What Was Stephen Thin-King? Why The Tommyknockers is King's Most Pointless Work

 

 

Starting around age thirteen, there was a period that I worshipped Stephen King. From the moment I read The Langoliers in the middle of eighth grade I was one of his Constant Readers. I would buy hardcovers of every new book starting with Insomnia at age fifteen and continuing well into the next decade. I bought every new chapter of The Green Mile; I went through Bag of Bones and Dreamcatcher. I read every paperback of his old books and read them all multiple times. (I’ve lost count how many times I ended up reading It over my lifetime, but my guess is at least a dozen.) For a very long time, I thought the sun rose and set on him.

I’m pretty certain when the bloom finally came off the rose. It was after I read the final pages of the last volume in The Dark Tower series in the fall of 2004. The series of books that has been the crux of King’s fiction well before he even knew it, the last twenty pages of the book are the most disappointing conclusion to any work of fiction I’ve ever read – and yes, that includes the series finale of Lost and whatever disappointment I felt with Mad Men.  To be clear, I should have been warned when I got to the last five pages of Wolves of the Calla, the fifth book in that series and I realized that Stephen King was about to write himself into the story. (I didn’t realize until the next volume that he was literally going to do that.) I might still have had respect for him he had hung up his scriveners’ pen after completing it in 2004 – at that point, what was left for him to write? But he has kept on churning novels at a prodigious rate ever since.  I have not stopped reading them to be sure – I still think he’s a gifted writer – but I’ve stopped buying the initial copy of everything he’s written. I’ll wait until the library edition comes out and read it then. Occasionally, I’ll buy a paperback if a story he’s written – like say, The Institute or Doctor Sleep appeals to me – but mostly he’s just like every other writer these days.

I will admit that in the last decade or so, the world of pop culture has finally figured out how to give Stephen King the treatment he deserves. Now that the limited series has officially become perfected by almost every cable and streaming service, some of his most recent work has been getting its due. Mr. Mercedes and his series involving Bill Hodges finally got the appropriate treatment from a network that may not exist anymore.  The most recent film adaptation of It finally gave us the version we deserved and managed to smooth out many of the rough passages that have troubled so many. And while The Outsider should never have been considered in the form of a regular series, it was well-written and superbly acted  with Cynthia Erivo giving a master class as Holly Gibney. (I understand Holly is getting her own novel next year. Maybe someone can convince Erivo to get her own series for HBO as well?) I don’t know if it’s possible to ever get The Dark Tower for any medium; there are too many problems with the narrative that have nothing to do with the effects. But maybe someday Amazon or Hulu will get it right.

But as much as I admire King’s work, in recent years I have become increasingly aware of just how flawed so many of his novels are. And while there are many of his novels that I have actively disliked after reading and many I considered hopelessly depressing, there’s one that I basically consider the biggest waste of time. And I should know I think I ended up rereading it at least five times before I turned twenty-one. I’ve come to learn a little bit of the circumstances of its writing, so there’s a better explanation for why its such a waste of time. That said, based on when it was written, I’m still kind of stunned it turned out so terrible.

Between 1984 and 1987, Stephen King was at the worst level of his addiction to cocaine. This might, in a weird way, explain how he was so productive during this period, turning out five volumes in the space of those four years. Despite the problems I have with some sections, I still consider It one of his three or four greatest works. Misery is considered one of the all-time greatest novels written and has been the source of one of his greatest films and successful stage adaptations. Eyes of the Dragon, one of the few books that King has written that seems designed for younger viewers (he specifically wrote it as a fairy tale for his daughter Naomi) is a superb children’s book and fits in very well with the overall universe he might still not have known he was designing. But the last book to be published of this cycle – The Tommyknockers – is such an immense misfire that all but the most devoted King fans are inclined to dismiss it and even King himself thinks that there might be a good story but he basically buried it under too many pages.

Even when I first read The Tommyknockers at age sixteen, I had issues with it. I told myself at the time that had to do with how King, who was probably putting Easter eggs in his books before we knew that was a thing, seemed to be doing in two slight references utterly dismissing two books I had already read. At one point, several of the characters end up in Derry which is the setting of It. While the novel is set after Pennywise has been defeated, King goes out of his way to suggest this is not the case – one character thinks he hears the drains chuckle in his hotel room; another thinks he is hallucinate a clown coming out of a sewer drain.

That galled me nearly as badly as the opening sequence when Jim Gardener, the protagonist of the novel, ends up in Atlantic City after the mother of all benders and has an encounter with a teenage boy who calls himself Jack and tells Gard that his mother has died in a car accident. The boy is Jack Sawyer,  the hero of The Talisman, a boy who traveled through multiple worlds to save his dying mother.  I spent a lot of time in both cases trying to convince myself King was messing with us – that The Tommyknockers took place before the events in It, despite the dates of both novels and outside evidence, or that the boy Gard talked to wasn’t Jack Sawyer. (King himself would confirm Lily’s fate in the sequel to The Talisman, Black House. ) Even then, I don’t think I realized that this was the kind of writer Stephen King was – that no matter how much effort the heroes put in to defeat the monster or save their loved ones, evil seems to pull it out in the end anyway.

Of course, even if you knew nothing about those references there’s still a lot wrong with Tommyknockers anyway.  King wrote bleaker novels before and after The Tommyknockers, but I don’t think he’s ever written one that’s more pointlessly bleak. The novel begins with a resident of Haven Bobbi Anderson tripping over a piece of wreckage in her back yard. She starts unearthing and concludes that what she has found is a flying saucer and that its absolutely massive. There are countless warning signs from the start – dead animals start showing up soon as she starts digging and she starts losing teeth, but then she decides: “Everything’s fine,” and begins to dig.

The novel then switches perspective to Jim Gardner, Bobbi’s friend, occasional lover, and ally in political protests. He’s a recovering alcoholic who after one last reading, gets plastered at a party, absolutely humiliates himself in the midst of an argument with a nuclear power man, and then goes on a bender. He is planning to kill himself when he gets a flash that ‘Bobbi’s in trouble’ and decides to go to Haven even though he has no money or even shoes. By the time he gets to Haven Bobbi has lost thirty pounds out of exhaustion, significant hair and teeth and is on the verge of dropping dead. Yet somehow, she’s made a lot of self-improvements to her home, that all seem to have to do with batteries and telepathy. Bobbi has become possessed of the beings within the ship who despite having been there for centuries – are not entirely dead. Gardener thinks she’s crazy but still decides to join her on the dig.

The next section of the novel completely jumps away from the perspective of Anderson or Gardener and focuses on how the unearthing of the ship is taking over the town.  The residents gradually become telepathic and psychic and begin to become significantly less human. There’s also a growing sign that many of them are losing their sanity. A housewife hears Jesus telling her secrets about the town, including her husband’s infidelity and she rigs the TV to kill him and then eventually kills herself.  The sheriff begins to think her dolls are talking to her. A resident teleports a man who has been cheating him for years on poker to an alien planet to die. These are the highpoints.

In a sense, it doesn’t matter what any of these characters are doing or what their fates are. Because by the time the novel has ended, every single character we have met for an extended period is dead. Some are victims of the aliens, some are victims of the residents of the town, some are victims of Gard’s eventual ‘victory’. It doesn’t matter; by the last pages every single resident of the town is dead, and quite a few innocent bystanders.  And you can’t even make the argument that they died for the purpose of saving mankind or Earth because there’s no guarantee of that.

James Gardener is one of the weakest protagonists in King lore. He knows early on just how dangerous the ship is, he knows he’s one of the few people in town the ship has no power over. (He has a plate in his head and for some reason that stops the ship from taking you over.) Yet rather than try to get away which he can or do anything to stop the ship, he spends most of the book unearthing it. By the time he realizes the full horror of what he’s been a part of, it’s too late to save himself or anyone in the town, the only thing he can try to do is rescue a child who is trapped on the alien planet on a magic trick gone wrong. (I’m actually going to get back to that in a minute.)  Without even knowing if he’s succeeding, he decides to try and launch the ship which he does and manages to get it out of Earth’s atmosphere before he dies inside it. Not even King, however, will go so far as to say he’s done anything to help there’s no guarantee as to where the ship will end up; for all Gardener knows, it may just return to Earth someday.

I don’t know if King was trying to mitigate the gloom of the ending when he wrote the last two pages, but the more I think about in retrospect the less happy it seems. Ok. In the middle of the novel, David Brown, a ten year old genius obsessed with magic, becomes infected by the ship, and becomes determined to make things disappear. In his show, he does make things disappear, but no one believes its real so he moves to his last trick to make his younger brother Hilly disappear. Hilly does, but David can’t make him come back. It is eventually revealed that David transported him to ‘Altair-4’, the name everyone has given for the planet the ‘Tommyknockers’, (the name for the aliens, also made up) come from.  David leaves the town with his grandfather is hospitalized, and eventually goes into a coma.

The final two pages show that Hilly Brown has been returned to his brother’s bed. I guess were supposed to consider that a happy ending but realistically how happy can it be? The Brown’s parents and grandfather are dead, along with every single person in their town. Haven has essentially been burnt to the ground and essentially every aspect of it taken over by the army and the intelligence communities. Hilly and David are essentially the only survivors of an alien invasion. They will probably spend the rest of their childhoods (at least) in the custody of the government and being studied, poked, and prodded. There’s not even a guarantee they’ll be together much longer.

I am not the kind of person who usually prefers the adaptation of any novel to the book itself but I have to tell you that compared to the novel, ABC’s 1993 miniseries adaptation of The Tommyknockers is infinitely superior. And to be clear, even by the relatively low bar set by ABC’s adaptations of King’s work from 1990 until around 2006 (after Desperation ended up being badly handled, King broke off his relationship with ABC), The Tommyknockers is not a good mini-series.  Any broadcast adaptation (basically the only option for any work of literature until well into the mid-2000s for TV) of a Stephen King book essentially gutted the best parts of so much of King’s work, not merely the violence but the profanities that made up so much of his prose.  They were better suited than most of the film versions when it came to included more of the story, but they didn’t do a great job: of all the series that were adapted, the only ones I think worked at all were The Stand and The Shining (this leaves out his original works).

There’s very little that’s of value in The Tommyknockers. Most of the generally good cast from Jimmy Smits and Marg Helgenberger in the leads, to E.G. Marshall and Joanne Cassidy in smaller roles are mostly wasted.  Most of the visual effects are clownish and ridiculous even b7 1990s standards. Most of the key plot points from the novel are there, to be sure, but played out on the screen they look even more ridiculous then on the page. And when we finally see the alien ship in the final half hour of the second part, the body suits are laughably awful.

But for all of that, I still thinks it’s preferable to the novel because the writers decided to reject the hopeless tone of the novel and bring in something resembling optimism.  Anderson manages to regain her sanity by the end of the novel. Gardener uses the last of his energy to destroy the alien ship and when he does, all of the townspeople regain their sanity and humanity. Even Anderson’s dog, which in the novel was sacrificed to keep the ship alive, escapes and is happily barking alongside her by the end.

You could argue that this was some kind of effort by standards and practices to give a happy ending to King’s vision. I’d counter by saying this was the only series in the history of King’s collaboration with ABC where the writers chose to do this. (Indeed, in the final minutes of The Shining  - which King himself adapted – he throws in one last kicker at the end to make us wonder if it was worth it at the end.) I can’t imagine any realistic adaptation of The Tommyknockers that would not have caused the viewer to go to their medicine cabinet and look for razor blades by the end.  I never found out what King thought of his adaptation of the novel for television but considering how angry he was at Kubrick’s version of The Shining and that he’s fairly vocal about the flaws in his own books, the fact that he’s said nothing virulently negative about it in the nearly thirty years speaks volumes.  (He did begin writing the teleplays for his own novels from that point on, however.)

There are some works of King’s that I have not looked at in years, and that may welcome being reread in some form. There are quite a few, however, I’m never going to read again, and one of them is The Tommyknockers. They came knocking at my door far too often, and I’m not opening it to them again.