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 here 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
Just Wait! I read that more than 10 years ago. But then, that’s the first thing which goes through your mind as you skip through the synopsis of “From a Buick 8”. Christine was real scary. A true Stephen King classic. Sadly the same cannot be said of Buick 8. Well, there’s nothing in it.
The story is about a Buick, which comes into the possession of “Troop D” - a police outfit in a tiny Pennsylvanian town – rather strange that King has got his story outside of Maine. The book is around 480 odd pages and starts off as a narrative by Sandy – one of the troopers. Ned Wilcox, son of Curtis Wilcox, a trooper who’s killed in a hit and run accident on the highway(If you read what happened to Stephen King a few years ago, you’ll find the details of the accident pretty familiar), comes into Troop D and starts taking interest in their activities. Sandy’s narration takes you through the initial moments and gives you an insight into the life of troopers – Shirley Pasternak, Huddie Royer, Eddie Jacobius and Arkie Arkanian. One fine day, Ned happens to peep into Shed B, which houses the Buick. Curiosity killed the cat, and satisfaction brought him back. And so starts the story of a car – and the ordeal of the reader.
From then on, it’s a confusion out there. Why the hell does King keep changing the narrator every now and then? Each chapter starts with a different speaker. Makes you wonder - what the heck’s happening?
OK! OK! I’ll return to the story(The what? There ain’t no such thing as a story here). The Buick arrived in town sometime in the late seventies(79 I think) – at the Jenny station run by Bradley Roach. The owner disappears - we never know where. Roach takes an instant dislike to the thing, and calls on Troop D. Troop D is also suspicious about the thing (Buick never made such a model, according to some one). They call in one of their chums from somewhere(the hell I’ll remember that! I wanna forget everything about this book!), who inspect the car, find everything wrong with it, and declare that they don’t want anything to do with it in the future. Troop D takes charge, and tows it away to the barracks – to Shed B. And then, the Buick puts its act together.
First of all, Trooper Ennis Rafferty disappears. No one knows where. But everyone is sure the Buick’s involved. Then the Buick starts its pyrotechnics. It puts up spectacular light shows once in a while – the whole of the shed is overflowing with bring purple light emanating from inside the Buick - and gives birth(yup!!) to things – strange bats, strange birds, strange beetles, and even a humanoid, who’s beaten to death by the troop.
And then what happens?
Nothing.
The paragraph written above is stretched to 400 pages in the book. And then the climax, or what King might claim to be a climax starts(Someone should tell him that instead of having to read through 450-odd pages to reach here, people might actually prefer to quit reading the book). Nothing much here also. Ned tries to destroy the Buick, and doesn’t succeed. The Buick meanwhile puts up one of its light shows just for the occasion and tries to pull Sandy and Ned into its world – Sandy manages to get a glimpse of it – again, without success. At the end of the book, the Buick’s still there. But, there is a crack in the windscreen.
King seems to be going from bad to worse. Well, Dreamcatcher may be an exception, and it gave me a lot of hope. But what compared to books like It, Salem’s Lot and Pet Semetary, the other books he has written in the recent past (Bag of Bones, The girl who loved Tom Gordon etc.) definitely let the reader down.
From a Buick 8 is definitely skippable.
