Christine

Scene: a middle-class suburb of Pittsburgh.

Time: 1978.

Cast of characters: Arnie Cunningham, a bookish and bullied high school senior; Dennis Guilder, his friend and sometimes protector; Leigh Cabot, the new girl in school, won by Arnie... but wanted by Dennis as well.

Just another lovers' triangle, you say? Not quite. There's a fourth here, the second lady, the dark lady. "Cars are girls," Leigh Cabot says, and the dark force in Stephen King's new novel is a 1958 Plymouth named Christine.

She is no ordinary car, this white-over-red two-toned survivor of a time when high-test gasoline was priced at a quarter a gallon and speedometers were calibrated all the way up to a hundred and twenty miles an hour... a time when rock and roll in all its first crude power ruled America... a time when speed was king.

Arnie Cunningham is determined to have Christine at any price, and little by little, Dennis and Leigh begin to suspect that the price of his growing obsession may be terrifyingly high, its result blackly evil. as Arnie sets feverishly to work on the seemingly hopeless job of resorting Christine, Christine begins to develop a terrible life of her own. Or is that only imagination? Dennis continues to hope so... and then people begin to die on Libertyville's dark suburban streets and roads... and the time comes when Dennis can no longer deny the horrifying truth: Christine is alive.

In Christine, Stephen King has returned to the full-fledged novel of supernatural horror for the first time since The Shining. It will keep readers up late... and will have them looking both ways as they cross the street after dark.