Christine Journal 7

As promised, the death count on Christine continues; see below. I look forward to the final tally. Sorry, no names -- that would be a serious spoiler. But I will say that the deaths in Christine are adequately terrible to qualify as a genuine hard core Stephen King novel. No Big Jim style deaths as of yet.

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So far chapter 36 has been the best. In fact, I would suggest that it is the kind of stuff that makes us say, "So that's why I read Stephen King!"

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I think I like this book because it's nothing but pure horror. It's not a political statement or a social commentary. Not opposed to those -- but this is just pure terror. There's no attempt at literature; King just grabs you by the throat and says, "Hey, there, want to hear a good story?" And with prose that are incredible he carries us into one messed up story.

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A few more spooky things about Christine:

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1. Repairs: No one ever actually sees Arnie making repairs on the car. Serious work gets done on her, but even the guys at the shop never see Arnie doing the work.
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2. Odometer: Have I mentioned that the odometer runs backward? -- fast! Now that's cool.

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3. Corpse: Christine isn't just alive. . . she's haunted. A ghost is actually attached to her. Note: "A man was standing there. Only it wasn't a man at all; it was a corpse. A rotting corpse in green pants. It was shirtless, but a back brace splotched with gray mould was cinched around its blackening torso. White bone gleamed through the skin stretched across its face. 'That's it for you, you shitter,' this starlit apparition whispered." ahhh, refreshing! Both gory and spooky. I like it a lot! And how's this: "The corpse of Roland D. LeBay held out its decayed hands to Buddy Repperton and grinned."

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4. The writing is King at his best. Another quote, because the writing here is SO GOOD! "On the far verge of Squantic Lake, some ten miles away as the crow flies, a young man who had gone out for a cross-country ski by starlight heard the sound and suddenly stopped, his hands on his poles and his head cocked. Abruptly the skin on his back prickled into bumps, as if a goose had just walked over his grave, and although he knew it was only a car somewhere on the other side -- sound carried a long way up here on still winter nights -- his first thought was that something prehistoric had awakened and had tracked its prey to earth: a great wolf, or perhaps a saber-toothed tiger."

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There's a lot more that's just this good... maybe better. I'm not sure King could have delivered these kinds of prose from Dennis' lips. When I started reading, I thought: Why did King switch tenses midway through? I know, he says he did it because he got stuck when Dennis landed in the hospital. I wondered why King didn't simply rewrite the first half of the novel in third person. I now see that the two voices (first and third) make the novel stronger. We needed Arnie's buddy to give us a tender look at the nerdy high schooler. However, the later scenes in the novel require things from another point of view. . . perhaps even Christine's!

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Revised DEATH COUNT: 6

1 by Suicide.

1 by choking.
1 by running over. (3x forward, 3x backward. Nice job, Christine.)
3 more by auto.
--attempted murder: 1 by choking. Creepy!