The Cutprice Guignol

It might be the height of summer, but this is no good reason to avoid throwing ourselves in the direction of some horror. Uh, more than we already have, I mean. Anyway! Spooky car fanciers rejoice: it’s time to get back into Christine – catch up on the last recap here.

(a quick note here too, with some promo for the upcoming Mike Flanagan Carrie series having just dropped – my first Stephen King recap series was about the Carrie novel, so you can check that out here should you be so inclined!)

We left off at the start of the third and final part of the novel, Teenage Death-Songs, and we kick things off with some Bruce Springsteen in the form of Cadillac Ranch:

We’re back in Dennis’ first-person POV here, as he prepares for a visit from Leigh back at home – I love the way King sets this up, with Dennis practically posing with a copy of Vanity Fair in preparation for her arrival after asking his dad to take his mother and sister out somewhere so he can be alone with her. His father, noting that Leigh was previously involved with Arnie, warns Dennis to be careful – and, as Dennis reasons, with his “old childhood friend suddenly a stranger, and a stranger who was out on bail, at that”, it’s not unreasonable. I think it’s an interesting choice to jump back into Dennis’ POV like this for the third act of the book, not least because it’s such a contrast to the earlier time we’ve spent with him in the book, where Arnie was at the centre of so much of his thoughts and actions – here, he’s almost secondary, distant, the gap between them widening even in Dennis’ head.

Anyway, Leigh arrives, and Dennis is clearly smitten with her – when she looks at him, he finds it a little too much, looking away and thinking of Arnie instead (doing little to dispel the Madly In Love With Arnie Cunningham Rumours unrepentantly propagated by me in earlier recaps). She and Dennis discuss what’s been going on with Christine, including the recent deaths of Darnell and Repperon, and her own experience nearly choking to death in the car. Dennis, however, is distracted by her desire for him, as much as he tries to ignore it:

“I saw all too clearly what comforting her could lead to. Arnie was between us – and a part of myself was, too.”

I find this set-up of the love triangle quite interesting, in how it mirrors Arnie’s relationships with Christine and Leigh and Christine and Dennis, respectively – like Dennis, there has been something between him and the people closest to him, and that tension has driven the two people on the end of his triangles to one another. Most of this chapter is dedicated to Leigh and Dennis catching each other up on everything that has been happening, but the chapter climaxes with a comparison between two signatures Arnie left on Dennis’ leg plaster – one from before Christine’s influence fully took hold of him, one from after. They are notably different, much to Leigh’s distress, and Dennis ends the chapter pondering on the fact that they did not want to anger Christine, but they likely already had.

Next up, we have Bob Dylan’s From a Buick 6, which is not only a pretty good song but also presumably where King got the title for his very serviceable 2002 novel From a Buick 8 from. The more you know!

“What happened in the next three weeks or so was that Leigh and I played detective, and we fell in love.”

I found it really interesting that King chose to position this section, with Dennis and Leigh becoming romantically involved, in the Teenage Death-Songs section instead of the preceding Love Songs one – almost as if this relationship signals a death of its own kind, the death of their respective relationships with Arnie or even their desire to be close to him any longer. Arnie and Leigh go about figuring out when his signature changed, identifying Christine as the primary shifting factor, and then Dennis has an interesting conversation with his father about Arnie’s recent behaviour:

“”He may be fined, and the judge will probably lecture him, but nobody wants to put an indelible black mark on the record of a nice young suburban white boy who is bound for college and a fruitful place in society.”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“Except he’s not really like that anymore, is he, Dennis?”

Dennis dances around the truth of Arnie’s change, declining to make it clear to his father what he thinks the reason behind it is – probably because that evil fucking car is a slightly concerning answer to hear under any circumstances, which is fair enough. His father turns his attention to the matter of Dennis and Leigh, remarking that she broke it off with Arnie because he wasn’t the same person anymore. He also remarks on seeing Arnie a few times out and about, and how different he seems:

“Hardly seems to recognize me. And he looks older. Now that his face has cleared, he looks older. I think he used to look like his father, but now…”

Look, I know I bang on a lot about how much I love the way King executes Arnie’s transformation over the course of this book, but come on. I just love the idea of LeBay’s influence literally pushing out that of Arnie’s father, the physical shift in him that’s almost uncanny. I also think it’s one of the reasons that this has proved such a hard book to bring to the screen, because depicting this change subtly without it coming across as a bit too cartoonish or blatant is extremely tricky without really obvious changes, like, for example, prosthetics or make-up.

After the conversation with his father, Dennis contacts a man named McCandless, an old army colleague of LeBay’s, who he is trying to get LeBay’s brother’s address from. However, the man also has a few memories of LeBay and Christine, most notably when he and a few other soldiers played a prank on LeBay by picking up her back wheels. However, Christine responded by tearing off the finger – and, not coincidentally, the wedding ring of one of the pranksters. With the way that Christine has been framed as a distinctly feminine and almost adulterous presence, the site of LeBay’s wife’s death and ultimately what came between Leigh and Arnie, it’s a neat detail that she would desecrate the symbol of a man’s marriage. There’s also a mention here of the rock-and-roll music LeBay listened to in Christine constantly, which is certainly a nod to the songs that start each chapter, almost as if LeBay’s influence has extended to the retelling of his story on a meta level.

With that, we’re into the next chapter, New Year’s Eve, which starts with some Bobby Troupe courtesy of the Beach Boys:

Dennis decides to give Arnie a call, and is initially met with a distressed Regina, who he meets with his usual grace and tact for women over forty – “I hadn’t liked the old Regina…but I liked this distracted, weepy woman even less”. Anyway, Arnie eventually comes to the phone, though Dennis is instantly struck that it sounds as if he is “talking to a stranger who was doing a pretty good imitation of my friend Arnie.”

Dennis suggest he come over to celebrate the New Year with Arnie, which Arnie enthusiastically agrees to, suggesting they watch Guy Lombardo together – the first hint that LeBay has truly taken over the young man completely, as Lombardo has been dead for years. Dennis becomes increasingly distressed, barely holding back a scream as the conversation continues. Eventually, though, he resolves to visit with Arnie, and is instantly struck when he arrives that Arnie’s gait and mannerisms are strikingly different. I love this section as a parallel to their earlier scenes together, the warmth and ease that they shared in their relationship entirely absent – King captures that sense of the uncanny brilliantly, and he really built up this relationship to break it down in this third act.

Eventually, the conversation turns to Leigh (though just before that, Dennis chokes on a kernel of popcorn, a nice callback to Leigh’s ordeal in the car), and Arnie clocks that there is something going on between the two of them. Dennis denies it, but admits that they have talked about him, and that they have touched on the argument about Christine that broke them apart. This, unsurprisingly, is about the only thing that interests Arnie, and he presses to find out what she said about Christine, accusing her of jealousy but certain that they will eventually get back together, despite Dennis certainty to the contrary.

After they see in the New Year, Arnie offers to drive Dennis home in Christine, which he reluctantly agrees to. It’s been a while since we’ve had the woman herself make a direct appearance in the book, and God, I just think King nails her slow rise to this oddly corporeal figure – when Dennis puts his hand on the door, he notes that it doesn’t feel like “chromed steel – but Christ, like skin.” Of all the nastiness in this book, I think this is the one that most unsettled me, such a viscerally wrong description in all the right ways.

As they drive, Dennis begins having visions – of Arnie as LeBay, corpse rotting, “the sound of flies hatching in his flesh.” Then, he sees a parade of Christine’s victims over the years – LeBay’s wife, a “stuffed trophy” with the odd liveliness of a corpse killed by carbon monoxide poisoning; his daughter, “face blackened with strangulation, eyes popping like a cruelly squeezed stuffed animal”, and Buddy Repperton and Richie Trelawney, a “roasted hulk…his eyes still alive and aware.” It sections like this that really take me back to reading the book as a teenager, and how utterly, inimitably disturbing I found King’s writing; he has a knack for the truly nasty that he makes scant use of, and it allows paragraphs like this to stand out in even more horrific a light. It’s hard to tell if Christine is showing off her victims to Dennis, threatening him, or some combination of the two, but it’s utterly horrible either way.

The chapter ends with Arnie dropping Dennis off at home, and Dennis nearly passes out on the step before his father finds him and brings his clearly distressed son inside. Dennis can’t hide his horror any longer, and, as he goes to bed, he realises he has no choice now but to contend with the nightmare that he has been confronted with, whether he likes it or not.

And that’s where we leave off this time around! We’ve got just a couple of recaps left, and I’m looking forward to getting into the climax of Christine and then started on my new book analysis project (which is not going to be a King story, but will be a modern horror classic with a truly foul reputation). I hope you enjoyed this truly gnarly recap, and catch up on the rest of them here if you haven’t already!