Stephen King’s Christine

I just finished reading Christine, an old Steven King novel about an old car, a teenager’s obsession with it, and the usual supernatural goings-on, set in western Pennsylvania in 1978-79. Since King usually chose Maine to place his stories in, I was struck by the fact that a later novel of his about an unusual “car” (From a Buick 8) that I had already read was set in the same general location. Apparently, there’s something in the author’s mind connecting old cars with western Pennsylvania!

I have to admit to some difficulty in the beginning with motivating myself to read through Christine. For one, I never was into the old fifties/sixties pop tunes about cars (I did think Jan and Dean’s 1964 Dead Man’s Curve was a classic), various lyrics of which open each chapter. And I never was into cars themselves, as a few of my classmates throughout my elementary and high school years were. But my overriding problem for most of the novel was my difficulty in identifying or sympathizing with any of its characters. Christine, written in the first person from the viewpoint of Dennis, a star high school jock, is about how his best friend, who happens to be the school “nerd” with a special proclivity to auto mechanics, comes across an old, beat-up Plymouth (named “Christine”), buys it, and becomes increasingly possessed by it. And then, as in other Stephen King works, very inexplicable and very, very bad things begin to happen. At this point, for me at least, the novel became more interesting and more disturbing. For I had finally come across a character that I could identify with. And it wasn’t a very compelling character, either. This forced me to examine my own attitudes and personality, not always a pleasant task.

So my interest in reading Christine began to increase until I flew through to the finish. And, in a peculiar (and equally disturbing) way, it had a happy ending. Of sorts. If you want to call its ending an ending. Anyway, whatever you might call it, I thought the ending was stupendous.

Christine is a novel whose attraction for the reader depends greatly on his/her interests and personality. It would be interesting to see which characters different readers identified with the most. And why. I wouldn’t rank Christine among Stephen King’s best novels, but it certainly wasn’t one of his worst, either.

I understand a movie was made about Christine. For the most part, though, I have been disappointed with film enactments of King’s works (The Shining being the worst), although there have been some notable exceptions (such as It and Stand By Me). So I suggest that you would probably be better off either checking out Christine from the library or purchasing a cheap used paperback copy instead of watching the movie.