Tommyknockers was the last King novel I attempted to read. I got about halfway through it and gave up. I haven’t picked up a single one since then, though I did read On Writing.
In the years since, I have found it simultaneously strange and yet gratifying that so many others had exactly the same experience.
Hmm…interesting. People hate the characterisation and the editing.
In my case, I was rather pleased with the way Gardner was brought out. He was a pathetic, pitiful exccuse for a human being, and that came across fairly well. The rabid anti-nuclear rants fit right in with the flow, so far as I was concerned…he thought that mankind was already doing a pretty good job mucking itselk and the earth up, and then lo and behold, along comes a spaceship that accelerates the process, leaving him feeling even more self-pitying. That felt okay.
The female (Robin? Roberta?) on the other hand felt a tad wooden. Maybe that had to do with the fact that she was ‘becoming’, so I guess it can be excused.
The editing…well, okay, it could have been snipped here and there, but nothing monumental that bothered me.
The only thing I really had a problem with was the fact that the alien dudes were so eeeeeevil. Nothing redeeming about them whatsoever. Creepy spaceship, check. Creepy physiognomy, check. Lust to kill other species, check. Lust to kill each other, check. Desire to take over the universe, check. Eeeeeeeevil, I say!! (Of course, I might be completely stupid in objecting to this. After all, who’s to say that an alien species - or Tolkien’s orcs for that matter - must think and behave in a manner that parallels human thought?)
Anyway, all said and done, the story flowed for me, and I saw no reason to hate it. It was there, and I read it.
Maybe that’s because there’s only so much horror that can scuttle out of the dark recesses of a psychopathic flying coke machine fitted with a rotary blade? 
Actually, I really didn’t see Tommyknockers as being a horror novel. I took it as more of a saga about Gardner with the alien theme being incidental, yet essential.
Sort of like Shyamalan’s movie Signs.
Well, I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who didn’t loathe the book. Maybe it’s true that great minds think alike! 
(Or maybe those of us who don’t hate it are simply all somehow damaged in the same odd way…)
I’m curious, am I the only one who saw the parallel betweent Gard’s anti-nuke obsession and the whole theme about sacrificing lives in order to power technology? Maybe Gard’s obsession by itself wouldn’t have made me think that King was projecting his politics into the story, but the two things together did make me wonder if maybe he was.
I didn’t think the book was horrible but not his best work. Am I the only one who thinks Dreamcatcher is his worst book?
Tommyknockers is the only King book I’ve ever started reading and simply not finished. There are a handful that I’ve read once and never picked up again (Salem’s Lot[, Cujo, Dreamcatcher), but I finished all of them except that one. I just put it down one day to do something else when I was about 3/4 of the way through, and never picked it up again. I didn’t care how the story came out, and I didn’t give a damn about the characters, so why bother?
A book has two possible hooks–the characters, or the plot. Ideally, both should be really strong, but you can skimp on one if the other is sufficiently built up. Although he has some plots that grab you by the throat and won’t turn loose till the last page, a lot of King’s plots are fairly standard horror crap that anyone could come up with. People don’t reread books for the plot; once you know what happens, what’s the point? King’s real strength is his characters, the ones like Nick and Stu and Roland and Eddie who are so real and true that you feel like you’ve known them all your life, and you’d slog through the dullest, most irritating plot just to see if it all comes out right for them in the end.
Tommyknockers didn’t have either hook and neither did Dreamcatcher. (What is it with him and the alien invasions that lead to massive rectal bleeding, anyway?) Boring, meandering plot and dull, lifeless characters. At least Cujo and Salem’s Lot had interesting plots, even if I didn’t give a damn if the characters died like flies.
What I hated about Tommyknockers was that his aliens and the alien culture didn’t make sense. He kept doing things to people that was eeerie and all, but it was obviously just to invoke a massive “ick” factor, not because it contributed to a coherent whole. Okay – so teeth start falling out and genitals start to change and other ookie stuff — but the people, as far as I can see, aren’t turning into the aliens, as we were lead to believe.
This answers the question posed above:
The rectal bleeding is just another part of the “aliens lead to ookie stuff” approach. King never seems to have met an alien he liked, or who had anything other than gross stuff on its mind. Not only in these two novels, but in his most recent (last), From a Buick 8. That novel
(Spoilers)
…gives us the pretty pointless killing of an alien by folks we’re supposed to identify with, and I hated that scene.
Kingtreats aliens as symbols or the embodiment of evil – a horror story concept. It’s the fear of the Other. And I’m a Science Fiction fan. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle addressed the difference, a bit, in their novel Lucifer’s Hammer (contrasting it with The Stand).
Ahh. I see that as being a bit different from what you originally stated, I think we’re in agreement.
(raises hand) I’m another person who didn’t mind it. It was actually the first Stephen King novel I read, back when I stupidly wouldn’t read anything that wasn’t science fiction, and it actually got me hooked on King. (Until I read “It”, which cured my addiction mighty quick. “The Tommyknockers”, with all its flaws, is abrosia compared to “It”.)
!!!
Finally! Someone who thinks It was bullcrap!
I…I don’t feel alone anymore…
Oh man, don’t get me started…the underage gang-bang…no, it’s not really a clown, it’s really, uh, an interdimensional spider! Yeah!..“The grackens know your real name”? WTF? What grackens? Where?
I think you mean Mote in God’s Eye–Lucifer’s Hammer is the one with the asteroid/comet that hits Earth. 
Duh. You did mean Lucifer’s Hammer (since you compared it to The Stand ). Sorry about that, Cal–it’s been a long week and apparently my reading comprehension is in the toilet.
Tommyknockers was my first Stephen King book as well, potshot christmas gift from my mother. With a lack of experience on his works and going solely on hype, I plodded through the book. The painfully long dig of little interest, the fleshing of every minute little detail for every single person, I hated the book. However, I always thought it was inherently my fault (I was just entering puberty) and that I couldn’t comprehend his genius. However, I still stopped reading it for about a year at around the one woman was going on about how she lost a chunk of her calf. I only went back and finished reading based on the principle that I in no way would give up on a book and see it to the end, through pain and death I would finish it.
I don’t hate the book, it taught me very valuable lessons, like it’s alright to wish painful demises on the supposed protagonists and sympathetic characters. It’s the one skill that lets me finish every book, since I invariably end up disliking the main characters no matter what.
My brother recommended The Tommyknockers to me. Funny guy. I forced myself to read the whole thing, and years later wasn’t surprised to find that King was heavily using when he wrote it. Not his worst stuff, but terribly bloated. Does his publisher do any editing of his novels?
What really got to me was the science. It’s either endearing or annoying, I don’t know which, but Stephen King has the view of science that you might expect from a really bright eight-year-old. He’s convinced that if you put together a train transformer and a bunch of crap from a hardware store, you can achieve controlled antigravity. Reminds me of the spaceships I used to design when I was a tyke.
Funny, I thought the miniseries of The Shining was botched as badly as most King films are. It started out well enough, but fell apart by the end. In fact, the ending was so completely different than the book that I was actually pissed off when I turned off the television.
Bad King. Bad, bad King. Whitewashing his own material like that.
That said, I’m a big Stephen King fan, and I found The Tommyknockers to be a dud. Most of his books at least have interesting characters and a story that keeps you reading, but Tommyknockers was a struggle to finish. I didn’t care about the characters one bit, and that’s a bad sign.
And even with that in mind, Dreamcatcher was worse than Tommyknockers… though it’s a close race.
I don’t where my copy of the book is at the moment but I don’t see how the ending could be whitewashed at all. I don’t believe the epilogue was included but the majority of the book was there. It was King’s vision, the one he wanted to do because Kubrick changed so much of the story.
You sure you’re not confusing The Shining miniseries with It? Now that was a whitewash!
Fine… I didn’t think this was necessary, but apparently it is:
Ending of the book…
Jack Torrance’s personality is completely subsumed by that of the hotel’s spirit, to the point that he smashes his own face with a roque mallet. When the hotel’s boiler is in danger of exploding, he tries to the last breath to stop it and save the hotel, but he is too late. From the point of the “face-smashing” right up to the hotel exploding, “Jack Torrance” the man is gone – the monster was in full control.
Botched ending of King’s miniseries…
When the hotel is about to explode, Jack rushes down to the cellar to save it. However, at the last instant it is made apparent that he could have saved it… but he stops. “Jack Torrance” the man returns, for those last instants, to let the hotel die. And then we have the tacked-on scene of Danny Torrance graduating to complete the picture, with Jack’s shiny-happy spirit coming back to view the proceedings. This “redemption” of Jack Torrance (starting with the hotel’s destruction, ending with Danny’s graduation) was completely added into the miniseries, was not present at all in the book, and ruins the ending of the story utterly.
There. Whitewashed.
See, The Shining is one of my favorite King novels, and I had high hopes that King’s own translation of it would be utterly faithful. Imagine my disappointment when he changes the climactic presence of one of the main characters so completely.
I know that Kubrick’s movie wasn’t nearly as faithful as King’s version was… but at least it got this part right, in his own way. It’s hard for me to understand why King got so many other details right (such as the hedge animals, which were nice), but then changed the ending in such a fundamental way.
As a matter of fact, I felt the same way about The Stand miniseries. Started out great, almost ideal. But by the end it all fell apart. One gets the feeling that King doesn’t know how to adapt his own work for the screen. His truly faithful adaptations have all been done by others. The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, Stand By Me, and Misery are the only four feature films I know of that have actually stayed faithful to the source material. The short films for “The Woman in the Room” and “Paranoid: A Chant” have also been quite good… the latter pretty much reads the whole poem aloud and combines it with some striking imagery.
OK, hijack over. Apologies to the OP.
In short, you asked for the world and got pissed when you didn’t get it, right? For all we know, the network might not have let him use the original ending.
Note that I said “faithful” and not “utterly faithful”. The other three versions had changes too. To my knowlede, the movie that remained utterly faithful to the original written word does not exist.
True enough.
However, I didn’t “ask for the world”… I was hoping for what King himself promised: a faithful translation of The Shining onto film. I didn’t get it.
His version was more faithful than Kubrick’s, to be sure, but the change at the end which I discussed in spoilers is so fundamental to the story, to me, that it kills the story. The miniseries botched it, while the book got it right, and even Kubrick’s film got that aspect of the ending right. Kubrick screwed up the details, but he seemed to understand how important this part of the ending was.
And it’s so hard to talk about this without giving away what I’m talking about…
The idea that the network may have pushed for the different ending is very true, though. Unfortunate, if so.