The Cutprice Guignol

Yes, yes, I know, I’ve left it far too long since my last Christine recap – but, with so much fabulous horror to sift through, can you blame me? Anyway, without further ado, let’s get right into it – catch up on the last recap right here, and let’s dive into the next part of Stephen King’s Christine!

We pick up not with one of our usual narrators, but with Moochie Welch – a friend of Buddy Repperton’s who was involved in the destruction of Christine after Buddy’s clash with Arnie. As he’s heading to Buddy’s, intending to catch a lift home after a concert, we get into perhaps the most iconic scare of the book: Christine’s self-driven murder of Moochie.

This chapter is such an amazing reminder to me of how much I adore King as a writer of horror, and especially of horror setpieces. Because this sequence could so easily have been ridiculous in the wrong hands – it’s a self-driving car jumping out of an alleyway on to an unsuspecting victim, it’s literally that one Monty Python sketch! But King doesn’t try to dodge the ridiculousness, instead embracing it to take it to this ghoulish, unsettling extreme, the grill a “grinning idiot mouth” as it advances on Moochie. It’s surreal and dreamlike in its hideousness, right down to the still, quiet, cold night that serves as the backdrop.

While it’s pretty late into the book to have our main villain directly claiming her first victim (Roland LeBay aside), I love the way this scene wrongfoots you as a reader – after Arnie’s fury, you go into thinking that he could be the one behind the wheel. Who else but someone who targeted Christine could be a target of such revenge? Even Moochie assumes Arnie is the one driving, and it’s only in his final moments that he realises this is all Christine, crystallizing all the supernatural weirdness surrounding the car at last.

And God, it’s brutal – Moochie gets mowed down, his back broken, and Christine reverse back and forth over him much like, I imagine, my cat rubs his chin on the side of any book I ever try to read. But my favourite moment of this comes just after the actual kill, when we’re left alone with Christine for the first time as readers – it’s the only real time we’ve seen her without another narrator to interpret in some way – as she repairs herself from the damage of the “accident”. There’s something so brilliantly sinister about this moment, especially given the lack of emotion Christine to express – it’s like a stone-faced assassin tidying up after a hit, right down to her spedometer resetting, as though she’s turned back the very time it took to commit the crime. Afterwards, she heads down to the garage, leaving Moochie in a pool of his own blood to be photographed for the local newspaper the next morning.

The next chapter starts off with the absolute banger from Bruce Springsteen himself:

And a check-in with Arnie who, despite some mysterious back pain, is back off to work on Christine at Darnell’s. Regina, his mother, narrates this chapter, and it’s another interesting one with regards to the book’s central theme of ageing and the ephemeral nature of youth:

“….making a wonder exactly what it was she had lived her life for – so her son could fall for a girl and a car in one terrible fall?…she thought about how time had a way of swinging power on its axis, and how old age had a way of looking through the dressing room mirror like the hand of a corpse poking through the eroded earth.”

The strained relationship between Arnie and Regina is one of the more interesting aspects of Christine on a re-read – there’s this uneasy sense of the two of them feeling out their power and responsibility in their changing relationship, as Arnie ages into a man and Regina to an older woman, and the clash of his growing independence against her various fears for him that have manifested as various levels of control. But she’s not the only parent who’s contending with ageing, as Arnie encounters his father before he can leave for the garage.

“His father had also aged in the storms that had blown up over Christine…the doctor had pointed out an incipient phlebitis problem, phlebitis, an old folk’s problem.”

Christine is gobbling this family up – and not just because petrol is that much to the gallon. Michael, having heard of the death of Moochie the night before, asks Arnie where he was at the time of his death, which leads Arnie to question his faith in him.

“Maybe if you’d been standing outside yourself these last couple of months,” he said. “You’d understand why I asked.”

Arnie denies it, and, as Michael begins to describe the crime scene, he becomes distressed:

“Stop it,” Arnie said. He suddenly looked sick and frightened, and Michael had the same thought Dennis had on that Thanksgiving evening – that in this tired unhappiness, the real Arnie was close to the surface, reachable.”

This is a really interesting chapter to position right after Christine’s first kill – not just because it underlines how brutally she’s fed on this family and their relationships, but because it draws a line between Arnie’s anger and her’s. Arnie might be changed, he might be furious with the people who did this to Christine, but he is not entirely lost to her yet. The tragedy is that he will be, that this reachable version of him will be all too quick to vanish – and, as he heads off to tend to Christine, he takes another step closer to exactly that.

Next chapter, next song – which is a little Ellas McDaniel, for your nerves:

Arnie sits in a recently-restored Christine, listening to the radio and pondering on the work he has done on Christine – or, rather, that he hasn’t done, given that so much of her seems to have regenerated without his input. In fact, that’s not the only thing that happened without him knowing much about it, as he also injured his back in another encounter with Christine that he can’t quite recall. There’s a great moment here, where Arnie thinks briefly about getting rid of Christine and the radio hisses static at him – Christine more and more personified, or rather, more feral with every passing moment.

A cop, Junkins, turns up to ask Arnie a few questions about Christine – though, he senses, it’s got more to do with the death of Moochie than anything else. Arnie’s internal monologue as he watches the cop look over the car is starting to puncture with pieces of LeBay – he thinks of Junkins as a shitter, brushing off mention of Moochie with similar pejoratives. But, briefly, when Junkins offers to be an ear for Arnie to talk about anything that’s happened, something almost nudges through:

“Arnie felt something trembling behind his lips, something tearful, something that hurt…he opened his mouth, and then a monstrous jab of pain walloped him in the back…it had the effect of a slap on a hysteric.”

I love these moments for Arnie – the way Christine punishes him for even considering telling their secret, a reminder that, as much as she has helped him, she can hurt him too. “Junkins was right – he looked like hell. But his pimples were gone.” He bids farewell to the cop and calls Leigh, who is concerned. Of course, we can’t skate by a check-in with his girlfriend without a little nod towards the real love of his life, Dennis-

“”There’ll be more time now. I promise. All the time you want“… because now, with Dennis in the hospital, you’re all that’s left between me…between me and…”

He finishes the call with Leigh by saying I love you, which she does not return. More and more, it feels as though the only person Arnie truly gets what he wants from is Christine. Even if she’s just as willing to take as to give.

And that’s where we leave off for this recap! You can catch up on the others right here, and I will endeavour to get another up in a slightly-less embarrassingly distant timeframe this time around.