"The Tommyknockers is an awful book," said Stephen King of his own 1987 sci-fi novel. "That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act. And Ive thought about it a lot lately and said to myself, 'Theres really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back.'" There's a sense that, whilst The Tommyknockers is by no means perfect, though, the master writer is still being a little hard on himself. After all, there's a lot to like about The Tommyknockers, which chronicles the happenings in a small American town after an alien spacecraft crash is unearthed in a nearby woods and begins to influence its inhabitants. King's right: there is probably a better novel beneath all the fat, the tangents can get rather annoying and the ending is off, but the characters that the author creates here are three-dimensional individuals that feel fully realised. For that aspect alone, this frequently maligned sci-fi yarn is well worth your time.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
