Got your thermos ready? Frizzy J here with a great book from the eighties.
Tommyknockers by Stephen King is a looong book. At 747 pages, this 1988 classic is a marathon read. I read it in four days. I really couldn't put it down. In 1993, ABC TV made a two movie miniseries based on the novel. For most of my life, I had only experience with that, and in truth, all I could remember was a telepathic typewriter and a bunch of people digging. My father loves the movies, though, so when I found the book in an old box I threw myself into it.
A stumble in the woods pushes middle-aged author Roberta Anderson onto a course designed to change human history. A quick inspection of the offending metal that tripped her leads to a vibrational exchange that augments her. She begins to dig, obsessively. The story then shifts over to Jim Gardener, an alcoholic poet on the brink of burning his life down. He loses his job in a fit of alcoholism and is about to commit suicide when a premonition strikes him… His friend Bobbi Anderson is in trouble. Bobbi being the only one left that loves him in life, he hitchhikes back home to Maine to help her. He finds her, thirty pounds lighter than when he left three weeks before, hungry and exhausted. She threatens to discard their friendship if he calls for help, so he must nurse her back to life on his own. While looking around the house, he sees that Bobbi has been busy… busy with things she had never had any inclination toward before. Things like, hanging bright fluorescent lights in the cellar, upgrading the water heater (not necessarily fixing, mind you), and upgrading her Tomcat lawn tractor. And then she shows him what she found, enlisting his help to dig it up. As they continue, the townspeople begin to change, gaining telepathy and inventing a series of goofy, battery operated gadgets. As miraculous as all of this is, death and mayhem soon ensue as the town twists and changes.
I am a lifelong Stephen King fan and was exuberantly pleased to find him in excellent form with Tommyknockers. The dialogue and characterization are rich and consistent, all of the plot threads come to weave into an epic arc, and I found it easy to get lost in the town of Haven and the Burning Woods.
I would recommend this story to anyone with the time and patience to read almost 800 pages. It's worth it.
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