine is definitely the best and only likable character in the book. She is beautiful, and she is evil. As it says on the back cover of the mass market paperback, “Christine is no lady,” and that is some truth. Her odometer runs backwards, she gets newer, and more cherry the more she is driven, her radio only gets oldies, and she can handle snowy roads without snow tires (mentioned multiple times and as a Maine winter driver I was impressed). In the midst of running people down, plowing through eight foot snowbanks, and even driving INTO a house to kill a man, she heals and regenerates in real time. She is awesome.

In Part III we watch as Leigh and Dennis fall in love, betraying Arnie, and becoming Christine’s next targets. Dennis and Leigh know Christine is no ordinary car and they make a plan to kill her. This plan is convoluted, and goes on forever. Arnie kind of drops out of this part of the book, he seems to be completely lost to those that love him, entirely under LeBay’s control, and in the denouement of the book Arnie is not there at all, as Leigh and Dennis fight Christine in Darnell’s (Will Darnell is already dead, killed by Christine inside his home, lol) garage, with a sewage tanker truck named Petunia. It’s an overlong sequence that ends with Christine being mostly destroyed and Dennis messing up his not healed broken leg. We are told later, by Dennis, that Arnie and his mom (the ice queen) died in another car accident that happened simultaneously with the fight between Christine and Dennis/Leigh/Petunia, in another location, and that LeBay’s ghost was toggling between these two scenes. I know, it’s…dumb. One of the best details here is that when Christine shows up to Darnell’s she has a car load of people with her, most are ghosts (and it’s a full house cause she has killed so many people over the years, pre-dating Arnie buying her) but one is the dead body of Michael Cunningham, Arnie’s Dad, who died in Christine of carbon monoxide poisoning, and is rosy cheeked and flopping around dead as the two vehicles duel. I liked that part.

The end of this book is maybe the worst because when Dennis wakes up in the hospital, Leigh and his family are there, we learn the whole Cunningham family was wiped out, and it keeps going. Dennis tells the story to a cop (whose partner was killed by Christine earlier in the book) and he starts telling the cop the story by circling back to the first sentence in the book, verbatim, and I was just like, what the hell is this, and then it goes on to give a loose sketch of how things pan out for Dennis. Which I didn’t want or need. We also see that a tiny bit of Christine was left, and she might be regenerating from that scrap as we speak. Sure.

Christine the movie (which I have not seen, but plan to) was directed by John Carpenter and released in 1983. It did not get good reviews but I expect I will like it, because the parts of this book that work feel like a slasher screenplay, and I think a schlocky blood bath movie is what this book should be. As a novel it was just such a mess for me. I kept thinking while struggling through that last third about how this book came out shortly after Different Seasons, a novella collection that is in my opinion one of the best books ever written. Of all time. And it’s not that I thought, how could King be so brilliant and then so decidedly not brilliant, but more that I just admire an artist that contains multitudes. To write so many different kinds of books, to be so prolific, to be so endlessly creative, and to put in the work is something I admire and strive for. Not every title is my jam (and Christine certainly isn’t for me) but rereading this book was a fun hate read nonetheless.

Up next we have Pet Sematary, which is in my top five favorite King books, and one I have read three times before, (but not in the last 15 years), so very excited to get into what is often called King’s scariest book. You can find all of my Reread project here: King Reread Project.