31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 8 (The Tommyknockers)

This is one hella eerie cover.

So we're back on that Stephen King train again. This will be a fun one. I knew, last year, that I had to cover It given my own personal experience with that work. I also knew that I'd have to cover something else by the man this time around. He's written an absolute shitload of things so I'm spoiled for choice... but there are big beloved ones. I could have gone with The Shining, or The Stand, or The Dark Tower, or anything else Big And Important. I could have gone with a second-tier classic like Firestarter or The Dead Zone. No. No, I think on some level, it could only be The Tommyknockers. Which is at once a somewhat-maligned entry of his (even by the man himself) and a compelling personal favorite. King may have executed things a bit long-winded and heavy-handed, but what he's executed here is some sort of compelling social commentary... albeit dressed up in a story about alien ghosts. It's no secret that Stephen King fired off a massive streak of hit novels in the 70's and 80's. It's also no secret that Stephen King had substance abuse problems. The two are intertwined in a deadly dance. The latter fueled the white-hot writing streak which led to the former. He's confessed to literally not being able to remember writing Cujo due to all the booze and drugs and other crap he was putting into his body. By the late 80's there was intervention from his family, and he finally did become clean. The Tommyknockers, written between 1982 and 1987, is in many respects a book about this... but dressed up in spooky metaphor.

The central conceit, such as it is, is the uncovering of a crashed alien ship in the forest near Haven, Maine. King loves the hell out of Maine and writer protagonists, and The Tommyknockers is no exception in this regard. Some part of the ship oxidizes as it's uncovered, letting out some sort of cosmic radiation in the air. Said stuff affects the people of Haven, giving them sudden bursts of inspiration to create wild and wonderful inventions fueled by a shitload of batteries. It's a perfect system! Amazing bouts of creativity and inventiveness the likes of which you've never seen! What's the catch? Oh, not much. Just a slow merging into a hivemind as you lose your individuality, your teeth, and eventually begin to mutate into some sort of alien/human hybrid. You "become" something else entirely, a monster with transparant skin that is no longer strictly human. Again, it can be seen as a bit on the nose, but I find it an incredibly frank metaphor for what King was going through with his drug issues. The female lead who first discovers the ship in the ground is driven by mad obsession to uncover the thing... and she even invents a special typewriter which reads her thoughts and lets her write her books while asleep. The first bursts of creativity and that initial high from the cosmic radiation lead to the town literally depending on it to survive. After a certain point they literally cannot breathe outside air without becoming sick. Withdrawal's a bitch. All of this is tied together with another on-the-nose theme, that of nuclear power being a Very Bad Thing. The 80's were a time when the Doomsday Clock was close to midnight, after all, and the alien power with its sometimes dangerous and deadly weapons would be one hell of an accelerant. Telepathic typewriters are one thing, but the Havenites also create rayguns, disintegrators, and a sentient killer Coke machine. (Yes. This happens.) Much like nuclear energy, they really have no idea what they're unleashing and the only limiting factor is batteries. One wonders what they would have done had they gone any further than the book's plot allowed them to.


It's not perfect, and it's not hard to see where it stumbles. Many accuse it of being overwritten and overly long, and I suppose it could have been more tightly paced; at just under 750 pages in paperback it's a bit of a brick. I'm no professional editor, though, and I have no idea what you could cut to make it flow faster. The professional editors in 1987 must have thought it was fine... but then again, said professionals let THAT scene in It happen. So, who knows? It's also full of lots of muddled references to other Stephen King books. For the sake of keeping this a spooky book review, I won't go in depth on how I feel about that shit, but here it feels off-putting. Sure, the references to stuff like The Shop from Firestarter make sense because a UFO would be black-ops government shit... but Dead Zone references? It references? Someone literally sees the clown in a sewer in Derry, three years after he's supposed to have been killed off for good? Then reality gets weird. There's a line about Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Hell. there's even an offhand line about "that fellow up Bangor who writes books with monsters and dirty words". Stephen King himself is intruding upon the narrative, existing in his own world of nightmare monster clowns and cosmic radiation that turns you into a hivemind alien. This is indulgence, yes, but a more fun reading would be something about the drugs making everything blur together in one big mess of creativity. In the end, that's where The Tommyknockers gets me. I'm a creative type as well, and I love this whole writing stuff. Here's a book by one of the guys who inspired me to get at it myself, and once you get past all the alien bullshit and nuclear power fear, what you have is a frank and personal statement about the dark side of creativity by a man hopelessly addicted to getting as high as humanly possible before writing about a woman with tentacles coming out from between her legs. (Yes, this happens too.) In that light, I find this book utterly fascinating even if its creator doesn't. It may not be perfect, but it's peak Stephen King for me.