The Tommyknockers
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The Tommyknockers is an 1987 horror novel by Stephen King. While maintaining a horror style, the novel is more of an excursion into the realm of science fiction for King, as the residents of the Maine town of Haven gradually fall under the influence of a mysterious object buried in the woods.
In his autobiography, On Writing, King attributes the basic premise to the short story "The Colour out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft. It also draws fairly obvious parallels with the classic 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. King wrote the book during a period of acknowledged substance abuse, and has written that he realized later on that the novel was a metaphor for that addiction.
A TV miniseries based on the novel was shown in 1993.
The mysterious object turns out to be a long-buried alien spacecraft stumbled upon by Bobbi Anderson, a writer of Wild West-based fiction. Once exposed, the spacecraft begins releasing an invisible, odorless gas into the atmosphere which gradually transforms people into beings similar to the aliens who rode in the spacecraft. It also provides them with a short-sighted form of genius which makes them very inventive, but does not provide any philosophical or ethical insight, instead provoking psychotic violence (on the part of people like 'Becka Paulsen, who kills her adulterous husband by fatally rewiring the TV, killing herself in the process) and the disappearance of a young boy (Davy Brown, whose older brother Hilly accidentally makes him disappear with a customised magic act).
The book's central protagonist, a poet and friend of Bobbi Anderson's named Jim Gardener, is a man with left-leaning, liberal sensibilities who is apparently immune to the ship's effects because of a steel plate in his head. Unfortunately, Gardener is also addicted to alcohol. His relationship with Bobbi deteriorates as the novel progresses. She is almost totally overcome by the euphoria of "becoming" one with the spacecraft, but Gardener increasingly sees her health worsen and her sanity disappear. The novel is filled with metaphors for the stranglehold of substance abuse, which King himself was experiencing at the time, as well as for the dangers of nuclear power and radioactive fallout (as evidenced by the physical transformations of the townspeople, which resemble the effects of radiation exposure), of unchecked technological advancement, and of the corrupting influence of power. Government agencies are uniformly portrayed as corrupt and totalitarian throughout the book, and Bobbi and Gard themselves are led into thinking that they can use the ship's "power" as a weapon to overthrow such authority figures.
Seeing the transformation of the townspeople worsen, as the local police constable, a journalist, and an eccentric old man are killed or worse when they pry too deeply into the strange events, Gardener eventually manipulates Bobbi into allowing him into the ship, activates it and launches it into space, resulting in the deaths of most of the changed townspeople (and himself) but preventing the possibly disastrous consequences of the ship's influence being allowed to spread to the outside world.
The book takes its title from an old children's rhyme:
- "Late last night and the night before,
- Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.
- I want to go out, don't know if I can,
- 'Cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man!"
- ISBN 0606041133 (prebound, 1987)
- ISBN 0451156609 (mass market paperback, 1988)
- ISBN 8401499984 (hardcover, 1992)
- ISBN 8401474655 (hardcover, 1999)
- ISBN 0399136991 (hardcover)
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All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.