King's Highway pt. 53: The Tommyknockers

(The below was written in December 2012. I revisited both novel and mini-series for the King's Highway Bridges and Infrastructure Renewal Project Summer 2016, and you can read that here. Carry on, friends and neighbors.)

I tried to read this book when it first came out and never made it all the way through. This time around, though, I absolutely loved it. I'll use pictures from the mini-series throughout this blog, but let me state up-front, while it (the mini-series) was better than I remembered, it is an inadequate representation of this book, which I feel is arguably among King's best. But! Where it does follow the book, it does so quite faithfully, and well:

(I hope this is a nod to Tourist Trap, but who knows.)

Here's King describing both the basic plot and his state-of-mind-while-writing-it from On Writing:

"In the spring and summer of 1986 I wrote The Tommyknockers, often working until midnight with my heart running at a hundred and thirty beats a minute and cotton swabs stuck up my nose to stem the coke-induced bleeding.

"(It) is a forties-style science fiction tale in which the writer-heroine (Bobbi, along with her poet-friend Gardener, aka "Gard") discovers an alien spacecraft buried in the ground. The crew is still on board, not dead but only hibernating. These alien creatures got into your head and just started... well, tommyknocking around in there. 

"What you got was energy and a kind of superficial intelligence (Bobbi creates a telepathic typewriter and an atomic hot-water heater, among other things). 

"What you gave up in exchange was your soul. 

It was the best metaphor for drugs and alcohol my tired, overstressed mind could come up with."

In addition to being perhaps-the-80s-best-metaphor for cocaine-addiction, it's a) fantastic sci-fi, though maybe everyone's cup of tea, and not really emblematic of the 1940s-style sci-fi King says it is. It struck me more as an 80s-specific take on the radioactive-panic movies of the 1950s, more than anything, b) almost an ideographic history of late twentieth-century background gadgetry, from the batteries whose "molecular decomposition technology" make an ongoing appearance, to toy-ray-guns, pocket calculators, to Simon:

Future generations need look no further for a comprehensive overview of the sort of "tech" that collected in the corners of countless American households in the pre-internet age. I think both Tommyknockers (and aspects of the Dark Tower books) really capture what it felt like to grow up (for me, as a child; for King, as a parent) with this stuff permeating our lives. (Not to mention, Chernobyl/ nuclear power humming away in the background) and c) a novel so well-constructed it absolutely boggles the mind that it was put together under the circumstances King describes. While substance-abuse is not an altogether-uncommon bedfellow for sharp prose, I'm just saying: this book hits on all cylinders: the language, the scope, the characters, and the 'engineering.' Tommyknockers shares a similar structure with It, in some ways, including lengthy sections about the town's past, a massive cast of characters, and a town slowly swallowed up by the monster(s) who live beneath it. 

Also, like It, it ends with the town's destruction.

Unlike Derry, though, Haven never seems to have "bounced back." I'd been under the mistaken impression that the SyFy show Haven took place in Haven ME, and as I was reading this, I kept wondering how the hell the show addressed the events of the novel. My blogger-BFF (just kidding, BB!) set me straight:

"Haven the television series makes no mention of the Haven, Maine that is in The Tommyknockers, nor does it make any mention of the events of that novel (makes sense, given that they'd have to have the rights to that novel to deal with it any way other than giving it a shout-out); and, as far as I can recollect, King himself has never returned to Haven in any way.

It's not the same town.  Literally.  It's like how there's a Paris, France and a Paris, Texas, and this is the one in Texas, except the show never even acknowledges that there's one in France.

That's part of what's so grating -- hemorrhoidal, even -- about that show.  It's this supposed Stephen King story, yet the producers were not even knowledgeable enough to know that King's fiction already had a Haven, Maine ... which is NOT on the coast.

I watched the video of a con panel with the producers, and that fact got mentioned very obliquely; reading between the lines a bit was necessary, but it seemed pretty obvious that the producers were made aware of The Tommyknockers and just shrugged it off.

The more I think about it, it's a really terrible show."

I've only seen bits and pieces of it, but I have to agree, particularly in light of all the above. And what a waste! The town of Haven - again, like Derry - is fleshed out so well, here; it's a damn shame it seems to be confined exclusively to this novel.

Anyway, back to the book. 

(Actually, one more digression. Hit play on this, if you would. The band - if you can call a bunch of tech-nerds with samplers and laptops a "band" - is The Orb. Like the Magic Theater in Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, they are probably "For Madmen Only." But, back in the "heady" days of 1993 and 1994, I was obsessed with this album (Pomme Fritz) and played it an awful lot. Although my only experience with The Tommyknockers at that time was from half-reading it at the tail-end of the 80s, this song always struck me as the perfect accompaniment for Bobbi's finding the UFO in the woods. It captures the mysterious, alien quality of the aliens of the novel/ the townsfolk's possession, if you ask me. If I was making a Tommyknockers movie, I'd have this playing pretty much throughout.)

As with Misery, evidence of what King mentions in On Writing (the mental exhaustion of minds-in-(ahem)-maximum-overdrive, the physical-deterioration of the characters (something that would make a movie adaptation of this a little disgusting, with all the bloody puking and teeth falling out and all; though Star Trek: Voyager managed to construct a compelling and infinitely-watchable episode around a visually-similar theme, in "Course: Oblivion"), the "power source" that must be kept a secret, from state troopers (and wives and families, of course) is throughout...

"Bobbi had discovered some huge power source and had become its prisoner. That same force was simultaneously galzanizing and imprisoning the whole town. And it was growing steadily stronger."

"They would begin the dance of untruth. The "becoming" would demand many lies. This one, the one they told themselves, the one that insisted they were really the same as ever, was the most important lie of all."

"(Ruth) slept, but her sleep was not easy... that part of her which clung stubbornly to sanity knew the truth: these were not the rising voices of the people she had lived with all these years, but those of outsiders. They were the voices of The Tommyknockers."

"She sat in the green, diseased heart of their influence and listened to them tell their lunatic fairy tales."

Cocaine excites the "power and paranoia" centers of the brain. The Tommyknockers seem to, as well. "He had come out feeling ten feet tall, ready to make love in the mud with a platoon of lady wrestlers." (I'm sure Dennis Hopper or Oliver Stone could relate to that one.)

"Don't make me mail you like some letter addressed to nowhere."

The Haven towns-folk build all sorts of new gadgets. Especially ones to guard the town-line. One of these is: 

As with any of these metaphors, they don't have to have been chosen consciously to work for either the plot or the cry-for-help deconstruction. Sometimes, as King alludes to in that On Writing quote and elsewhere, the unconscious screams any way it can. Ergo, a killer "Coke" machine, floating off the ground, attacking any who try to get in or separate the Havenites from their "power supply."

"The scream suddenly became a loud buzz in Gardner's head. He knew he was listening to the mental sound of mortal disconnect."

"When he finally went mad, none of this shit would matter anymore."

At the beginning of King's career, (especially in Salem's Lot) I thought some of the quotations he used at the beginning of chapters, etc. weren't especially relatable to the events in-text. Not so, here. Take the passage that starts Book 3 from The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing:

"I slept and I dreamed the dream. This time there was no disguise anywhere. I was the malicious male-female dwarf figure, the principle of joy-in-destruction; and Saul was my counterpart, male-female, my brother and my sister, and we were dancing in some open place, under enormous white buildings, which were filled with hideous, menacing, black machinery which held destruction. But in the dream, he and I, or she and I, were friendly, we were not hostile, we were together in spiteful malice. There was a terrible yearning nostalgia in the dream, the longing for death. We came together and kissed, in love. It was terrible, and even in the dream I knew it. Because I recognized in the dream that those other dreams we all have when the essence of love, of tenderness, is concentrated into a kiss or a caress, but now it was the caress of two half-human creatures, celebrating destruction."

Very appropos for the "becoming" of the Haven-folk into the Tommyknockers, as well as for the relationship between Bobbi and Gard in the novel. (It's worth mentioning that Book 3 comes charging out of the gate. I found the whole book to be compulsively readable, but there's a strong "second wind" in the whole last act.)

The Tommyknockers are described as an "interstellar band of Gypsies," great sky travelers but as vulnerable as mosquitoes breeding in a shallow pool. They "crashed" in Haven, ME centuries ago and have been lying dormant in their ship (which is huge - three football fields in diameter) awaiting discovery. Once Bobbi trips over one small edge of the ship, they lock onto her and through her, the town, transforming everyone into versions of themselves.

"We have no history, written or oral... Guided by the currents, both large and small, that run through the universe. 'God' is the name some people give those currents, but God's only a word, like Tommyknockers or Altair-4."

"Tommyknockers" is a term plucked from Gard's mind, as is "Altair-4," i.e. stand-ins for the aliens/ their homeworld. Altair-4 is, of course, the name of the alien world in Forbidden Planet.

"Are there more of you out there?"

Bobbi shrugged. "I don't know." And don't care, the shrug said. We're here. There are improvements to be made. That is enough.

"That's really all you are?" (Gard) wanted to make sure; make sure there was no more to it. He was terribly afraid he was taking too long, much too long... but he had to make sure. "That's all?"

"What do you mean, all? Is it so little, what we are?"

"Frankly, yes," Gard said. "You see, I've been looking for the devil outside my life all my life, because the one inside was so fucking hard to catch. It's hard to spend such a long time thinking you're... Homer..." He yawned again, hugely. His eyelids had bricks on them. "... and discover you were... Captain Ahab all the time."

The scene where Gard and Bobbi enter the ship is one of my favorite bits of King's writing, ever. Tense, atmospheric, disgusting, and brilliant. The aliens use humans/ humanoid-lifeforms as slaved-living-batteries. Which reminds me:

Poor Peter! (Bobbi's dog.)

Gardener and the Dallas Police

Played by the future President of the United States Jimmy Smits

"A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what's going on." - William S. Burroughs.

When Gard shows up at Bobbi's house, it is after a monumental-blackout-binge/righteous-piss-up. We are introduced to both his anti-nuclear politics and his alcoholism in cringeworthy, powerful passages that are are brutally-honest depictions of a mind-besotted. Gardener wakes up one morning suddenly possessed by his own Tommyknocker, a need to consume all the booze in the world. Aided and abetted by one of his fellow poets, he attends a post-poetry-reading party, where a pro-nuclear blowhard triggers his rage on the topic. He ends up, several days later, on a beach in New Hampshire. (More on that, below)

Bobbi is able to sell Gard on the whole yeah-they're-aliens-and-we're-keeping-it-secret-so-what? angle by a) enabling his need for booze, and b) invoking "the Dallas Police," as in "Do we want the Dallas Police in charge of this?" Something instantly-recognizable to not just liberals of Stephen King's/ Gard's-and-Bobbi's generation: that beyond-the-law establishment-buffer-zone, the sort of folks represented by "The Shop" in Firestarter. (Who also make an appearance, here, towards the end)

Here's Gard:

"Spent fuel rods that were stacking up in big, hot piles. They thought the Curse of King Tut was bad? Brother! Wait until twenty-fifth-century archaeologists dug up a load of this shit!"

"You talked to people who had lived through one administration after another in which their elected officials told one lie after another, then lied about the lies, and when those lies were found out, the liars said "Oh geez, I forgot, sorry" - and since they forgot, the people who elected them behaved like Christians and forgave...

"You couldn't believe there were so fucking many of them willing to do that until you remembered what P.T. Barnum said about the extraordinarily high birth rate of suckers... when you tried to talk to them, they looked at you as if you were babbling in a foreign language."

I miss this King. I don't think he's necessarily speaking through Gard, here, but there was a real anti-establishment streak in his earlier stuff. I mean, there still is, but he seems to have placed his faith in the same sort of folks he once (correctly) identified as crooks. I don't want to go too far down this path, but it's ironic to me that the guy who wrote all this/ created the Shop ended up on the side of the Dallas Police, at least on the topic most-closely-associated with them.

"I've read all the conspiracy books so you don't have to; Oswald acted alone." - Stephen King, 2011.

Gardener manages to put the proverbial monkey-wrench in the works, and the last we see of him, he is taking off into outer space, flattened to the floor as he makes the jump to hyperspace.

"Lying on the transparent floor of the control room, already better than seventy thousand miles out in space, Jim Gardener lay in a widening pool of his own blood... and smiled."

Godspeed, sir.

DARK TOWER ALERT!

Not really, but it's worth mentioning that in the first hundred pages, "Ka" and "Palaver" both appear, and "The Arrowhead Project" (i.e. that strange military experiment from The Mist that seems to have poked a whole in the Todash Darkness) is mentioned. Plus, when Gardener wakes up from his blackout, he runs into Jack Sawyer from The Talisman. Plus, Pennywise, that age-old foe/sibling of The Turtle, makes a cameo, as well. (Briefly, on pg. 510)

Is Altair-4 (where Dave Hillman spends most of the novel, here, having been inadvertently transported there by his brother) the same destination to which the Buick from From a Buick 8 transports people? Doubtful, I guess, but an intriguing possibility.

Some Final Thoughts 

Both Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok are mentioned a couple of times. Google-image search them; you may enjoy it.

Liked this line: 

"Dick was in a perfect ecstasy of fury... but at the center of his rage was terror, like a cold curdle of rancid cream in the middle of a poisoned chocolate."

The very last line is great. I won't reproduce it here, but after the 746 pages that lead up to it, I felt like standing up and saluting. Again, I started this novel thinking I might not even finish it; I ended it believing it to be among King's finest work.

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.

 NEXT!

The Dark Half!