Review: "Christine" by Stephen King

I was very weary of this book as I was about to start it. It comes from that very unfertile period in Stephen King’s career where, in retrospect, the books are very lackluster, and a lot of their fame comes from movie adaptions. This book, along with Cujo, which I have read, and Firestarter, which I have not, come, coincidentally right after the period in the seventies, where every novel he published (from Carrie to The Dead Zone) was great, and looked at now as classics in American literature. Also, only speaking of Cujo and this book, the plots seem very one-note and seem to exist as potboilers only, which is change from the balance of depth and suspense found in his first, most creative period. So, I went into Christine with low expectations, and am glad to say that they were exceeded, but not by leaps and bounds. The plot is silly, with a possessed car not nearly as menacing as Jack Torrence with an croquet mallet or Randall Flagg with his flock of Vegas refugees, but from page one, the story takes itself seriously, as most of King’s novels do, and I found I was sucked into this insular world of Libertyville, and more importantly the unfortunate existence of Arnie Cunningham, whose best friend, Dennis, narrates. We see Arnie immediately transformed from the person Dennis has known his whole life by a junked 58 Plymouth Fury on sale in the yard of an old man named Roland “Rollie” LeBay, who we learn, through the stories Dennis is told, was not a good person (and in my opinion, an overrated real life monster in the fictional landscape of Stephen King). As soon as the car is his, Arnie begins to change, for better and worse, his skin clears up and he begins to date the prettiest girl in school, Leigh Cabot. He is also falling behind in school and fighting more with his parents, and all these aspects stem from the car, which Roland called Christine. It acts to both enhance our view of Arnie’s social standing, and makes us worry about where this dark road will lead him. This is one of the more psychological of King’s novels, right up there with Misery and Dreamcatcher. We want Arnie to succeed, because we all knew one of his kind in high school: someone who is constantly marginalized by others and demoted to being a second-class citizen in the world of teenagers (as Dennis says, “there is one or two in every school). But improving through Christine’s power may be too much of a price to pay, and we see the bullies who wreck his car, and those who betray Arnie suffer the wraith of this newfound addiction in Arnie’s life, and more than scary, it is also quite sad and tragic. It shows how good people, who finally get what they want, turn into something just as bad as the world they rally against. While this book is good, there are a few points of contention. I may have found some of the worst sentences and phrases King has wrote down in his great career, but they only appear a few times in the first hundred or so pages. Also, the ending was too dark, just like in Pet Semetary, and the lasting impression this book leaves feels kind of awful and too much like a slap in the face. While not perfect, this book is not as bad as I expected it was going to be, and should be read by those who love Stephen King as much as I do.

Rating: 4/5