ARNIE CUNNINGHAM: As a senior at Libertyville High School, Arnie is the quintessential sidekick. He speaks softly and minds his own business, trying not to get picked on by his peers and hoping to live long enough to survive high school. He loves Leigh Cabot, though he doesn’t have the guts to even ask her out until he buys Christine, a red 1958 Plymouth Fury.
Arnie’s new car changes him, in more ways than one. At first he seems more confident. He asks Leigh out, and they date for a bit. A nice car has given Arnie the boost he needs to feel good about himself. Or so it seems.
But Christine has wrought other changes on Arnie. His appearance changes. His face clears up, and he carries himself differently. His best friend, Dennis Guilder, notices the alterations immediately. He finds, over time, that he doesn’t really like the new Arnie, and eventually, neither does Leigh.
Arnie is not himself. Quite literally. He has been manipulated and at times even possessed by the malignant ghost of Roland LeBay, the first owner of Christine. In the end, Arnie sees what he has done to his life, and how much he has hurt the people he loves the most. He wrests control of himself from LeBay one final time, and attempts to save his mother’s life. It is a failed attempt, and both Arnie and his mother are killed.
CHRISTINE: A 1958 red-and-white Plymouth Fury, Christine was built on the assembly line in Detroit, and she was born bad. There was something evil about her from the beginning, a supernatural force that reached out to hurt those it came into contact with.
Christine’s first owner was Roland LeBay, an Army veteran. LeBay was a cruel man, though he prized his car more than anything. Upon his death—shortly after selling Christine to Arnie Cunningham—his spirit merges with the car, combining his cruelty with Christine’s already considerable evil.
Then Arnie begins to be tainted by Christine’s evil, and LeBay’s presence as well. After local toughs, led by Buddy Repperton, vandalize the car to get at Arnie, the car sets out on its own at night, hunting them down and killing them. Eventually, in an effort to put an end to that evil, Dennis Guilder and Leigh Cabot use an enormous sewage truck to crush Christine until she is useless scrap. Later, she is destroyed in a compactor at a junkyard.
However, that may not be the end. For out in California, a kid named Sandy Galton, who had once attacked Christine with his friends, is struck and killed by a car. Dennis Guilder wonders if this murderer is Christine, and still fears that she might be coming for him.
DENNIS GUILDER: The most valuable player on the football team at Libertyville High, Dennis Guilder isn’t the average jock. His relationship with Arnie Cunningham proves that. Everything Dennis is, Arnie isn’t. Where Dennis is handsome and athletic and outgoing … Arnie isn’t. And yet they remain friends, as they have been since grade school. Dennis is Arnie’s protector, and tries to be his voice of reason when things in Arnie’s life get out of control.
Nobody understands why Dennis always defends Arnie, and in time, Dennis comes to realize that he can’t save Arnie anymore. Despite their outward differences, they’re both intelligent young men, and their friendship means more than the prejudices of high school, the cruelties of teenage life.
But it has always been easier for Dennis than for Arnie. They are both enamored of the same girl, Leigh Cabot, but Arnie doesn’t believe he stands a chance with her if Dennis is his competition. Yet when Arnie begins to change, thanks to Christine’s influence, he finds the courage to ask Leigh out, and she says yes.
Over time, however, both Leigh and Dennis have to deal with the further changes in Arnie, and the way his obsession with Christine has twisted him. As a result, the two of them are drawn together, and eventually fall in love.
Together, Dennis and Leigh destroy Christine—or at least believe they have.
Presently, Dennis Guilder remains in Libertyville, where he is a high school teacher. He still fears that one day Christine may return to unleash her vengeance upon him.
ROLAND LeBAY: Born and raised in Libertyville, Pennsylvania, Roland LeBay was a misanthrope all his life. He was a cruel individual who didn’t ever see the need to get on well with people. But he knew cars. In the Army, he was a mechanic known for his ability to fix anything.
When he bought Christine in 1958, it was a match made in Hell. The car itself was already evil, somehow, and LeBay’s natural hatred of people fed the auto, just as it fed him.
Some twenty years later, Roland sells Christine to a local teenager named Arnie Cunningham. Shortly thereafter, he dies. At least, physically. His spirit, however, merges with Christine, and together, the two of them—car and owner—change and possess Arnie Cunningham. In the end, however, when Christine is being destroyed, LeBay’s spirit flees the vehicle in an effort toward self-preservation. He tries to fully possess Arnie himself, but Arnie fights him. The struggle takes place in a speeding car, and an accident ensues that takes Arnie’s life and that of his mother, Regina Cunningham.
It is presumed that without a host, Roland LeBay’s spirit has gone to its final reward. Or final punishment, as the case may be.
LEIGH (CABOT) ACKERMAN: As a senior at Libertyville High, Leigh has the misfortune to briefly become the girlfriend of Arnie Cunningham and the object of Roland LeBay’s obsession. Leigh cares for Arnie a great deal, but soon comes to realize that his fixation on his car is very unhealthy. In fact, along with Arnie’s best friend, Dennis Guilder, Leigh realizes that there is something supernatural at work here. Together with Dennis, she aids in the destruction of Christine.
For a time afterward, Leigh and Dennis remain together as a couple. Eventually, however, they split and Leigh marries another. She settles in Taos, New Mexico, where she still lives with her husband and their twin girls.
WILL DARNELL: The owner of Darnell’s Garage, where Arnie restores and garages Christine, Will Darnell is a common criminal. He uses his operation to smuggle drugs—among other things—inside cars. When Arnie Cunningham is arrested for working for him, Darnell lets him take the fall. In vengeance, Christine kills Darnell.
BUDDY REPPERTON: The most notorious member of Arnie’s class at Libertyville High, Buddy is the leader of those students who frequently abuse Arnie. When Arnie begins to change and grow more confident—and more importantly, less afraid of Buddy—Repperton and his friends attack and vandalize Christine.
For that act, Christine later forces Buddy’s car off the road, and Buddy and several of his friends die in the ensuing crash.
SANDY GALTON: Though Sandy Galton doesn’t participate in the assault on Christine, he is the one who tells Buddy where the car can be found, and lets them into the airport parking lot where the attack occurs. Though for a very long time it appears that Sandy has escaped Christine’s vengeance, it is later reported that he has been struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver in California. It is Dennis Guilder’s belief that Christine has somehow returned and is responsible for Sandy Galton’s death.
VERONICA and RITA LeBAY: The wife and young daughter of Roland LeBay, both of them die while inside Christine. Rita chokes to death. Veronica’s death appears to be suicide, but Dennis Guilder believes that Christine murdered her.
CHRISTINE: ADAPTATIONS
Just in time for Christmas, in 1983, Columbia Pictures released the motion picture version of Christine. Oddly enough, despite the marquee value of the Stephen King name, and the fact that the story was, of course, his, the film was marketed as “John Carpenter’s Christine.” Carpenter, director of Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), and Escape from New York (1981), among many others, clearly had his own box office appeal, but the billing seemed awkward nevertheless.
Produced by long-time Carpenter collaborator Richard Kobritz and adapted by Bill Phillips, the 111-minute movie remained relatively faithful to the original novel (except for the change of making Christine inherently evil rather than possessed), despite the title billing. Keith Gordon, who would later become a director himself, played the doomed Arnie Cunningham, with John Stockwell as Dennis Guilder and Alexandra Paul as Leigh Cabo
t.
The film version of King’s novel met with mediocre reviews and unimpressive box office, but continues, as with just about everything these days, to survive in the eternity of video.
CHRISTINE: TRIVIA
• Alexandra Paul, who plays Leigh Cabot in the film, went on to become the costar of the most-watched television series in the world, Baywatch, in the 1990s.
• Actress Kelly Preston plays the relatively minor role of Roseanne, a girl Dennis Guilder briefly dates. In an odd confluence of events, the book features Dennis and Roseanne going to see the movie Grease (1978), which starred John Travolta, who happens to be married, in real life, to Kelly Preston. Travolta also had an early role in a King film, as Billy Nolan in Carrie (1976).
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SKELETON CREW
(1985)
Seven years after the publication of Night Shift, Stephen King released a second short story collection entitled Skeleton Crew. He penned both an introduction and a chapter of story notes for the volume, both of which give readers valuable insight into the mind of the author. As King states in his introduction, the tales span a long period in his life. The oldest, “The Reaper’s Image,” was written shortly after he graduated from high school in 1966. The newest, “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” was composed in 1983.
The volume’s contents reflect King’s change in fortune since his first collection, especially in the markets now available to him. The majority of the entries in Night Shift had first appeared in slick men’s magazines like Cavalier, Penthouse, and Gallery. Some of the stories featured in Skeleton Crew were first published in men’s magazines as well, but in more reputable and better-paying publications such as Playboy. An examination of the copyright page reveals King’s growing influence on the horror genre: several of those included here had also appeared in Kirby McCauley’s landmark Dark Forces: New Stories of Suspense and Supernatural Horror (1980), Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, the revived Weird Tales, and assorted volumes of Charles L. Grant’s critically acclaimed Shadows anthologies from the early 1980s.
The collection, which features twenty stories and two poems, contains an epigram that reads, “Do you love?” This phrase shows up three times in the collection, first in “Nona” (the title character poses the question to the narrator as he stands over the corpse of an ex-girlfriend), then in “The Raft” (Randy somewhat absurdly asks this query of the “oil slick” creature), and finally, most poignantly, in “The Reach” (as the narrator inquires, “Do the dead sing? Do they love?”).
“Here There Be Tygers”
A chilling short story, this piece is all the more effective because King never explains how a tiger came to be in the boys’ bathroom at the Acorn Street Grammar School. The horror is just simply there.
“HERE THERE BE TYGERS”: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
CHARLES: A third grader who first encounters the tiger in the boys’ restroom but manages to escape back to his homeroom.
KENNY GRIFFIN: A third grader who is eaten by the tiger in the boys’ restroom after being instructed by Miss Bird to check up on Charles.
MISS BIRD: Charles’s third-grade teacher, Miss Bird scoffs at his assertion that there is a deadly tiger in the boys’ restroom. Entering the restroom, she, too, is presumably killed by the imaginary tiger.
“The Monkey”
This story is a perfect example of taking a commonplace object—a toy—and making it utterly terrifying. In this narrative, the object of terror is a mechanical monkey, the kind that clashes a pair of cymbals together when you wind it up. (King has told similar stories since, namely “Chattery Teeth,” which appears in Nightmares & Dreamscapes, and “Chinga,” a teleplay he cowrote for The X-Files in the late 1990s. The first features a set of novelty windup teeth; the latter showcases a haunted doll.)
Hal Shelbourne was abandoned by his father at a young age. Searching through his father’s effects one day, Hal discovers a mechanical monkey. Hal winds it up, its cymbals clash, and, shortly thereafter, their babysitter, Beulah, is accidentally killed in a shootout. Then, in rapid succession, Hal loses the family dog, a best friend, and, tragically, his mother. Each time, the monkey’s clanging preceded the death. Deathly afraid of the toy, he throws it in a well. The toy resurfaces years later, scaring Hal out of his wits. Knowing its presence threatens the well-being of his family, Hal weighs the toy down and throws it into Crystal Lake, presumably destroying it forever. One sign that the deadly toy monkey may still be with us is the fact that hundreds of fish die in the lake soon thereafter.
“Cain Rose Up”
Originally published in the Spring 1968 issue of Ubris (the University of Maine at Orono literary magazine), this story was inspired in part by Charles Whitman’s Texas tower massacre. This type of story soon became a subgenre—stories like Harlan Ellison’s “Thrillkill” cover similar terrain. Sadly, acts of violence like those in these stories have become a fact of life in modern-day America.
Shortly after finals, Curt Garrish starts shooting people from his dorm window. His motivation for doing so is never explained.
“The Raft”
A tragic coming-of-age story, one in which all the principals succumb to the hypnotic callings of a carnivorous oil slick that makes its home in a Pennsylvania lake. King originally submitted this story to Adam, a men’s magazine that published horror fiction at the time. The tale—then titled “The Float”—was accepted, and King was duly paid. Because it was Adam’s policy to pay on publication, King assumes the story was published, even though the magazine folded soon thereafter and he never saw the story in print. Rewritten years later, its first official publication was in yet another men’s magazine—Gallery.
“THE RAFT”: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
RANDY: The narrator of the events that occurred on the raft, Randy usually follows the whims of his best friend, Deke. So when Deke suggests they commemorate the end of summer (and the end of classes at Horlicks, of “The Crate” fame) by taking a dip in an isolated Pennsylvania lake, Randy reluctantly agrees. The two pals take their girlfriends, Rachel and Laverne, with them. Diving into the lake, they swim out to a raft, where they are cornered by a sentient oil slick. Rachel, who makes the mistake of trying to touch it, is consumed when the creature surges onto her arm and pulls her in. Deke goes next, literally pulled through a crack in the boards that make up the raft’s surface. After Laverne is taken, Randy is left with only the creature for company. He is slowly hypnotized by the colors that swirl in the living oil slick. Presumably, he succumbs and is consumed by the creature.
[NOTE: As adapted by George A. Romero, this story was the most effective tale in Creepshow 2 (1987). That particular segment starred actors Daniel Beer, Jeremy Green, Page Hannah, and Paul Satterfield.]
“Word Processor of the Gods”
This story came about because of King’s fascination one day with what he could do with the DELETE button on his keyboard.
An English teacher, Richard Hagstrom always wondered how his sisterin-law, Belinda, could have married a worthless, abusive drunk like his deceased brother, Roger. Further, he marvels at how such a disjointed union could have produced such a wonderful child as his beloved nephew, Jonathan. Married to the shrewish Lina, father of the loathsome Seth, Richard wonders how fate had screwed things up. Richard is heartbroken when Jon and Belinda are killed in an automobile accident caused by his drunken brother—all he has are his memories and the homemade word processor Jon built for him before his death.
Richard is aghast to discover that the DELETE and EXECUTE buttons on his keyboard actually work in the most literal sense: Experimenting with a portrait, Richard makes it disappear, then brings it back, merely by typing a phrase on his keyboard. Realizing the machine’s potential, he next deletes his repulsive son and wife, then types “I AM A MAN WHO LIVES ALONE EXCEPT FOR MY WIFE, BELINDA, AND MY SON, JONATHAN,” and hits EXECUTE. Although the machine is destroyed in the process, it once again manages to alter reality, thereby providing Richard wi
th a new, and much happier, home life.
[NOTE: This story was adapted by Michael McDowell (who would later cowrite the screenplay for 1996’s feature version of Thinner) and appeared in 1985 as an episode of Tales from the Darkside, a television series produced by George A. Romero and Richard Rubinstein.]
“The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands”
This tale is narrated by George Gregson, a member of a poker club that meets at a brownstone located at 249B East Thirty-fourth Street, New York City, a locale King readers will recognize from the novella The Breathing Method in 1982’s Different Seasons. Gregson relates the curious events that took place in the club in 1919.
“THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT SHAKE HANDS”: PRIMARY SUBJECTS
HENRY BROWER: Brower is the man referred to in the title of the story. Cursed to cause the death of anyone he touches by an Indian holy man who blames him for the death of his son, Brower usually shuns human contact. Playing poker one night in the club, he wins a round, upon which one of his opponents, a man named Jason Davidson, grabs his hand and shakes it. Brower pulls away and runs out into the night. Following Brower, Gregson confronts him and hears his story. When Gregson laughs, Brower demonstrates his power, killing a dog merely by touching its paw. Gregson remains unconvinced until Davidson passes away suddenly and Brower commits suicide, apparently just by grasping one of his hands with the other.
The Complete Stephen King Universe Page 36