Christine

Having completed Christine, I’m still not entirely sure how I felt about it.  Part of me feels like this was a book that was directed at boys rather than girls, particularly because it was centered on a car—but also because it considered where the lines were drawn between being a boy and a man.  Another part of me like aspects of it, although I felt that it was similar to several SK novels/short stories that I have already read.  Some of it was pretty clunky, to be honest, most specifically all of the references to disaster in the future.  The best of these was a reference to the fact that the narrator would not finish the football season, which sounded ominous, but turned out to be because of an injury sustained on the field and not due to a haunted car.  This points to a larger problem, which was the flawed narrative structure.  In parts 1 and 3, Dennis—the friend of the protagonist Arnie Cunningham—narrates the action.  In part 2, Dennis is in the hospital, having suffered from that fatalistic football injury, so there is instead an omniscient narrator.  Yet the story is supposedly Dennis recounting his experience.  It doesn’t really make sense to have the part in the middle. 

There’s another problem: the haunted car.  I just didn’t buy it.  This strikes me as funny, because I could ‘buy’ vampires floating outside windows or clowns in sewers, but a car possessed by a ghost seemed unrealistic to me.

As for previous influences, I think that two of the stories from Different Seasons were pretty clearly part of this novel.  The complications of adolescent friendship were similar to the themes from ‘The Body,’ while the increasing influence of an evil, older figure from ‘Apt Pupil’ was a vital part of Christine.  I also think that SK was in an ‘everyday things that can kill you’ phase right around this time.  See, for instance, the dog in Cujo (which also had hints of continued evil, even if that theme wasn’t developed fully).

One important thing that I took from Christine was the origin of the word ‘roont,’ which will be important in the fifth book of the Dark Tower.  Turns out that ‘roont’ is simply the Pittsburgh-area pronunciation of ‘ruined,’ meaning that the inhabitants of the Calla were Yinzers.  Mystery solved!  There is one more clear connection to a future novel that I found, which is the fact that LeBay committed arson when he was younger that killed a family he did not like.  Annie Wilkes will do the same in Misery.

Christine, along with The Shining, are the two novels so far that most explicitly confronted the issue of addiction.  In some ways, SK makes this clear as he even refers to Arnie’s appearance as resembling that of a junkie near the end of the book.  But in other ways, the symptoms of an addict are less clearly defined.  Arnie’s anger is similar to that felt by many addicts, as is his alienation from friends and family members.  Although there is a ghost driving his car, Arnie’s lack of responsibility and inability to remember ‘his’ actions are also similar to an addict.  Just as in The Shining, I think that this story would make even more sense (and be even more tragic) with the supernatural element removed.  Also, it would get rid of the ‘ghost in the car’ device which I did not care for.

Different Seasons

This was my second time through Different Seasons, although I had a few vague recollections from my prior reading of it.  I remembered that I liked ‘Shawshank,’ I disliked ‘Apt Pupil,’ and I thought ‘The Body’ was okay (now the movie version, that was some good stuff.  Wil Wheaton FTW).  Also I remembered that I thought ‘The Breathing Method’ was kind of over-extended and silly.  And I will be damned if this doesn’t sum up almost exactly how I felt when I reread the stories.

‘Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption’

Let me start by saying that I think this story ranks in the top 5 all time by King.  Of everything.  It is fast, it has character, it has a good twist, and it wraps up nicely.  Now probably I have been biased because the movie is also pretty good, but I recall from my first read through that I liked this story as well.  I want to quote Roger Ebert in his review of the film: ‘The horror here is not of the supernatural kind, but of the sort that flows from the realization than 10, 20, 30 years of a man's life have unreeled in the same unchanging daily prison routine.’  Isn’t that great?  And it is an apt summary.  There is really no horror per se in this story, simply an intriguing tale of events at a Maine prison.  Plus I liked that SK didn’t drop too many hints about the ending (I mean, you can piece it together as you go, but it isn’t nearly as bad as some of his foreshadowing.  See Christine).

What I didn’t know about these novellas is that they were all written far earlier in King’s life.  From the afterword, he describes that he writes a major novel, then writes a novella for the heck of it.  That writing compulsion is nutty.  This novella was written following The Dead Zone, which makes all of the sense in the world to me.  The Dead Zone is also about the passage of time and what happens in the interim.  In that book, Johnny lost five years of his life when he was in a coma, and SK did a great job of detailing how his life changed irrevocably during this time.  In ‘Shawshank,’ it is a much longer period of time, but Andy experiences a similar loss of time while he is jailed.  Really great.  The whole novella makes me happy.

‘Apt Pupil’

This one, I don’t like.  SK wrote it after The Shining, which I imagine had to be a tough book for him, what with the drinking and the potentially abusing your own son and how the book is about a writer and all.  But I still don’t like this book.  It is about a young psychopath (and yes, from the very beginning he is identified as such, go read chapter 1 and notice his lack of empathy and his need to put on the ‘right emotions’ for others) who meets an old Nazi.  Horrible events ensue.  I think that the only part I liked in this one was the part when Dussander overdosed on Seconal, which seemed like a really Valley of the Dolls way of dying to me.

I don’t really get the point of this novel.  It doesn’t offer enlightenment about the condition of either of them.  The murders that take place are very graphic, perhaps unnecessarily so.  I guess it could be understood as a character sketch between two psychopaths, but I’m not sure that SK is really exploring them.  Certainly there are ties between this and other novels, most notably Christine, but I remain uneasy about this content—perhaps more uneasy than I have with any of the books that I have read by him to date.

‘The Body’

As someone who has never been a 12-year old male, I think that parts of this story will simply never make sense to me.  It is a very boy-centric story.  However, I liked it.  I liked the storyteller angle and the coming of age part.  It’s hard not to read a lot of King’s biography in this book, particularly since he purportedly saw one of his friends get hit by a train when he was young (as recounted in Danse Macabre).  The highly graphic description of the dead boy seems to come from a very specific experience for SK—mind you, he is also a good writer, so maybe this is just me projecting.

What I did not notice the last time I read this book is how closely aspects of it resemble It (if you’re curious, he wrote this one after ‘Salem’s Lot).  There is the gang of ‘losers,’ for instance.  And there are mean boys who want to beat them up.  At one point, SK mentions cannibals with their teeth sharpened, which conjured up It in my mind instantaneously, so I am assuming that there are similarities between the two.  But the most jarring moment was the following near the end, when Chris and Gordie were talking about whether the others would tell about their experience.

Gordie: They’re scared, Chris.  Teddy especially, that they won’t take him in the Army.  But Vern’s scared, too.  They’ll lose some sleep over it, and there’s gonna be times this fall when it’s right on the tips of their tongues to tell somebody, but I don’t think they will.  And then…you know what?  It sounds fucking crazy but…I think they’ll almost forget it every happened.  (424 in the 2004 Signet edition)

BOOM.  That is totally what happens in It.  Between attacks, everyone gradually forgets what happened, even the Losers, despite their intense experience the first time around. 

‘The Breathing Method’

Yeah, this one is kind of silly.  SK weaves an elaborate tale of not-muchness around a story of supernatural weirdness.  This one was after Firestarter, which also felt kind of derivative.  Would have worked better as a short story, I feel.