The Tommyknockers (1987) by Stephen King

The Tommyknockers (1987) by Stephen King: 

"The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act." - Stephen King, the "act" being his addiction problems.

Who am I to argue with Stephen King on the topic of Stephen King?

The Tommyknockers is the worst thing -- novel, story, screenplay, comic book, greeting card, you name it -- the prolific King has ever written. I don't think it's even that close between The Tommyknockers and the second-worst thing. 

King wrote The Tommyknockers at pretty much Peak Addiction, and it is interesting from an autobiographical perspective as page after page dwells on the alcohol addiction of protagonist James Eric 'Gard' Gardener. 

And the townsfolk of fictional, tiny Haven, Maine (near demon-haunted Derry in Stephen King's Maine) also succumb to addiction of a type: well, an infection, anyway, from a long-buried spaceship that ends up getting unburied when Gard's former lover, Western writer Bobbi Anderson, stubs her toe on a projecting part of a giant spaceship in the woods behind her rural home.

Once exposed to air, the spaceship infects people with some sort of airborne virus or nanotechnology. The virus makes people progressively less human as it also turns them into assholes who like building high-tech gadgets. Soon, Haven is hard at work, working towards The Becoming, when they'll finish excavating the spaceship (it's saucer-shaped, natch) and go do bad things somewhere on Earth or elsewhere.

All this seems to have been predicted by a Maine folk rhyme about 'the Tommyknockers' that begins 'Late last night and the night before/ Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.' Even buried for millennia, the spaceship has exerted some malign influence on people living near it. It reminds me of King's previous novel, It, in which we see It crash into the primordial forest that would one day become Derry. Derry is located about 30 miles from Haven. Is there some sort of magnet that causes weird stuff to crash in this area of Maine? Is Amelia Earhart's plane out there too?

There's probably an OK but derivative short science-fiction novel buried in the bloat of The Tommyknockers. The novel's most obvious antecedent is Quatermass and the Pit/ Five Million Years to Earth, in which an alien spaceship is unearthed during a London subway dig and proceeds to alter the humanity around it as it draws power from its environment. The Tommyknockers is the rural version of that, and this time the Martians aren't Nazis: they're gadgeteers. They're King's heavy-handed, repeatedly spelled-out metaphor for the human beings who make atomic bombs, nuclear power plants, intelligence agencies, and every other ill on the Earth caused by technology.

King plays bait-and-switch with his protagonists. Bobbi Anderson takes point, but once the alien infection takes hold, the narrative switches to Gardener. And once Gardener gets really drunk in the middle of the book, the novel jumps around among various townsfolk and outsiders until Gardener starts to sober up around page 350 or so. The structure plays Hell with readerly sympathy, a problem compounded by...

The Tommyknockers give us King's least sympathetic, most caricatured set of characters in all of his writing. It's far and away King's sourest book. Part of the problem seems to come from King's decision to only supply characterization for most of the townsfolk after they're already turning into gadget-building assholes. Part of the problem comes from the fact that King falls back on some of his recurring stereotypes for characters, even when they should be at least nominally sympathetic. 

To cite one, we get a nebbishy man who lives at home with his mother who browbeats him. We also get a crusty senior citizen who knows where all the bodies in Haven are buried, not one but two writers as co-protagonists (and Gard is alcoholic -- did I mention that?), a super-smart kid who's ostracized by his peers but beloved by his younger brother, and a lot of small-minded small-town types. Once most of those stereotypes get infested, they're really annoying.

Even the people outside Derry are assholes. Gard has to deal with a mean woman who runs the travelling poetry show that pays his salary. You can tell she's mean because she's an upper-class twit with a pinched face and no breasts. Bobbi has been repeatedly terrorized throughout her life by an insanely domineering, evil sister, and you can be sure that evil sister will show up in Haven before the end of the novel. The bad characters in The Tommyknockers have no redeeming qualities. But we will spend a lot of time with them. Even doomed minor characters from outside Haven are assholes who sort of deserve to die. And die they will!

And we will know that many of them will die before they die for one of two reasons. Maybe King will employ probably his least endearing, corpus-wide trope -- the narrative voice telling us that the character we're reading about is going to die before the end of the novel. Or maybe King will indulge in the frustrating, suspense-cancelling structural tic he developed for The Tommyknockers, in which the novel describes events building to something catastrophic before jumping backwards in time to show us the events building to that same something catastrophic from a different narrative POV. This happens again and again, and indeed accelerates in the last 50 pages or so, as we see the same thing happen over and over again from a seemingly endless series of POVs. So long, suspense!

Two major characters have steel plates in their heads. And this is a major plot point. Two characters! What are the odds! King also brings back the evil Coke machine from Maximum Overdrive. I shit you not. I wish he'd also brought back Captain Trips from The Stand so that everyone in this fucking novel could die by page 100.

At several points, either King or his characters basically throw up their hands and start using other people's works to explain things. Thus, Peter Straub's Floating Dragon gets a shout-out from Bobbi and Gard. So, too, Poul Anderson's Brain Wave (wrongly in terms of Brain Wave's plot), the work of Robert Heinlein (dismissively and not remotely accurately in the assessment, BTW), and some of King's own work. It's Pennywise cameos for no real reason other than that a couple of characters drive through Derry. 

The Heinlein moment is especially weird. Having learned that the aliens (or 'Tommyknockers' if you prefer) are neither benign nor particularly intelligent, Gard thinks "So much for Robert Heinlein." As Heinlein wasn't known for writing a lot about benign, technologically advanced aliens, this statement makes little sense. 

It makes even less sense when one knows that one of Heinlein's most famous novels of the 1950's was The Puppet Masters, in which malign parasitic aliens invade Earth and take possession of human beings to advance their goals. They even stick people in fluid-filled tubes, as do King's Tommyknocker-possessed humans. 

And King even repeats a much different Heinlein trope, one seen in many American science-fiction works: humanity has something so special about it that unlike other races, it offers resistance to this alien threat. King has met the enemy, and King is Heinlein.

Much, much odder is a section in which King's narrative voice sings the praises of Canadian writer Robertson Davies and, specifically, Davies' Deptford Trilogy and, most specifically, those portions of the Deptford Trilogy dealing with the young Dunstable Ramsey's attempts to master magic tricks in the company of the younger Paul Dempster, who really will master magic and go on to become professional magician Magnus Eisengrim. So King really likes Robertson Davies. Not one of the characters -- King's narrative voice. OK. This novel is brought to you by the Deptford Trilogy. I'm surprised the narrative voice doesn't warn us that Robertson Davies is going to die.

I could go on, but I'm sort of exhausted. The novel ends in part with an astronomical statement that makes absolutely no sense. That pretty much sums it up. Populated with characters unpleasant or boring or both, derivative or dismissive of far superior works, The Tommyknockers is indeed, in King's own words, "awful." To flip the punchline of an old joke... and such large portions! Not recommended.