Christine by Stephen King

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 was 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 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”

For the Reading Challenge(s):
The Stephen King Constant Reader Challenge

The Reason

For the The Stephen King Constant Reader Challenge and my online bookclub was having a Stephen King buddy read extravaganza during Halloween season!

The Quotes

“Has it ever occurred to you,” he said abruptly, “that parents are nothing but overgrown kids until their children drag them into adulthood? Usually kicking and screaming?”

“If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.”

“I once heard about some millionaire who had a stolen Rembrandt in his basement where no one but him could see it. I could understand that guy. I don’t mean that Arnie was a Rembrandt, or even a world-class wit, but I could understand the attraction of knowing about something good … something that was good but still a secret.”

“I don’t believe in curses, you know. Nor in ghosts or anything precisely supernatural. But I do believe that emotions and events have a certain…lingering resonance.”

The Narrator(s)

Holter Graham. I loved it!

My Thoughts

I watched the movie for the first time earlier this year and I thought I really should read the book too, because it’s the one Stephen King book that my husband read that I hadn’t yet, and he’d been singing its praises. I’m glad I finally did because I really liked the story and yes, it’s definitely much better than the movie! There was a lot of nuance with the characters and their relationships, and their backstories too, that I wasn’t expecting and didn’t get with the movie. The relationships between Arnie’s parents and himself was especially interesting, and I love how King really gets in there with the complexity of parent-child relationships.

I had put off reading this book because I wasn’t particularly interested in cars and there were so many other King books I wanted to read first, but now that I’ve read it I feel like a fool for putting it off so long. I think this may be one of my top Stephen King books now!

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

Duma Key by Stephen King

NO MORE THAN A DARK PENCIL LINE ON A BLANK PAGE. A HORIZON LINE, MAYBE, BUT ALSO A SLOT FOR BLACKNESS TO POUR THROUGH . . .

A terrible construction site accident takes Edgar Freemantle’s right arm and scrambles his memory and his mind, leaving him with little but rage as he begins the ordeal of rehabilitation. A marriage that produced two lovely daughters suddenly ends, and Edgar begins to wish he hadn’t survived the injuries that could have killed him. He wants out. His psychologist, Dr. Kamen, suggests a “geographic cure,” a new life distant from the Twin Cities and the building business Edgar grew from scratch. And Kamen suggests something else.

“Edgar does anything make you happy?”

“I used to sketch.”

“Take it up again. You need hedges . . .

hedges against the night.”

Edgar leaves Minnesota for a rented house on Duma Key, a stunningly beautiful, eerily undeveloped splinter of the Florida coast. The sun setting into the Gulf of Mexico and the tidal rattling of shells on the beach call out to him, and Edgar draws. A visit from Ilse, the daughter he dotes on, starts his movement out of solitude. He meets a kindred spirit in Wireman, a man reluctant to reveal his own wounds, and then Elizabeth Eastlake, a sick old woman whose roots are tangled deep in Duma Key. Now Edgar paints, sometimes feverishly, his exploding talent both a wonder and a weapon. Many of his paintings have a power that cannot be controlled. When Elizabeth’s past unfolds and the ghosts of her childhood begin to appear, the damage of which they are capable is truly devastating.

The tenacity of love, the perils of creativity, the mysteries of memory and the nature of the supernatural–Stephen King gives us a novel as fascinating as it is gripping and terrifying.

For the Reading Challenge(s):
The Stephen King Constant Reader Challenge

The Reason

For the The Stephen King Constant Reader Challenge and my online bookclub was having a Stephen King buddy read extravaganza during Halloween season!

The Quotes

“If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say ‘I can do this’ even when you know you can’t.”

“A person’s memory is everything, really. Memory is identity. It’s you.”

“The only religions I don’t like are the ones that insist their God is bigger than your God.”

“Stay hungry. It worked for Michelangelo, it worked for Picasso, and it works for a hundred thousand artists who do it not for love (although that might play a part) but in order to put food on the table. If you want to translate the world, you need to use your appetites. Does this surprise you? It shouldn’t. There’s no creation without talent, I give you that, but talent is cheap. Talent goes begging. Hunger is the piston of art.”

The Narrator(s)

John Slattery. I was completely immersed and I enjoyed it very much!

My Thoughts

This is also a reread. I don’t remember anything about it except that I loved it, because although I rated it 5 stars when I first read it, I didn’t leave a review. Having read it again this time, I can totally see why I loved it the first time, and why I’m quite sure I’ll still love it when I read it again in the future.

It is such an all encompassing book for me; it evokes so many emotions, makes me feel so much, all the ups and downs. It grabbed my attention from the beginning, even though it started slow and almost felt like an easy vacation read, and then it got really intense and I couldn’t put it down. I fell in love with all the characters, but that’s no surprise because King’s characters are always so well-written.

I loved Edgar’s and Wireman’s bromance, the way they trusted each other and related to each other even from the beginning. I love the way we see Edgar’s progress from the start of the story; his struggles, his recovery, his thought processes… I love how I fell for Ilse and other people in Edgar’s life, simply through the way Edgar thinks about them. How can I not love King’s books when he gives me everything? The story is always exciting, the characters are always interesting, and all the different types of emotions are always spilling out of me! Ugh, so good!

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

Carrie by Stephen King

Carrie may be picked on by her classmates but she has a gift. She can move things with her mind. Doors lock. Candles fall. This is her power and her problem.

To be invited to Prom Night by Tommy Ross is a dream come true for Carrie — the first step towards social acceptance by her high school colleagues. Until an unexpected cruelty turns her gift into a weapon of terror and destruction that no one will ever forget.

For the Reading Challenge(s):
The Stephen King Constant Reader Challenge

The Reason

For the The Stephen King Constant Reader Challenge and my online bookclub was having a Stephen King buddy read extravaganza during Halloween season!

The Quotes

“People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.”

“High school isn’t a very important place. When you’re going you think it’s a big deal, but when it’s over nobody really thinks it was great unless they’re beered up.”

“Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not on the subconscious level where savage things grow.”

“This is the girl they keep calling a monster. I want you to keep that firmly in mind. The girl who could be satisfied with a hamburger and a dime root beer after her only school dance so her momma wouldn’t be worried . . .”

The Narrator(s)

Sissy Spacek, and Margaret Atwood. I can’t think of better narrators for this book. Love them!

My Thoughts

This is a reread, and although it isn’t one of my favorite Stephen King books, I find that I like it more this time around and appreciate it for the story it is. Carrie is such a fascinating character; she’s not really the bad guy here and yet, she caused hundreds of deaths and a whole town’s destruction. Stephen King has always been the master of writing about regular people who are monsters, and it’s interesting when you realize he’s been doing this since the beginning.

Carrie isn’t the monster here, she’s just a scared little girl pushed to the brink of what she could handle emotionally. Her mother, her school bullies, they are the true monsters. I also read this right after reading Frankenstein and I thought it was interesting with the whole “who’s the real monster” theme. There are some real parallels here that I’m not sure I would’ve realized if I hadn’t read them back to back, especially with some of what I said in my Frankenstein review about bad parenting. I also mentioned about how it was great that Frankenstein was focused more on the father as the parent, while here, we see the mother being the focus of bad parenting.

Maybe I liked this book more this time around precisely because I read Frankenstein right before, but honestly, I find myself noticing a lot more this time too about the rest of the characters in the story, the way they behave, their thoughts processes, and I’m amazed once again by Stephen King’s character study. This is why I love his books.

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?