The Tommyknockers by Stephen King
New English Library (paperback), 1987
609 pages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tommyknockers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tommyknockers_(miniseries)
BLURB FROM THE COVER
Everything is familiar. But everything has changed.
Coming back to the little community is like walking into a nightmare for Jim Gardener, poet, drunk, potential suicide.
It all looks the same, the house, the furniture, Jim’s friend Bobbi, her beagle (though ageing), even the woods out at the back.
But it was in the woods that Bobbi stumbled over the odd, part-buried object and felt a peculiar tingle as she brushed the soft earth away.
Everything is familiar. But everything is about to change.
EXTRACT
For want of a nail the kingdom was lost – that’s how the catechism goes when you boil it down. In the end, you can boil everything down to something similar – or so Roberta Anderson thought much later on. It’s either all an accident … or all fate. Anderson literally stumbled over her destiny in the small town of Haven, Maine on June 21, 1988. That stumble was the root of the matter; all the rest was nothing but history.
REVIEW
I have mixed feelings about The Tommyknockers which I haven’t read for over ten years. There are some things about The Tommyknockers that I love. The novel is set in Haven, a small fiction town in Maine. Many of King’s best novels are set somewhere similar. I love the setting. The characters are all very well-written especially Bobby and Gard. Gard is drunken, useless arsehole but somehow likable and pitiable. This would have been written when King was drinking a lot and taking drugs and so I felt Gard was clearly based on King himself. I loved some of the things that happen in Haven because Bobbi starts to dig up the spaceship. I loved everyone making crazy things with batteries and reading each other’s mind. I loved the scene near the start when Bobby takes her dog Peter to the vet and the other animals go nuts. I loved it when David Brown really vanished during his brother’s magic act. I loved what happened to Ruth everyone favorite sheriff and the weird stuff with her dolls. I loved how outsiders felt dizzy and sick and experienced severe nosebleeds in or around the town and how towards the end people could not get in or out at all. However, the hardcore sci-fi stuff including the physical changes the Haven residents went through while becoming aliens left me cold at times. I don’t think these elements worked as well as some other parts of The Tommyknockers. Science fiction is my least favorite genre and I prefer it on screen than in a written form. The TV mini-series is great though. The Tommyknockers is a bit of a mixed bag for me with elements that work really well and some that just did nothing for me.
RATING
