Introduction
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father’s family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen’s grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.
He and Tabitha Spruce married in January of 1971. He met Tabitha in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, where they both worked as students. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men’s magazines.
Stephen made his first professional short story sale (“The Glass Floor”) to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men’s magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.
In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.
In the spring of 1973, Doubleday & Co. accepted the novel Carrie for publication. On Mother’s Day of that year, Stephen learned from his new editor at Doubleday, Bill Thompson, that a major paperback sale would provide him with the means to leave teaching and write full-time.
At the end of the summer of 1973, the Kings moved their growing family to southern Maine because of Stephen’s mother’s failing health. Renting a summer home on Sebago Lake in North Windham for the winter, Stephen wrote his next-published novel, originally titled Second Coming and then Jerusalem’s Lot, before it became ‘Salem’s Lot, in a small room in the garage. During this period, Stephen’s mother died of cancer, at the age of 59.
Carrie was published in the spring of 1974. That same fall, the Kings left Maine for Boulder, Colorado. They lived there for a little less than a year, during which Stephen wrote The Shining, set in Colorado. Returning to Maine in the summer of 1975, the Kings purchased a home in the Lakes Region of western Maine. At that house, Stephen finished writing The Stand, much of which also is set in Boulder. The Dead Zone was also written in Bridgton.
In 1977, the Kings spent three months of a projected year-long stay in England, cut the sojourn short and returned home in mid-December, purchasing a new home in Center Lovell, Maine. After living there one summer, the Kings moved north to Orrington, near Bangor, so that Stephen could teach creative writing at the University of Maine at Orono. The Kings returned to Center Lovell in the spring of 1979. In 1980, the Kings purchased a second home in Bangor, retaining the Center Lovell house as a summer home.
Stephen and Tabitha now spend winters in Florida and the remainder of the year at their Bangor and Center Lovell homes.
The Kings have three children: Naomi Rachel, Joe Hill and Owen Phillip, and four grandchildren.
Stephen is of Scots-Irish ancestry, stands 6’4″ and weighs about 200 pounds. He is blue-eyed, fair-skinned, and has thick, black hair, with a frost of white most noticeable in his beard, which he sometimes wears between the end of the World Series and the opening of baseball spring training in Florida. Occasionally he wears a moustache in other seasons. He has worn glasses since he was a child.
He has put some of his college dramatic society experience to use doing cameos in several of the film adaptations of his works as well as a bit part in a George Romero picture, Knightriders. Joe Hill King also appeared in Creepshow, which was released in 1982. Stephen made his directorial debut, as well as writing the screenplay, for the movie Maximum Overdrive (an adaptation of his short story “Trucks”) in 1985.
Stephen and Tabitha provide scholarships for local high school students and contribute to many other local and national charities.
Stephen is the 2003 recipient of The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the 2014 National Medal of Arts.
Literature Review
Scene: a middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh.
Time: 1978.
Cast of characters: Arnie Cunningham, a bookish and bullied high school senior; Dennis Guilder, his friend and sometimes protector; Leigh Cabot, the new girl in school, won by Arnie…but wanted by Dennis as well.
Just another lovers’ triangle, you say? Not quite. There’s a fourth here, the second lady, the dark lady. “Cars are girls,” Leigh Cabot says, and the dark force in Stephen King’s new novel is a 1958 Plymouth named Christine.
She is no ordinary car, this white-over-red two-toned survivor of a time when high-test gasoline was priced at a quarter a gallon and speedometers were calibrated all the way up to a hundred and twenty miles an hour…a time when rock and roll in all its first crude power ruled America…a time when speed was king.
Arnie Cunningham is determined to have Christine at any price, and little by little, Dennis and Leigh begin to suspect that the price of his growing obsession may be terrifyingly high, its result blackly evil. as Arnie sets feverishly to work on the seemingly hopeless job of resorting Christine, Christine begins to develop a terrible life of her own. Or is that only imagination? Dennis continues to hope so…and then people begin to die on Libertyville’s dark suburban streets and roads…and the time comes when Dennis can no longer deny the horrifying truth: Christine is alive.
In Christine, Stephen King has returned to the full-fledged novel of supernatural horror for the first time since The Shining. It will keep readers up late…and will have them looking both ways as they cross the street after dark.
It’s about the years-long friendship of popular football jock Dennis Guilder and Arnie Cunningham, the bespeckled, outcast with oozing spots on his face who’s the butt of everyone’s joke. It’s also about beautiful Leigh Cabot who comes between the two friends and Arnie and the object of his obsession, the car, that bitch Christine.
Christine comes to life. Arnie becomes somehow possessed by the spirit of a nasty old bastard called Rollie De LeBay, Christine’s former owner who may or may not have burned another child’s house down when he was a kid and who may or may not have let his daughter choke to death inside the car.
A group of local yobs trash Christine when Arnie works his ass off to make it street legal. A large part of the story revolves around Christine coming to life and hunting down and killing every yob involved. The police officer investigating the murders knows something stinks and Arnie is somehow connected and Christine eliminates him. Even Will Darnell, the shady crook who runs the garage where Arnie worked on Christine is taken out of the picture when he sees too much. The book is set in 1978, so Christine was 20 years old when Arnie found her and every one of those 20 years was apparent in her appearance. She’s rusted badly. Oil puddles under her block. Dennis takes one look at her (immediately the car is referred to as her) and tells Arnie the car is junk beyond salvation.
As Arnie is admiring his new love, the owner emerges from a rundown tract house and introduces himself as Roland LeBay, U.S. Army retired. LeBay is a foul man with a foul mouth and a foul smelling back brace he wears having incurred injury while in the army. Arnie immediately wants to know the asking price, telling LeBay that whatever he’s asking for it, it’s not enough. LeBay quotes a price of $250. Dennis is astounded, telling LeBay the car is dead and he’s taking advantage of his friend. LeBay dismisses him and takes Arnie’s $25 deposit.
The news that Arnie has purchased a car is greeted with fury (pardon the pun) by his parents who have controlled and dominated Arnie his entire life. When Arnie takes delivery of Christine and drives the backfiring, oil smoke emitting hunk of Detroit iron to his home, his mother forbids him from keeping it at their house. He is forced to take it to a local garage run by the town’s local criminal, Will Darnell, where he rents a repair bay for $20 a week.
Dennis takes an immediate dislike to Christine. The car makes him uncomfortable. He sits in it and the car seems to speak to him. When he stands in front of it, the car’s grille seems to leer at him. Christine is ugly in more ways than her rusted appearance.
Life goes on at Libertyville High School. Dennis plays football and although the team is not very good this year, Dennis is a standout star. He’s got a girlfriend of whom he is fond and is enjoying new vistas of teenage sexuality with her. Arnie has his auto shop classes, chess club, and Christine.
Dennis stops by Darnell’s garage a few weeks after Arnie buys Christine to check on his progress and is immediately struck by the haphazard manner in which Arnie has gone about repairing her. While the engine still drips oil, he’s replaced the broken antenna. There’s new upholstery on the back seat while the rest of the interior remains rotted. And half of the one piece grille has been restored to chrome. The cracks in her expensive to replace wrap around windshield are gone.
A few weeks later, Dennis and the team are playing an away game and Dennis is shocked to see Arnie arrive in Christine, still looking worse for wear, but definitely improved in appearance and performance. So is Arnie. His chronic acne has cleared and he looks more mature. Dennis is even more surprised that Arnie now has a fine looking young lady on his arm. Leigh Cabot is attractive (Dennis is immediately attracted to her) and new at the school. Arnie is now walking with a limp, having injured his back when helping Darnell with some of his cars he claims.
That next week, Arnie reads that Roland LeBay has died. Arnie feels compelled to attend the funeral and Dennis goes with him. After the funeral, Dennis decides to talk to LeBay’s brother who tells Dennis his brother’s ugly life story full of bitterness and hatred. He also tells Dennis Christine’s story. Christine was the culmination of LeBay’s life’s goal: to own a new car and he treasured it. His daughter choked to death in the car and LeBay refused to get rid of it. His wife committed suicide in the car and LeBay hung onto it. Nothing was going to part Roland LeBay and Christine until LeBay was no longer able to get a driver’s license and no longer needed the car.
A few days later, Dennis is going to meet Arnie for lunch outside the school when he finds Arnie cornered by several of the school’s delinquents, led by a tough named Buddy Repperton. Buddy has produced a switch blade and is threatening Arnie with it. Dennis wades into the standoff and confronts Repperton and his friends. Before anything bad happens to Arnie, a teacher arrives and breaks it up. Buddy is expelled and his friends suspended.
Arnie finally presents Christine in her restored grandeur. He takes Dennis for a ride. Dennis notes that the odometer rolls backward. Arnie says there must be a defective cable and it’s just one more of the small repairs he needs to make.
Before Thanksgiving, Dennis is badly injured in a football game. He breaks both legs and has a spinal injury. He is confined to a hospital bed and is out of the picture for several months. Meanwhile, Arnie puts the final touches on Christine, making her look showroom new.
For Arnie, it would seem his life has dramatically improved. His tormenters have been tossed from school. His appearance, like Christine’s has dramatically improved. He’s dating a hotty and has a cherry vintage car. But things are not good.
Arnie’s mother, still peeved over her son’s independence in buying a new car and spending much of his college money on it, refuses to let him keep the car at home. His father buys him a parking pass at the local airport and Arnie is forced to take a 25 minute bus ride to get to his new car. His home life now tense.
One night, he and Leigh are engaged in a heavy petting session at a drive-in movie when Leigh abruptly jumps from the car and runs to the concession stand. She can’t stand being in the car, she tells Arnie. She senses jealousy and resentment from Christine. Arnie dismisses her anger as ridiculous. But when Leigh starts slapping Christine’s dash board Arnie gets mad. Leigh tells him he’s just angry because Leigh’s slapping his other girl.
Other things make Leigh uncomfortable about Christine. Her green, glowing dashboard resembles two malevolent eyes. Her radio plays only vintage rock and roll, no matter where the dial is tuned. Leigh Cabot is quite convinced that Christine has a soul – and evil soul full of jealousy and anger. She visits Dennis in the hospital and confides her concerns to Dennis who is growing more attracted to her. Recalling his own discomfort around Christine, Dennis sympathizes, but is hardly in any position to do anything about it.
One night, while out partying, Buddy Repperton and his friends decide it’s time to exact revenge upon Arnie. They go to the airport and effectively destroy the car, punching holes in her body, cutting up her interior, and smashing her engine. Leigh and Arnie arrive at the airport the next day to find her mangled hulk. Arnie flies into a rage, screaming about the “shitters,” (one of Roland LeBay’s pet pejoratives) who trashed his car. He has it towed back to Darnell’s intent on repairing what seems to be irreparable.
Over the next several days, the boys who trashed Christine die violently. One is repeatedly run over on the street. Buddy Repperton and a few of his friends are chased on a snow covered road and forced off where they die in a fiery crash. A police detective drops in on Arnie at Darnell’s where Arnie is doing some mechanical work on her. He has paint samples linking Christine to the crimes while Arnie has air tight alibis for the crimes. What troubles the detective is that Christine’s body, which should have been mangled after the violence she inflicted, is in perfect repair. Arnie denies any knowledge of the crimes and points to his alibis.
Leigh reaches her breaking point when, one afternoon, she starts choking on a hamburger while riding in the Fury. Arnie tries hitting her on the back, but can’t dislodge the clog in her windpipe. A hitchhiker they picked up earlier gives her the Heimlich and saves her life. Convinced that Christine is responsible, she tells Arnie it’s either her or Christine. Leigh won’t ride in the car anymore. Arnie makes his choice and it is Christine.
Dennis is released from the hospital just before Christmas and Leigh comes to visit him. She’s distraught over the breakup and worried about Arnie who has become increasingly bitter toward the entire world. She doesn’t know what to do about Arnie or the car. As the two are talking, they fall into a passionate embrace and kiss deeply. Dennis has fallen in love with his best friend’s ex-girlfriend.
Two days before Christmas, Arnie is arrested in Will Darnell’s car, hauling cigarettes without tax stamps into New York from Pennsylvania. He is held in a local jail for a couple days before being released to his parents. The police want to nab Darnell for a host of illegal activities, but Arnie — much to the consternation of his parents — won’t roll over on his boss.
Dennis decides to spend New Year’s Eve with Arnie to ascertain his friend’s mental state. Arnie seems to lapse back and forth between himself and someone else. He confuses Dick Clark with the long dead Guy Lombardo. Sometimes, during the evening, Arnie acts like an entirely different person. While Arnie is driving Dennis home, Dennis enters his own time warp. Fifties music blares on Christine’s radio as Arnie observes the scene outside. Libertyville appears as it did in the 1950s. He looks beside him at the driver and is horrified to find that the desiccated corpse of Roland LeBay is driving the car. As they approach the Guilder residence, reality as Dennis knows it is restored. The tense, uneasy evening with Arnie is over.
Arnie is confused by his own behavior. He disappears from himself for long periods of time. He’s invented and excuse for his chronically ailing back, but struggles to remember how it really happened. It then comes to him how he pushed the derelict car around the junkyard behind Darnell’s as the odometer slowly rolled backward. Eventually, the engine repaired itself enough to allow him to start it and drive it around the yard for hours as time rolled backward and Christine fixed herself. At first he is horrified. But he finds solace in cruising in Christine who seems to make his unhappy thoughts go away.
Dennis and Leigh meet one evening for a meal and then start making out in Dennis’ car behind a fast food restaurant. Whilst they are liplocked and groping each other, Christine and Arnie stumble across them. Arnie, who made it clear to Dennis he was intent on getting Leigh back, feels horribly betrayed by the only friend he ever had. He leaves after promising revenge.
Dennis and Leigh are now both convinced that they will be Christine’s next target. Dennis talks to Arnie’s dad who is extremely worried about his son who is now completely alien to him. Dennis asks him to let him know if Arnie plans to leave town. It dawns on Arnie’s dad that every time one of Arnie’s enemies is killed, he’s out of town. He promises to let Dennis know. The next day, he calls Dennis to tell him that Arnie and his mother are going to Penn State on a college visitation.
Dennis and Leigh hatch a plan to destroy Christine. Dennis rents a large truck and takes it to Darnell’s with Leigh, confident that Christine will seek them out. Dennis is in the truck while Leigh waits by the garage door to shut it once Christine enters. The plan is for her to bolt outside as the door is closing while Dennis jousts with Christine.
It does not go as planned, and Leigh does not get out. Christine enters and Leigh is unprotected. Christine tries several times to run her over and she eventually seeks refuge in the garage office. Meanwhile, Dennis is ramming Christine repeatedly. As Christine moves, she repairs the damage Dennis does. Finally, Dennis is able to corner Christine and repeatedly rams her until her body is knocked off the frame. Still, she tries to repair herself and Dennis goes on ramming until there is little left of Christine but hunks of misshapen metal. She cannot move.
The police and paramedics arrive and Dennis is taken to the hospital, having reinjured his leg. He comes out of his painkiller haze to talk to a detective investigating the case as well as the other deaths, having taken over from Detective Junkins whom Christine disposed of. He tells Dennis that Arnie and his mother were killed in a crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and that Christine has been placed in a compactor. He wants to know the whole story. Dennis, unconvinced that the detective will not believe him, tells the whole story. The detective leaves without commenting on the veracity of Dennis’ story.
We find out that Dennis and Leigh go to college together and date for several years before breaking up. Dennis graduates college and now (apparently in 1983) teaches junior high school history. He still exchanges Christmas cards with Leigh who has married and moved to Arizona. One time, he includes a note in her card, asking how she copes with what happened. She writes back that she doesn’t know what Dennis is talking about.
Dennis reads that about a California man run down in a hit and run. He was a native of Libertyville and was the lot attendant who let Buddy Repperton and his friends into the parking lot the night they trashed Christine. Dennis knows that somewhere, in the United States, there is a pristine 1958 Plymouth Fury with non-stock red and white paint, tooling around, spreading evil.
For this novel – perhaps more than any other King novel – I have mixed feelings. There is much to love about it and there is much to criticize.
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The conflict between girlfriend and car is also a genuine concept that King develops well. Since kids have owned cars, boyfriends