Cruising for a Bruising

Stephen King's characters live in places like Libertyville, Penn., and travel to Pittsburgh for a special trip. They drink Iron City beer, eat Campbell's Chunky Beef Soup and spread their sandwiches on Wonder Bread. They belong to Weight Watchers and get their cars Midasized; their kids listen to Kiss and Andy Gibb, and their fathers work for H&R Block. And when they want to read a novel, no doubt they reach for a Stephen King.

King is the novelist of middle America. Anyone who sells as many books as he does and writes about the eerie topics he chooses--vampires, ghosts, mad dogs--is usually tossed off by the critics as a purveyor of supermarket literature. But King pays no attention to those effete reviewers concerned with literary value; he knows that everyone goes to the supermarket.

King throws brand names around as liberally as if he were collecting commissions from companies. But in fact his incessant litany of commercials stems from the same impulse that dares Stephen Spielberg to fill his movies with Reese's Pieces and beer jingles. The device embeds the book or the movie firmly into the consciousness of its audience; the labels make everything familiar, and we placidly swallow it as the real thing.

In Christine, his latest novel. King chooses to make horrible the centerpiece of American life, the automobile. Arnie Cunningham, the archetypal nerd, sees a rusted-out '58 Plymouth Fury sitting on the street one day and falls in love. He's handy with tools and decides to fix it up. Naturally, he gets skinned on the deal by the crazy old misanthrope who sells him the car, but he carts the wreck off, finds a garage where he can keep it, since his parents refuse to let him park it in front of their house, and begins to work.

And all of a sudden, Arnie's luck changes. The beautiful new girl in school falls in love with him. His face starts clearing up. He stands up to the school bully. And his car is shaping up so fast, it's almost as if it's repairing itself.

Hint, hint, King's style is damn the subtleties, full speed ahead. You know from the first that the car is Evil. And if you don't figure it out, King helps you out with a little nudge, like when Arnie's best friend Dennis muses:

I was seventeen years old, bound for college in another year, and I didn't believe in such things as curses... I would not have granted you the power of the past to reach out horrid dead hands toward the living

But I'm a little older now.

So when Arnie starts using slang that the crazy who