Stephen King said this about his novel The Tommyknockers — “It’s an awful book.”

Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold the phone, Mr. King, hold the phone…

The Tommyknockers is a great book. King didn’t start doing awful books until the 1990s. His only great books post 1970-1990 were The Wastelands and Wizard and Glass. Everything else from Needful Things on is pretty blah, at least in my opinion. If someone else wants to believe current King is amazing, more power to them. Art is subjective and all that.

But back to The Tommyknockers — the only real complaints I have about it is that it, apparently, owes a great deal to Quatermass and the Pit, which I’ve never seen (not for lack of trying, though). I also came across another movie called They Came From Beyond Space, where the hero is immune to the takeover because of the metal plate in his head. Sound familiar?

Other than that, I have no complaints. I love the idea of a woman out for a walk in the woods behind her house, who then trips over the leading edge of a buried flying saucer, a buried titanic flying saucer. She then proceeds to dig it up. In the process, the flying saucer starts taking her and the entire town over. Rampant Gyro Gearloose inventions. Deceptions. Betrayals. Fun little subplots. A ton of characters who are all distinct individuals. Some incredible imagery (like when pine trees burst and the spraying sap creates rainbows). A sentence-long cameo appearance by Pennywise. A guy eating a hamburger and proclaiming it something like “wunner” because he can’t say “wonderful” with his mouth full. Green lasers. Flying tractors. Super water heaters. Cocaine is quite a drug…

My favorite part of The Tommyknockers is the main character Jim Gardner (who actually disappears for a large chunk of the book) and, to a lesser degree, his relationship with Bobbie. Jim Gardner is not my favorite King character, but he is way up there on the list. Not only is his character wonderfully flawed, but he is also a major underdog throughout the book. Tension continues to exist throughout the story because, while he goes along with the plan, we are privy to his doubts, and we also have information he does not, so we know exactly how much danger he is in. Gardner is a character who cannot possibly win, but maybe, just maybe, he can somehow come out even, even if he does lose.

The portrayal of Gardner’s alcoholism is also well done, maybe because King has his own experiences with addiction. The reader really gets a sense of how wrecked Gardner is, but the man just…keeps…going. We love his dedication to Bobbi and his will to function despite being constantly trashed. We love how he is tempted by all that is happening, but his brain never stops being suspicious. Then there are the little moments, like when he is in the midst of an enormous excavation, hung over and reciting Tom Sawyer. Gardner is maybe King’s greatest achievement in characterization. Characterization may be King’s greatest strength, but he took it to another level with Jim Gardner.

I am currently rereading The Tommyknockers for the first time in…yikes, at least 10 years. Every now and then I’d read parts of it, but this time I am doing the whole thing. Now that I’m older and more discerning, I’m still not noticing a lot of awful in the book. In fact, The Tommyknockers makes me admire King even more for just how much book he delivered. I find post-1990 King books to be filled to the brim with padding and filler, and even though Tommyknockers is a thick book, it feels like everything that happens is…neat, for lack of a better word. It’s not a book like…I’m not even sure which Dark Tower volume it is anymore, where we leave the awesome characters to spend time with a booger-eating mutant boy we’ve never met before and have no interest in. (Man, those books really went off the rails in 5-7, and I am saying that as someone who thinks 1-4 are amazing, and I also have no problem with the ending). The Tommyknockers is simply a glorious clump of neat. That’s it. That’s all.

There was also a miniseries made on The Tommyknockers. It came out in 1993. I found it to be decidedly not neat. I only saw it once way back then. It seemed clunky. Jimmy Smits, bless him, was a terrible choice for Jim Gardner. I also didn’t like the shape of the spaceship in the miniseries. The simplicity of a big silver flying saucer was way better than the clunky thing the miniseries used. The miniseries is maybe useful to watch out of curiosity, but it leaves a lot to be desired. (Edit: I decided to re-watch the miniseries, and I’ve softened my critique of it. It remains clunky, but I get that they were trying their best with what they had. I also now understand why they didn’t use the traditional flying saucer shape for the craft. They don’t give away that it is aliens until well into the miniseries. For all the viewer knew, they could have been digging up an ancient temple, which is what the craft looks like partially unearthed.)

It is usually interesting to read a King interview. I find him to be a brilliant man, but, like the villains of The Tommyknockers, he seems to be simultaneously brilliant and sometimes missing the obvious. In this era of Twitter, you can get King’s opinion on a lot of topics, and there is a ton of stuff I disagree with him about these days. In this case, his assessment that The Tommyknockers is awful is another opinion of his that I will have to label as off target.