The Cutprice Guignol

There will come a day, dear reader, that I will get these Christine recaps out in a timely manner, but this, once again, was not it. I will not keep you waiting any longer to get into this part – catch up on the last one here, and let’s dive back in!

We start back at chapter forty – ominously titled “Arnie in Trouble” – with some Beach Boys:

The chapter opens with Rudolph Junkins and Rich Mercer, two local cops who are investigating the mysterious deaths of Buddy Repperton et al, a case they suspect has more to it than meets the eye. Junkins, when Mercer mentions that he seems to have it out for Arnie, makes an interesting remark:

“You know, the first time, I kind of did. I liked him and I felt sorry for him. I felt like maybe he was covering for someone else who had something on him. But this time I didn’t like him at all.”

All these little details and seemingly-throwaway comments about the way Arnie has changed are there to drive home how stark the shift is for Arnie Cunningham between the boy he was and the person he is becoming; that Junkins idly thought he might have been covering for someone else applies to Christine, of course, but also in a less literal sense, he’s covering up the odd possession that is taking place between him and the spirit of Roland.

The cops turn up at Darnell’s garage, and get their hands on Darnell’s tax records via a visit to the home of a slightly shifty local resident. Leading a raid on the garage, they question Darnell, and, despite his distress, they come back with a cold, hard nothing on Arnie or Christine. Afterwards, Junkins reflects on Arnie again-

“…the first time he had talked to Arnie Cunningham, he had been talking to a drowning man, and the second time he had talked to him, the drowning had happened – and he was talking to a corpse.”

Just such a great little turn of phrase to sum up how lost the Arnie we met at the start of the book now is. Arnie, for his part, is out cruising in Christine when he gets pulled over by the cops. Arnie panics, worried that any involvement with the police will damage his chances at college and his future plans, but is reminded of what Roland said to him about Christine: “All you got to do is go on believing in her and she’ll take care of you.”

When he greets the cops, he does so in the voice of an old man, much to the shock of Junkins and Mercer. They search his car, and Arnie’s front soon crumbles when they find unmarked cigarettes in the trunk (left there by Darnell) and put him under arrest, triggering a response that Arnie sees as childish:

“Desperate, childish tears, hot salt, welled up in his throat and closed it…could you cry in dreams?”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Arnie’s “real” self, the one who seems to react as the previous version of him might, is seen as childish or youthful; it’s in stark contrast to the moments when he is overcome by Roland, when he seems decades older than himself, aggressive, bad-tempered, downright nasty.

But Arnie calms himself by focusing on Christine, and the chapter closes with his father receiving the call that his son has been taken into custody.

The next chapter opens with Bob Seger:

And a brief check-in with Dennis, who is just leaving the hospital after rehab for his accident on the field. Elsewhere, the Cunningham family is gathering for a traditional Christmas Eve visit with some extended family, in the hopes of putting Arnie’s brief encounter with the law behind them following the discovery of unstamped cigarettes in his car.

We actually get an extended sequence from the point of view of Regina, Arnie’s mother, which I found really interesting – she organizes a lawyer for him, and visits him in Albany where he is being held after his arrest. She struggles to recognize him, with a newly short haircut (a far cry from his previous style, which she believes was “in emulation of Dennis”), looking gaunt and much older than his years. Regina has definitely been an antagonistic figure over the course of the book – keeping Arnie’s father under her thumb, placing hefty rules on what Arnie can and can’t do, demanding her own way even when it’s unreasonable or impossible – sometimes to the extent that she comes across as a bit of a one-dimensional shrew with the ever-placating husband trying to cope with her moods. But here, Arnie takes the role of the antagonist, refusing to accept a plea deal and dismissing his mother’s attempts to reach him. By the time she leaves, she ponders that his expression is “so horribly blank” that she cannot stand to be in a room with him any longer, and leaves. As we draw up on the end of the second part, I think this is an important shift, with Arnie alienating even his family because of Christine.

Arnie is eventually released, and reflects on his arrest and the comfort he took in the memory of Christine during his time away from her. He dreams of Darnell threatening Christine –

“No, don’t do that, please! I love her! Please, you’ll kill her!”

Arnie realizes that Darnell will no doubt hold Christine hostage when he realizes that Arnie is on the hook for the cigarettes, leaving him terrified to lose her. This quote comes in stark contrast to a later moment he shares with his parents, as they arrive at their relative’s place –

“He’s a donkey…she talks to him like a donkey, she rides him like a donkey, and he brays like a donkey.

“You’re smiling again,” Regina said.

“I was just thinking about how much I love you both.”

They really believed it.

The shitters.”

We close out the chapter with Leigh, who is home alone on Christmas Eve (“all alone and still a virgin,” she thinks to herself, which, as much as I hate to say it, was pretty much my internal monologue in my teens as well), and finds herself plagued by discomforting images of Christine stalking her parents through the snow. The setting of this chapter, I think, is really telling; Christmas Eve is a time of anticipation, and King subverts it here to be one of horrible discomfort, an anticipation of something terrible rapidly approaching, as Arnie succumbs further to Christine and LeBay and drifts further and further from humanity. Leigh, finally, picks up the phone and calls Dennis, needing to talk to someone about her fears – needing to talk to someone who understands about Christine.

We begin the next chapter – and the final chapter of the book’s second section – with this absoloute banger from Springsteen –

We begin as a Christmas Eve storm closes in on the town, with police pleading for people to stay off the roads – Leigh’s parents make it back in one piece, and Arnie settles in with his family to watch some festive classics (note: the only festive classic I recognise is Muppet Christmas Carol, and I will take needless issue with anyone who disagrees). Elsewhere, in Darnell’s garage, however, Christine comes to life.

“A turnblinker came on – one amber eye, winking in the snow. She turned left, towards JFK drive.”

The vendor of a nearby gas station (who is reading a story King refers to as a “fuckbook”, a name which I am imminently stealing for all of my own erotica work) is interrupted by a lone driver pulling up outside and leaning on the horn until he gets his attention. When he heads outside to see what the commotion is, though, we get one of the most outrightly spooky moments of the entire book so far –

“Leaning out of the window, less than six inches from his own face, was a rotting corpse. Its eyes were wide, empty sockets, lips drawn back from a few yellow, leaning teeth…

Fill it up…fill it up, you shitter.”

I love this moment, Roland LeBay’s return to the story – against the backdrop of that oppressive snow and family togetherness, the idea of this spirit out in the dark really hits right for me. LeBay soon vanishes, but Christine is not done with the hapless vendor yet, and mows him down outside the station, leaving him for dead. But she is not done for the night, tracking down Will Darnell, rewarding Arnie’s faith in her by taking out the man who landed him in this mess in the first place.

I mentioned during the section featuring Christine’s first kills, of Buddy Repperton and his boys, that there was something almost cryptid-like about King’s description of her, and I think it’s on display here in the profoundly unsettling sequence where she stalks and kills Darnell. She’s “little more than a ghost in the membranes of the swirling snow,” driving directly towards the picture window that Darnell is watching her from and smashing through the glass to claim her next victim. She drives across his living room, in this distinctly weird image, a car inside the house as the building struggles to contain her, floorboards groaning, furniture tipping. Everything about Christine feels entirely abberrant to the normal run of the world, and King captures that so well in this sequences where she goes after her new victims. It could so easily just read as almost comical, a killer car on their tail, but he really knows how to deliver on the profound, mind-bending discomfort of seeing her on the prowl.

She finishes the job, and, repairing herself, heads back to the garage to wait for Arnie. And that’s where we end this chapter, and part two of the book, which brings us on to the final section. Teenage Death Songs. Thanks again for your patience in waiting for this next part, and I can’t wait to jump into the third act and climax in the next part! In the meantime, you can check out the rest of the recaps right here, and, if you fancy supporting the blog, drop me a tip here!