Wednesday, March 25, 2009
 
Book Report: The Tommyknockers by Stephen King (1987)
Yesterday's foreshadowing about the introduction to the novella in Transgressions mentioning this book wasn't a hint as to the resolution of that story; instead, it foreshadowed that I read this book after that one. Because one decent 780 page book deserves another. Well, truly, this book is only 560 pages, but it took me a while to read it.

In it, the town members of Haven, Maine, start acting funny when a writer begins to uncover an alien vessel buried in their midst.

Well, it's a kinda short King book, but he still puts in cannon fodder characters that he introduces just to kill off. Also, he spends a lot of time making allusions to other books (The Dead Zone and It in particular) and even alludes to himself (a writer up near Bangor who writes gross books, unlike the writer in this book, who writes Westerns).

In true King fashion, bizarre things occur as people encounter fantasy novel situations and don't realize they're in a fantasy novel. However, like many, the writing of the book is very good but the end leaves me a little disappointed. Maybe I misconstrued some of the foreshadowing, but it seems to me that early parts indicated survival of characters who didn't survive. Perhaps I misread it. But with thousands of volumes left for me to read, I don't have the need to go back and re-read it to see if I was right.

Now you can understand why I read those Dilbert books I reported on earlier in the week. After 1300 pages in two books that took me weeks to read, I needed to boost my numbers and I'm a little behind on the annual book reading numbers.

Books mentioned in this review:


 
To say Noggle, one first must be able to say the "Nah."