The Cutprice Guignol

I woke up bolt-upright in the middle of the night a few days after I wrote that Welcome to Derry review, gripped by the sudden realization that it had been actual months since I had updated the Christine series on my blog. So, in the interests of letting me sleep (a little, at least) more comfortably at night, welcome to the next part of my deep-dive into Stephen King’s Christine! Check out the last part right here, and let’s jump in to the next few chapters

We’re getting started with The Clash, and a Leigh-centric chapter as Arnie’s girlfriend continues her uneasy relationship with his car (we’ve all been there, right, ladies?).

Arnie and Leigh go Christmas shopping together – “a very good day”, she tells us, “right up until the moment that Leigh Cabot almost died”. On the way back from their trip to the mall, Leigh nudges Arnie into picking up a hitchhiker, which he does; but soon, things grow tense in the car as the radio is stuck on the old-fashioned station of WDIL, playing La Bamba. “Must be death on the radio,” the hitchhiker remarks. “Good old WDIL”.

Arnie pulls over at a takeout place to pick up some food for them, and heads inside to grab Leigh something to eat – which leaves Leigh uncomfortable in the presence of this male stranger. She wonders if Arnie left her alone with him on purpose, as a punishment for getting him to pick him up in the first place, but she knows that, even if she were to hit the horn to get help, it wouldn’t blow. Christine didn’t like her enough to rescue her, and she knows it, another reminder to the edge of competition and hatred between Leigh and Christine.

But the hitchhiker seems to notice that something is off with the car too, but he’s glad to make his exit when Arnie returns with the food. Only Christine isn’t about to let Leigh off that easily – no, as soon as she starts to eat, she chokes on a piece of food.

I love the sequence that follows for just how brutal and human it is – the recent adaptation of The Long Walk had elements of this too, the horror of how the human body can fail and the terror in the face of that imminent, fatal failure. While there’s a supernatural element here, with Christine’s implied involvement, Leigh’s choking always makes me feel a bit tight in the throat:

“He reached his hands for her, and then reached back, immobilized by panic

(Oh help me help me for God’s sake do something I’m dying oh my dear God I’m choking to death on a McDonald’s hamburger Arnie why don’t you HELP ME)“

The way that Leigh’s inner monologue devolves into something almost religious, longer spaces between each word as she struggles to even think straight while she begs God in contrition for her sins, really drives home the urgency and brutality of this scene. The dashboard lights begin to warp into what Leigh perceives as eyes as Arnie bangs her uselessly on the back, and the hitchhiker instead intervenes and dislodges the burger from her throat as Leigh falls out of the car. Arnie initially swings for him in shock, but Leigh manages to point out that the kid saved her life and Arnie eventually apologizes before the three part ways, Leigh shaken as she finds herself believing that Christine was the cause of her near-death experience.

Afterwards, the car fills with a foul, rotten smell that Leigh takes to be the expression of Christine’s rage at her survival, and she finally confronts Arnie about what happened that night – and the ways that Christine has been imposing on their relationship since the start.

“I’ve seen the Heimlich manouvre poster on the door to the kitchen. You must have seen it too. But you didn’t try that on me, Arnie…”

“It’s just that in the heat of the moment, people forget-“

“You seem to forget a lot of things in that car. Like how to be Arnie Cunningham.”

This is how Christine functions – the plausible deniability, that Arnie could have reasonably just forgotten what to do when faced with his girlfriend choking to death in front of him, that it could have been nothing more than a mistake, but we know by now that it’s not, and that she is forcing what remains of Arnie Cunningham out of the vessel that once held him. Arnie becomes enraged, and Leigh tells him that their relationship is over, to which Arnie has some strikingly familiar things to say:

“You just saddle up and ride with the rest of those shitters. Who gives a tin shit?”

The little glimpses we get of LeBay in these moments are some of the most abjectly chilling in the book, the reminder of where Arnie’s succumbing to the car is going to lead him, that twisted mix of youth and agedness coming together – and the implication that LeBay might have once been a decent kid like Arnie, too. And it’s not where that ends this chapter – after Arnie takes Leigh home, he drives around for a while as the radio begins to play fifties newscasts along with the classic hits, and Roland LeBay appears to him, riding shotgun.

“You have to make the shitters pay, Cunningham. Every last fucking one of them.

“Yes…yes, that’s a fact,” Arnie whispered. And the wipers nodded back and forth.”

And then we’re off to Libertyville High to check in with the populace at large in a brief interlude that kicks off with some ZZ Top:

In the pre-Christmas period, everything is slowing down, including book reports (I love the little detail King throws in, presumably gleaned from his own time as an English teacher, about teenagers swiping quotes straight from the dustjacket for their work – “after all, how many Sophomore English students are apt to call The Catcher in the Rye “this burning classic of postwar adolescence?”) and Leigh, who has been failing exams and flunking tests for the first time ever. A student of Buddy Repperton’s crew vanishes, though nobody can quite figure out why, and Dennis dresses his hospital room for Christmas. And, in the lull, Dennis considers that things could be “worse – much, much worse.” And soon, it seems, he’s to be proved right.

The next chapter starts with The Inmates-

-along with Buddy Repperton and his crew, all of whom are having a pretty hard time after a crushing sports loss. Oh, and the brutal mowing-down of their good buddy Moochie a few weeks before, but you know, mostly the sports thing.

Tensions are high between the group as Buddy takes the wheel to drive them on to their next destination, and the mood isn’t lightened when it becomes clear a car is following them along icy backroads that nobody else has any business being on. A car that Buddy has a very bad feeling about –

“It was the car that had run down Moochie. Oh yes it was. The psycho who had greased Moochie was behind the wheel of that car and now he was after Buddy.”

But Buddy isn’t going down without a fight – despite the protestation of his friends, he floors it on the icy roads, pushing the car to the edge of what it can handle and beyond. This sequence is pure nightmare fuel to me, the worst-case-scenario of all those times some arsehole thought it would be funny to drive too fast don’t a country road with me in the backseat; the killer moment is when Buddy takes his hands off the wheel and does his seatbelt up for the first time in his life, all but accepting his fate as the car closes in on them, till, at last, he sees who’s behind the wheel.

Or, rather, who isn’t. It’s Arnie’s car, alright, but the driver’s seat is empty – and that’s the last thing Buddy sees before they crash into the concrete bollard of a gatehouse.

“The eight-inch concrete lip peeled off everything bolted to the lower deck, leaving the twisted wreckage of the exhaust pipes sitting in the snow like a weird sculpture. The Camaro’s rear end was at first accordioned them demolished. Bobby Stanton was demolished with it. Buddy was dimly aware of something warm hitting his back. It was Bobby Stanton’s blood.”

This chapter is so profoundly unnerving to me, along with the earlier one we covered with Leigh in this recap, because of how banal the horror is. Sure, it’s a haunted car doing the killing, but the description of this brutal high-speed crash is something all too close to real life. For all the supernatural elements of Christine, it’s these I find the most discomforting – and baby, we’re just getting started.

Because Buddy, unlike the rest of his friends, isn’t dead. He makes it out of the Camaro, only to find that he is being stalked by Christine, who seems determined to finish the job. It’s a credit to King that he manages to keep this segment from descending into the ridiculous – I mean, it’s a killer car, for God’s sake, it’s as B-movie as they come. Instead, he focuses on the parts of this that are recognizable and real, the harm a car can do to a human body, regardless of who’s piloting it. This sequence genuinely makes me a bit ill, as Buddy tries to reason with Christine or whoever is controlling her, only to pay with his life. It’s pure fucking terror, enough that you feel sorry for Buddy, who’s been one of the most prominent human villains in the book so far.

“He felt something bullet past him, and then the snow was red as Christine’s tail-light flashed.

“No!” Buddy screamed. Pain lanced his chest. “No! No! N-“

…Blood ran down his cheek from the hole where his ear had been. Frosty air jetted from his nose. His breath came in whistling sobs.

Christine paused….

Playing with me…playing with me, that’s what it’s doing. Like a cat with a mouse”.

Christine torments Buddy brutally in the snow, leaving his legs mangled and his body set to freeze to death, when Buddy is suddenly confronted by the image of a man.

“Only it wasn’t a man at all, it was a corpse. A rotting corpse in green pants…

“That it’s for you, you shitter.”

And, with that, Christine finishes the job, mowing him down as the spirit of Roland LeBay looks on. The chapter closes with a man some ten miles away hearing a strange sound:

“Although he knew it was only a car…his first thought was that something prehistoric had awakened and tracked its prey to earth.”

I truly love the notion in a lot of King’s work that evil is not a thing that manifests because of a certain set of circumstances, but something that weights for the appropriate person or place to attach itself to in order to show itself once more. This description of Christine as something almost primeval that happens to have taken the form of this car for the time being…oof, it really hits me just right in terms of the unsettling nature of her being.

And that, horribly enough, brings us to the end of this recap! 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. Check in again for another soon!