10 Most Insane Stories Stephen King Ever Dreamt Up

6. The Tommyknockers

Of all of King's 80s novels, The Tommyknockers may be at the bottom of the list for most fans. King himself has admitted that The Tommyknockers is "an awful book" and would tell Rolling Stone that it was the last novel he penned before getting clean (King did far more than dabble in drugs and alcohol in the years prior). The story surrounds the discovery of a UFO buried in the earth in a small Maine town. Rather than reporting it to the authorities, its excavation becomes a personal quest for a pair of childhood friends, James Gardner and Bobbi Anderson - but all the while, the ship puts out some sort of emissions that turns the townsfolk less and less human, and more and more alien. While Gardner - Gard for short - is apparently immune, Bobbi and most of the town's remaining population are not. While all the creatures on board are dead, it's not long before the townsfolk are more or less under the ship's control, and in the end, Gard is forced to kill Bobbi, and launch the ship (which has begun to effect him as well) back into space, while the government rolls in to clean up the town. Weird? Yes. Insane? Yes. Any good? Debatable.