Thrillers & Suspense
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Christine
Stephen King's ultimate evil vehicle of terror, Christine: the frightening story of a nerdy teenager who falls in love with his vintage Plymouth Fury. It's love at first sight, but this car is no lady.
Evil is alive in Libertyville. It inhabits a custom-painted red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine and young Arnold Cunningham, who buys it.
Along with Arnold's girlfriend, Leigh Cabot, Dennis Guilder attempts to find out the real truth behind Christine and finds more than he bargained for: from murder to suicide, there's a peculiar feeling that surrounds Christine-she gets revenge on anyone standing in her path.
Can Dennis save Arnold from the wrath of Christine? This #1 national bestseller is "Vintage Stephen King…breathtaking…awesome. Carries such momentum the reader must force himself to slow down" (The New York Times Book Review).
Evil is alive in Libertyville. It inhabits a custom-painted red and white 1958 Plymouth Fury named Christine and young Arnold Cunningham, who buys it.
Along with Arnold's girlfriend, Leigh Cabot, Dennis Guilder attempts to find out the real truth behind Christine and finds more than he bargained for: from murder to suicide, there's a peculiar feeling that surrounds Christine-she gets revenge on anyone standing in her path.
Can Dennis save Arnold from the wrath of Christine? This #1 national bestseller is "Vintage Stephen King…breathtaking…awesome. Carries such momentum the reader must force himself to slow down" (The New York Times Book Review).
Readers Top Reviews
MR WMichelleSarah
Reading Christine made me realise why I stopped reading Stephen King twenty odd years ago. I can't help it but I find his writing style annoying. Christine is about an evil car, who may be possessed by it's former owner and seems to have got a massive hold on it's new owner Arnie. King is a master writer and there are many excellent set pieces throughout. However for me the book is far too long. It clocks in at 722 page and could easily have been cut to 350. King goes off on tangents, digressions and fills in so many background details on the characters that are completely superfluous to the story and plot. This was the problem with both IT and The Tommyknockers.
John McAlexander
This was sort of a twisted story and somewhat peculiar. Recommended reading experience only for an established Stephen King fan. I really am not one of those. OK BOOK.
John McAlexand
Okay, sure, there are flaws. The vast misunderstanding of Pennsylvania geography, for one. The ambiguity, awkwardly handled, over whether the true threat is Christine herself in some primordial evil way (cool) or simply the vengeful ghost of LeBay (meh). Some off-putting 1970s attitudes about women. King's persistent use of larger bodies to indicate unpleasant personalities. That sort of thing. That being said...the book has its moments. Still draws me in after all these years. I rate it as about the middle point of King's skill spectrum (with the recent The Institute at the bottom, followed closely by Under The Dome and Dr Sleep; at the top, I place The Shining, Misery, and the JFK time travel one whose title I always get wrong because I can remember that the date is November 20-something but not which day, and I am not clicking out of this review to look it up). As you may note, a mid-level King novel still earns four stars from me. That seems about right.
Greggorio!Joe
Stephen King is a genius. CHRISTINE is a masterpiece. It is the most traumatic, shocking, horrific, frightening and yet unequivocally brilliant piece of fiction that I have ever read. It is a horror novel. It is a love story. It is a tragedy. That is a review in its own right, but I choose to continue. Because this is fun. The story goes like this: A young lad by the name of Arnie Cunningham is cruising the streets of his hometown with his pal Dennis ... When Arnie just happens to catch a glimpse of a vision of something that he never knew that he wanted. A 1958 Plymouth Fury sedan. The problem is, the car is a wreck, it is a rust bucket which shouldn't be on the road. And there is no way in hell that our Arnie can afford to fix it up. Dennis can see it for what it is but he cant make his pal Arnie see the wood for the trees. But Arnie buys it anyway. Because when Arnie looks at this particular Plymouth he doesn't see what everyone else sees. He sees a stud bucket on wheels. He sees success. He sees easy living. He sees everything he has ever wanted without ever realising he wanted it. In other words, the devil has come to Libertyville and he has set his sights on Arnold Cunningham as his first victim. Stephen King has always been a delight to read. In CHRISTINE, his writing is suspenseful, compelling and at times down right addictive. Given that the book was written back in the 1980s it still holds up remarkably well today. At times, CHRISTINE is shocking, but in a good way. You switch on the kindle (or open your book) and see an innocent and innocuous looking chapter introduction that (so my kindle tells me) will take me 15 minutes to read but once you read this chapter you are faced with the choice of re-reading it for the simple joy of it, or rushing straight on to the next chapter even though it is a work day and it is well past your bed time. Personally, i tend to re-read them. His "shocking" chapters are classic Stephen King gore fests, which are gruesome, highly enjoyable rides of absolute terror and completely unexpected. Hence the shock factor. They can also be quite moving and emotional once your heart beat and blood pressure drop back to normal levels. And also once you have regained your grip on reality and your own sanity. Reading CHRISTINE is like attending a master class in writing sophisticated horror fiction. As always with Mr King, his characterisation stands out like high powered fog lamps on a brand new 4WD motor vehicle. His plot is sufficiently complicated and complex that the book never seems long despite its 746 pages. I have already mentioned its gore factor, the shocks and the unremitting terror in the second half. And so to the ending. It is perfect. It is brilliant, shocking and yet, heartbreakingly sad. The perfect (horrific) ending to the perfect horror novel. B...
Short Excerpt Teaser
Christine 1 First Views
"Oh my God!" my friend Arnie Cunningham cried out suddenly.
"What is it?" I asked. His eyes were bulging from behind his steel-rimmed glasses, he had plastered one hand over his face so that his palm was partially cupping his mouth, and his neck could have been on ball-bearings the way he was craning back over his shoulder.
"Stop the car, Dennis! Go back!"
"What are you-"
"Go back, I want to look at her again."
Suddenly I understood. "Oh, man, forget it," I said. "If you mean that . . . thing we just passed-"
"Go back!" He was almost screaming.
I went back, thinking that it was maybe one of Arnie's subtle little jokes. But it wasn't. He was gone, lock, stock, and barrel. Arnie had fallen in love.
She was a bad joke, and what Arnie saw in her that day I'll never know. The left side of her windshield was a snarled spiderweb of cracks. The right rear deck was bashed in, and an ugly nest of rust had grown in the paint-scraped valley. The back bumper was askew, the trunk-lid was ajar, and upholstery was bleeding out through several long tears in the seat covers, both front and back. It looked as if someone had worked on the upholstery with a knife. One tire was flat. The others were bald enough to show the canvas cording. Worst of all, there was a dark puddle of oil under the engine block.
Arnie had fallen in love with a 1958 Plymouth Fury, one of the long ones with the big fins. There was an old and sun-faded FOR SALE sign propped on the right side of the windshield-the side that was not cracked.
"Look at her lines, Dennis!" Arnie whispered. He was running around the car like a man possessed. His sweaty hair flew and flopped. He tried the back door on the passenger side, and it came open with a scream.
"Arnie, you're having me on, aren't you?" I said. "It's sunstroke, right? Tell me it's sunstroke. I'll take you home and put you under the frigging air conditioner and we'll forget all about this, okay?" But I said it without much hope. He knew how to joke, but there was no joke on his face then. Instead, there was a kind of goofy madness I didn't like much.
He didn't even bother to reply. A hot, stuffy billow of air, redolent of age, oil, and advanced decomposition, puffed out of the open door. Arnie didn't seem to notice that, either. He got in and sat down on the ripped and faded back seat. Once, twenty years before, it had been red. Now it was a faded wash pink.
I reached in and pulled up a little puff of upholstery, looked at it, and blew it away. "Looks like the Russian army marched over it on their way to Berlin," I said.
He finally noticed I was still there. "Yeah . . . yeah. But she could be fixed up. She could . . . she could be tough. A moving unit, Dennis. A beauty. A real-"
"Here! Here! What you two kids up to?"
It was an old guy who looked as if he was enjoying-more or less-his seventieth summer. Probably less. This particular dude struck me as the sort of man who enjoyed very little. His hair was long and scraggy, what little there was left of it. He had a good case of psoriasis going on the bald part of his skull.
He was wearing green old man's pants and lowtopped Keds. No shirt; instead there was something cinched around his waist that looked like a lady's corset. When he got closer I saw it was a back brace. From the look of it I would say, just offhand, that he had changed it last somewhere around the time Lyndon Johnson died.
"What you kids up to?" His voice was shrill and strident.
"Sir, is this your car?" Arnie asked him. Not much question that it was. The Plymouth was parked on the lawn of the postwar tract house from which the old man had issued. The lawn was horrible, but it looked positively great with that Plymouth in the foreground for perspective.
"What if it is?" The old guy demanded.
"I"-Arnie had to swallow-"I want to buy it."
The old dude's eyes gleamed. The angry look on his face was replaced by a furtive gleam in the eye and a certain hungry sneer around the lips. Then a large resplendent shit-eating grin appeared. That was the moment, I think-then, just at that moment-when I felt something cold and blue inside me. There was a moment-just then-when I felt like slugging Arnie and dragging him away. Something came into the old man's eyes. Not just the gleam; it was something behind the gleam.
"Well, you should have said so," the old guy told Arnie. He stuck out his hand and Arnie took it. "LeBay's the name. Roland D. LeBay. U.S. Army, retired."
"Arnie Cunningham."
The old sport pumped his hand and sort of waved at me. I was out of the play; he had his sucker. ...
"Oh my God!" my friend Arnie Cunningham cried out suddenly.
"What is it?" I asked. His eyes were bulging from behind his steel-rimmed glasses, he had plastered one hand over his face so that his palm was partially cupping his mouth, and his neck could have been on ball-bearings the way he was craning back over his shoulder.
"Stop the car, Dennis! Go back!"
"What are you-"
"Go back, I want to look at her again."
Suddenly I understood. "Oh, man, forget it," I said. "If you mean that . . . thing we just passed-"
"Go back!" He was almost screaming.
I went back, thinking that it was maybe one of Arnie's subtle little jokes. But it wasn't. He was gone, lock, stock, and barrel. Arnie had fallen in love.
She was a bad joke, and what Arnie saw in her that day I'll never know. The left side of her windshield was a snarled spiderweb of cracks. The right rear deck was bashed in, and an ugly nest of rust had grown in the paint-scraped valley. The back bumper was askew, the trunk-lid was ajar, and upholstery was bleeding out through several long tears in the seat covers, both front and back. It looked as if someone had worked on the upholstery with a knife. One tire was flat. The others were bald enough to show the canvas cording. Worst of all, there was a dark puddle of oil under the engine block.
Arnie had fallen in love with a 1958 Plymouth Fury, one of the long ones with the big fins. There was an old and sun-faded FOR SALE sign propped on the right side of the windshield-the side that was not cracked.
"Look at her lines, Dennis!" Arnie whispered. He was running around the car like a man possessed. His sweaty hair flew and flopped. He tried the back door on the passenger side, and it came open with a scream.
"Arnie, you're having me on, aren't you?" I said. "It's sunstroke, right? Tell me it's sunstroke. I'll take you home and put you under the frigging air conditioner and we'll forget all about this, okay?" But I said it without much hope. He knew how to joke, but there was no joke on his face then. Instead, there was a kind of goofy madness I didn't like much.
He didn't even bother to reply. A hot, stuffy billow of air, redolent of age, oil, and advanced decomposition, puffed out of the open door. Arnie didn't seem to notice that, either. He got in and sat down on the ripped and faded back seat. Once, twenty years before, it had been red. Now it was a faded wash pink.
I reached in and pulled up a little puff of upholstery, looked at it, and blew it away. "Looks like the Russian army marched over it on their way to Berlin," I said.
He finally noticed I was still there. "Yeah . . . yeah. But she could be fixed up. She could . . . she could be tough. A moving unit, Dennis. A beauty. A real-"
"Here! Here! What you two kids up to?"
It was an old guy who looked as if he was enjoying-more or less-his seventieth summer. Probably less. This particular dude struck me as the sort of man who enjoyed very little. His hair was long and scraggy, what little there was left of it. He had a good case of psoriasis going on the bald part of his skull.
He was wearing green old man's pants and lowtopped Keds. No shirt; instead there was something cinched around his waist that looked like a lady's corset. When he got closer I saw it was a back brace. From the look of it I would say, just offhand, that he had changed it last somewhere around the time Lyndon Johnson died.
"What you kids up to?" His voice was shrill and strident.
"Sir, is this your car?" Arnie asked him. Not much question that it was. The Plymouth was parked on the lawn of the postwar tract house from which the old man had issued. The lawn was horrible, but it looked positively great with that Plymouth in the foreground for perspective.
"What if it is?" The old guy demanded.
"I"-Arnie had to swallow-"I want to buy it."
The old dude's eyes gleamed. The angry look on his face was replaced by a furtive gleam in the eye and a certain hungry sneer around the lips. Then a large resplendent shit-eating grin appeared. That was the moment, I think-then, just at that moment-when I felt something cold and blue inside me. There was a moment-just then-when I felt like slugging Arnie and dragging him away. Something came into the old man's eyes. Not just the gleam; it was something behind the gleam.
"Well, you should have said so," the old guy told Arnie. He stuck out his hand and Arnie took it. "LeBay's the name. Roland D. LeBay. U.S. Army, retired."
"Arnie Cunningham."
The old sport pumped his hand and sort of waved at me. I was out of the play; he had his sucker. ...
