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.