The Tommyknockers

The narrator does a great job with this Stephen King signature. Tommyknockers knocking on your door… I love how King fills the space between the book covers with a story about 1 person and the situations they face. There are very few characters you get to know but don\’t care, it\’s all about the one, unlike any other. Edward Herrmann, I hope you sought some psychiatric help after embodying Gard for this book. Great all around, excellent to listen to.

I\’ve always been a big fan of Sc-Fi, even before I became a fan of King, so it was only natural that I eventually came to read this book. King writes a \”sci-fi\” novel, what could go wrong? I would only reccomend this book to fans of King or other hardcore sci-fi fans and even then, I wouldn\’t expect everyone to leave this book having enjoyed it. I was actually pleasantly surprised. This book was bigger, grander, more enticing than just the mere sum of its parts. It\’s more than, \”ooo King wrote a book with a flying saucer and aliens!\” This book is about obsession, curiosity killing the cat, hubris without moral compass, progress for progresses sake, innovation without imagination, cold calculation without purpose, destructive impulses, the drive to improve, a hunger for excess, addiction, and the self destructive forces at the root of the darker side of human nature. I read an interesting review of this book that calls this King\’s opus on addiction. Written at a time when he was drinking the heaviest and regularly coked up out of his mind. You can just feel the self loathing peeling off of the page as you plow through it. There are certain passages that are hard to read because of the suicidal and existential dread that weighs the narrative down in certain sections. It\’s almost a punishment to the reader and a self indulgent self-hatred fest in some of the longer passages of internal dialogue with the main character. …but I honestly wouldn\’t change a damn thing. I was thinking about this a lot today, I don\’t think you really could edit anything out of this book and have it still carry the same weight. It\’s not King\’s best book and it\’s certainly not hard sci-fi, but it\’s unique and powerful and beautifully grotesque. It had a raw power about it that captured my imagination and wouldn\’t let go (once I was about half way through it). It can be hard to get through and on to the damn point, but once it picks up steam, the narrative rolls along to a crazy flurry of a conclusion. lastly, I really enjoyed how mysterious, unexplained, and stupidly pointless a lot of the Tommyknockers alien back story was! I\’m a huge hard sci-fi fan and hard sci-fi can tend to over explain or scientifically explain all the magic of the narrative away on the front end. Approaching a sci-fi theme with more of a mystery, suspense angle was a fun twist on familiar themes. And the absurdist idea that the aliens are somehow pointless, futile, unintelligent, in their destructive, directionless, and ill-guided hubris was an awesome spin on the extra-terrestrial theme! Bravo.

Stephen King himself called this an awful book. Its all over the place with only one interesting character. There are more questions than answers by the end. Some of the imagery is more ridiculous than believable. It conjures no feelings of discomfort let alone horror. The narration, however, was well done. Herrmann does his best with the material given.

The overall book is good,and the narrator did his job very well. It\’s just the editing of the audio book is driving me crazy, they cut words short and even a few words out of the end of every chapter

Miles fly by while listening to it in my truck. Awesome story, and an awesome author

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