747 pages
Paperback
Fiction
1987
My adult reading started with Stephen King and The Tommyknockers. The first day I was able to check out non-children's books at my local library I got a brand new copy of The Tommyknockers. Four weeks later I had destroyed the book, because I had carried it around with me that entire time. I was hooked and went on to read many of King's other books. I was at the local Library Book Sale 25 years later and saw this sitting there. I decided it was time to see how it stood up after so many years.
Bobbi Anderson is an author of Western books and has settled for the last ten years outside the small town of Haven, Maine. She owns a large amount of land and likes to take her dog for walks out in the woods. On one of these walks she trips over an odd chunk of metal sticking out of the earth. She decides to dig it up and see what it is.
Jim Gardener and Bobbi have been friends for a long time. Gardener is a poet and about to make the last reading of his life. After that he plans to tie one on and take a long walk off a short pier. While in the midst of attempting suicide and gets a feeling that Bobbi is in trouble. Well, he owes it to her. He can always kill himself another time.
Bobbi has found a ship in the Earth. Soon she starts to come up with inventions for things she never even considered before. She hooks up her water heater to run on batteries, she creates a typewriter that can type when she is asleep, she starts modifying her tractor to dig better than it does and she starts growing vegetables to put the local fair winners to shame. Gardener shows up and seems immune to the effects of the ship in the earth. Maybe because of the plate in his head from that skiing accident so many years ago. Soon the rest of the town starts to get new ideas too. Hopefully, they can "become" before the rest of the state figures out what is happening in their little town.
For me The Tommyknockers got better with age. A good portion of the book is getting inside of the character and seeing people's inner monologue. I know while reading this in my early teens I had know idea what a lot of the subject matter was dealing with. Menstruation, cheating on your spouse, murder and technologies beyond normal human capabilities must have really confused my impressionable young mind.
I enjoy Stephen King's writing. It is easy to get through the story as it is tense and exciting. You always want to keep turning pages to see what happens next. It was nice "going back to my roots" and I plan on reading some other of King's books that I haven't enjoyed in 20 years.
3 Intellectual/Emotional - I would say this would have been a 2 if it wasn't for the boy that invents the disappearing machine. When he makes his brother disappear, but can't get him back, I was emotionally sucked into the brother's world.
3 Style/Readability - King's writing is always easy to get through and entertaining but it doesn't grab me for the beauty of the prose.
3 Long Term Impact - Stephen King is one of the most prolific and most read authors of the last 50 years. He is known as "The Master of Horror", but really that isn't what his best work is about. He got famous for horror early in his career and has had that label ever since. Most of his work in the last 30 years has more to do with supernatural happenings and less to do with horror. Tommyknockers lies somewhere in the middle of that. It is more science fiction, with some bad things that happen, than horror. It isn't one of his super famous books, but I am sure it has and will influence writers into the future.
