The Cutprice Guignol

Well, after a Stephen King-related ending that I utterly loathed, I think it’s time to wipe the slate clean with a Stephen King-related ending that I actually love. Because, my dear friends, after (amount of time redacted for what remains of my sense of dignity), we are finally at the end of Christine! Check out the last entry here, and let’s dive straight into the climax of this brilliant book once and for all.

We start of with Jan and Dean, and the appropriately-titled Dead Man’s Curve, for a chapter just named “Arnie”.

And we get into the action pretty quickly here, as Dennis runs into Arnie in the parking lot of their school, and they begin a confrontation regarding Leigh, Christine, and well, pretty much everything else, too. It’s the first time we’ve seen them together in a while, and the depth to their one-time friendship gives way to a whole lot of hurt-

“Where you been, Arnie? This guy LeBay, he’s a jonny-come-lately. Me, I was here all along.”

Arnie confronts Dennis about his relationship with Leigh, but Dennis is quick with the comeback:

“”You can’t steal what’s been given away.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the night she choked in the car. The night Christine tried to kill her. You told her you didn’t need her…”

“I never did! That’s a lie! That’s a goddamn lie!”

“Who am I talking to?””

At this point in the book, Arnie has completely succumbed to LeBay; not just in a literal possession sense, but in the sense that he has turned himself into the victim of everything that is happening to him. I think one of the things that makes LeBay such a great villain is how pernicious he is; he’s not outwardly evil, necessarily, but willing to let a confluence of circumstances come together around him to narrow the world to just him and Christine. He’s a foul, cruel man, but it’s his indolence that makes him truly detestable to me – and Arnie’s manifestation of him, denying responsibility like this, is a perfect example of that.

Arnie kicks Dennis’ crutch away, and, for a moment, Dennis manages to get through to him, reminding him of the ant farms they made together as kids.

“”Are you in there someplace? That dirty fucker never had an ant farm in his life. He never had a friend in his life.”

And suddenly the calm hardness broke. His face – his face roiled.…LeBay was there, furious at having to put down an internal mutiny. Then Arnie was there – drawn, tired, ashamed, but most of all, desperately unhappy.”

I love this little moment between Dennis and Arnie – it fits so well with the rest of the book that it’s the mention of their friendship that pulls Arnie, however briefly, out from under LeBay’s control, not the fighting over Leigh and his self-professed love for her. Arnie – the Arnie that loved and loves Dennis – is still in there, but LeBay’s control is ultimately too much for him to fight. When he looks to Dennis again, Dennis no longer sees any part of Arnie at all, finding Roland LeBay looking back at him. One of the darkest parts of this book, at least for me, is that Arnie truly is just collateral damage to LeBay and Christine – as Dennis points out to him, “you never really planned anything, did you? You just followed your intuition.” The loss of Arnie hits hard in knowing it could have been almost anyone, but that it was Dennis’ best friend, the kind, gentle, loving boy we got to know in the first part of the book, who bore the brunt of it.

Dennis tells LeBay that he’ll meet him at Darnells that night, and that brings us to the end of this chapter. The next opens with Frank J Wilson and the Cavaliers, and Last Kiss:

Dennis makes it out of the confrontation with Arnie/LeBay (who I’ll be referring to as LeBay from here on out, as does the text), and doesn’t realise until he pulls over that he has been crying all the way home. God, the death of this friendship truly gets me, man – relationships are often strained to the point of no return at the beginning of young adulthood, and, okay, most of us don’t have to deal with a killer car possession in the midst of it, but I remember what it felt like to lose people I had known my whole life at that point, and King captures that brilliantly here.

He heads over to rent the biggest, heaviest truck he could get his hands on from a local, Johnny, who sets him up with Petunia – a twenty-thousand gallon capacity tanker for cleaning out septic systems. With the smell to match. Dennis rents her from Johnny in the hopes of using her to crush Christine at Darnell’s that night – if she turns up, of course. Later, he meets Leigh at a diner (where he notes that she looks both “practical and sexy” – and look, I wish I could call this out as a really strange thing to notice, given the circumstances, but when I was seventeen, I could have had one leg in a bear trap and still noticed a woman with half an inch of cleavage on display, so I’ll give it a pass here). The two of them have a coffee and then climb into Petunia to prepare for their final confrontation at Darnell’s.

Which leads us into the final chapter, Christine – and our very last little song together, which is not a song, but, in fact, a poem by John Creeley, I Know a Man, which I’ll share here in full:

“As I sd to my   

friend, because I am   

always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his   

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for   

christ’s sake, look   

out where yr going.”

I love this poem as an opening to the final chapter – it acts as such a perfect sum-up to the book so far, the friendship that underpins it, the car at its heart, and the danger inherent in this last stretch. And that is danger that we jump straight into, as Dennis calls Arnie’s father, and discovers that he;s has headed out to Penn State with his mother. He feels little sympathy for Regina – implying that she is a manipulator like LeBay – and tells Michael to gather his and Leigh’s families somewhere safe to avoid an attack from Christine. Michael asks him outright who is using Christine to kill people when Arnie’s not around, and, while Dennis comes close to telling him, he thinks better of it, getting him to promise that he’ll sequester their families somewhere safe, and heading off to intercept LeBay.

With assurances in place, Leigh and Dennis head over to Darnell’s, where they find Petunia’s door frozen shut. Dennis, yanking it open, injures his leg again, forcing them to improvise a device to work the clutch – it’s a fun moment, one that could be entirely coincidental since the barren, icy weather has been such a feature of the last few chapters, but one that could also easily be down to Christine’s metaphysical interference. Once they have prepared for Christine’s arrival, Dennis thinks of LeBay, in Arnie’s body, driving with his mother – “face pale and unsmiling and clear of acne”. It’s another little detail I really love, Arnie’s acne being proof of his real self, his age, his relative innocence.

Dennis and Leigh have a sexual encounter at the garage, after which Dennis falls asleep. When he wakes, dusk has fallen, and he and Leigh prepare the garage for what they hope will be the final attack on Christine -“that old and infinitely wise monster,” Dennis thinks. “Did we really think we could outsmart her?”. It’s a horrible, heavy bit of foreshadowing, one that frames Christine in much the same way she was during her attack on Repperton and his crew – some almost prehistoric beast, beyond modern understanding. Leigh asks Dennis to kill Christine – to do it for Arnie, to set him free. Even now, when they’re together physically and their relationship is undeniable, their mutual love for Arnie is really what binds them together. It’s a curious little love triangle in the most literal sense of the phrase, and I really enjoy the way that, even in this final act, Leigh has love for Arnie enough to want to free him from Christine.

And then, Christine arrives, “sudden savage circles of light” springing to life in the snow outside the garage. Leigh opens the door to line up Dennis’ attack with Petunia, but Christine and LeBay take a run at Leigh before she can get to safety. Dennis notices that the car is full of people, “a whole carload of them”, before Leigh manages to take hold of a rack on the ceiling and swing herself to safety, which leads her to smash her head into the back wall and start bleeding severely from her head.

Dennis hits Christine with Petunia, and realises that one of the figures in the car is Michael Cunningham – “like a grotesque life-sized doll…his head lolling on the stalk of his neck”. Christine is damaged, but swiftly repairs herself, uncrinkling the damage to the hood and popping back into place for another go at Leigh, which Dennis manages to intercept. Michael is thrown out of the car through a break in the window, and there’s this turn of phrase that really made me shudder, his head compared to a “grotesque flattened football”. I mean, all literary analysis aside – yeuch.

Dennis attacks Christine with Petunia again, and sees LeBay in the driver’s seat – “a decayed and stinking cameo of humanity”, which might be my favourite description of him so far – and, as he drives over the car, he thinks “Arnie? Man I am so sorry I wish I wish I wish”. It’s one of the last things that crosses his mind as he destroys Christine, knowing that, despite it all, he’s losing his friend in the midst of it; King really drives home the tragedy of it here, the death of their friendship and Dennis’ childhood that he can do nothing but give in to in order to safe Leigh and himself from the car who consumed him.

Dennis blacks out, and when he comes to, Leigh is there with him, assuring him that everything is okay – she flagged down a snowplough driver who is calling the authorities, and it’s finally over. Or, at least, it would be, but this is a horror novel, and that means that you don’t get to put down the villain quite that easily. Dennis looks over to the hubcap-

“Punk! Punk! Punk!

The dents were popping out of it.”

Christine begins to re-assemble herself one last time, and an injured Dennis calls on Leigh to run the gas while he hits the clutch. She’s terrified, but manages to work with him to run down Christine a few more times, at which point authorities are rattling the door and it is, at last, over.

Dennis dreams of Arnie in the hospital –

“Thanks. Thanks, man. You did okay. I think it’s all going to be better now.

No sweat, I said – or tried to say – but he was gone.”

Ugh! When I first read this book, I was around the edge of Dennis and Arnie, but as a thirty-something now, there’s something about the death of a teenager that hits me in a way it didn’t back then. Arnie’s so young, and so decent, and so cruelly, unfairly taken from the world, and I love that we see him through the lens of Dennis’ affection for him, right at the end.

A ranger tells Dennis that Arnie and his mother died in an accident in her car heading out to the university, but Dennis believes that LeBay abandoned Christine when he realised she was a lost cause to possess Arnie again – Dennis tells the story of what happens at Darnell’s, and the book closes:

“Shortly after, I told my story a second time. Now I’ve told it a third. And a third time, they say, pays for all.

Rest in peace, Arnie.

I love you, man.”

And that’s where we end Christine! I’ve loved doing a deep-dive into this book – I adored it when I first read it, and it’s just confirmed to me that it remains one of my favourite King novels. It’s such a rich, interesting story about adolescence and loss that somehow takes the slightly-silly premise of a haunted car and turns it into something meaningful and moving and genuinely scary all at once. Above all else, though, it’s a love story – a story of the relationship between Arnie and Dennis, the tragic demise of their relationship through the lens of Arnie’s possession by Roland LeBay (who I still rank up there with King’s best villains). I would love to hear your takes on it in the comments below, and I’d love to invite you to stop by for the start of my new book recapping project, in which I’ll be taking a deep-dive into Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, starting next month. If you’d like to go back to the start of this series, you can do so here. Thank you for joining me!