The Tommyknockers By Stephen King

 

The Tommyknockers

By Stephen King

Bobbi Anderson stumbles across a UFO buried in the woods attached to the house she inherited and she decides to dig it out. At first she doesn't know what it is, but slowly she comes to realize what she's unearthing. In the process she is suffering the consequences of the ship's power, becoming emaciated, losing her teeth, hair, and a lot of blood. As the ship is unearthed the effects start to travel across the town of Haven, Maine where she lives, causing the same effects to start to happen to its residents to various degrees. The townspeople become extremely mechanically creative and start to acquire a hive-mind. The ship on Bobbi's property becomes the most important thing to them, and they work to protect it from the prying eyes of outsiders.

Some are not affected, though, namely anyone with metal in their heads. One such person is Bobbi's friend and lover James Gardener, a poet and hapless drunk who get himself into lots of scrapes and who even killed his wife with a gun blast to the head. He makes his way to Haven to visit Bobbi under a premonition that she is in trouble. When he sees the state of her, he is horrified. Then she shows him the ship and enlists his help in unearthing it. She keeps him drunk and docile, and he does this knowing full well what it is doing to Bobbi. Eventually the story takes the sinister turn you know is coming and Gard is up against the town.

This book gets a bad rap for being self-indulgent, bloated, and all over the place. I can see that. There are many point of view shifts and the book is much longer than it needs to be to tell the story. Gard is supposed to be the hero, but his point of view doesn't even take up half of the book. King wrote The Tommyknockers at the height of his cocaine and alcohol addiction. He admits the book lacked editing and he was given free reign to write whatever he wanted without it. I think that knowledge has haunted his career, since many people think King's owrk isn't edited, even to this day, which isn't true.

However, I have to say that I liked it. I liked it far more than I expected to.

This is a story full on about addiction: The characters are obsessed with the ship. It takes over their lives, consumes them with its power. They black out and have bursts of creativity, they lie and act like they are in control when clearly they are being controlled by the thing. This story can also be about the corporate takeover of America, with citizens becoming enslaved by the corporate entity, wasting away working toward the goals of that entity. Losing themselves and their culture, their uniqueness.

Mentions from King's other works and pop culture:

1. Mention of The Shop from Firestarter.

2. The town of Haven is located near King's fictional town of Derry, which features.

3. Mention of John Smith and Stillson from The Dead Zone, set in Derry.

4. The clown from IT makes an appearance, along with chuckles form the drains in Derry.

5. Mention of Jack Nicholson in The Shining film.

6. King even references himself as the writer up in Bangor who makes up monsters and uses dirty words.

7. Supposed mention of Cujo, but I must have missed that, along with a mention of someone from The Talisman, which I haven't read (co-written with Peter Straub).

All in all, I liked the story. It was too long and was derivative, but I liked the characters and it had a good amount of tension and suspense. the horror was good if that's what you like about King's work. Most of all I liked the themes. I give The Tommyknockers 3.5 stars.