Daniel (@dungeondive) continues The Ran(King) of King with 1987’s The Tommyknockers — opening with a lovely riff on how King books were ubiquitous in his childhood, found beaten-up in every rented vacation cabin, which is exactly the battered mass-market Signet format he now prefers to read him in.
A first read for Daniel, and one he’d long avoided on its terrible reputation. Bobbi Anderson unearths a buried alien craft near Haven, Maine; as she and her alcoholic poet friend Gard dig it out, an otherworldly presence takes over the town, turning the residents into tooth-losing “tinkerers” who build weapons from vacuum cleaners and toy guns. Written at the depth of King’s addictions, it’s excessive in every way — nearly 800 pages, oddly plotted, no clear hero, new characters introduced 50 pages from the end. And yet he liked it more than expected, because it plays to King’s greatest strength: a whole-town ensemble with a deep sense of place. The middle section reads like a suite of self-contained short stories and is, he thinks, masterful; he also notes it’s essentially the seed of his beloved Under the Dome.
A chance meeting with Jack Sawyer (Talisman) ties it loosely to the Dark Tower web. It enters the board above Firestarter.
The Tommyknockers is widely panned — does its whole-town ensemble win you over too, or is the bloat unforgivable?