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The Tommyknockers (Signet) | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Signet
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
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You Save: $7.98 (100%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  180 reviews
Sales Rank: 194011
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 752
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7 x 4.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0451156609
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780451156600
ASIN: 0451156609
Publication Date: October 31, 1988
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Bobbi Anderson and the other good folks of Haven, Maine, have sold their souls to reap the rewards of the most deadly evil this side of hell.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 175 more reviews...
 TOO LONG, TOO TEDIOUS August 22, 2008
The book starts out promisingly enough with a female novelist unearthing a spaceship buried on her land. But then Mr King dissolves into hectares of verbiage that don't advance the story one iota. You could take out whole chapters and no one would notice, because the plot doesn't advance an inch in that time. Add to that Mr King's customary infatuation with scatology and what you have is an utterly tedious piece of work.
 good imagination but ending dragged July 30, 2008
Stephen king wrote this book with great imagination self moving coke machines etc... I mean how many people can actually imagine dying by a soda machine and it makes sense only in a way he wrote the book a higher intelligence buried in a ground who specialize in making off the wall type stuff and cowinceadently that intelligence is passed on the more the ship in the ground is uncovered.
I thought the characters were well explained and had no trouble imaganing what they looked like. The one thing I did not like was the ending I thought it was vague and kinda short sorta like he was in a hurry to finish it and just threw toghther a ending just to finish this already long book.
I feel he should have shortened the middle which I felt was to long and he should have worked harder on the ending but thats just my opinion
I was up LATE LAST NIGHT & THE NIGHT BEFORE finishing this May 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I think the polarization of reviews regarding "The Tommyknockers" stems from making the very easy mistake of thinking of the King as a only and constantly a horror writer. While I did enjoy his other more 'traditional' horror and fantasy tales, "Tommyknockers" was a nice little breath of fresh air, incorporating mostly sci-fi elements into the work. Not quite the ideal read if you're looking to be scared intelligent [I hasten to use the word 'stupid'], but as some other reviewers have said, for a [quite] entertaining, well written and thought provoking sci-fi a la Stephen King, you certainly can't go wrong here.
 Demanding, maddening, glorious May 1, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
My first reading of this book, many years ago, was aborted. I simply hadn't the patience to wait for the slowly unfolding revelation of the inhabitants of the spacecraft and found myself scanning rather than reading large tracts of the tale.
So my second attempt at the Tommyknockers was a revelation. For the first time, I now appreciate what a truly magnificent writer Stephen King is. I realise now that my initial impatience was prompted by reluctance to engage with the depth of the characters portrayed and the complexity and richness of the human drama surrounding the central tenet of the story.
I think that at times, I have suffered from the dread disease of the 20th and 21st centuries - attention deficit combined with a lust for instant appeasement of my appetite for entertainment. This is no frame of mind with which to approach a literary work of this quality.
For me, The Tommyknockers is a fine piece of literature premised on a simple idea that is shattered and broken like crystal in King's mind, and then reconstructed as a tendrilous and subtle shadow-creature that creeps into the readers mind as the tale unfolds.
The work of a master.
 Boring...scare by numbers drivel March 8, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It took me two attempts to finish this book...I wish I had given up the first time. Everything is so over written here that it could easily fit into a novella if King didn't have dierhea of the word processor. To his credit there are some neat sci-fi things in the book, like the inventions and powers that people get from being in contact with the space-ship, but there is little else worth reading.
There are many frustrating scenes of buildups to scares that just fail to be scary. More than once, this book hooked me with the promise of earth shattering revelations or unberable horror around the corner, and then just fizzled out and started building the next scene. To clairify, in this story SK tells you "there's something scary out there," then leaves it up to you to creep yourself out about it. However, once you get to that "scary thing out there," it's just a trick of light. He offers no real horrors here.
It's also really strange to me how he has to put so many possible reasons for the supernatural in his books. This one has the obvious UFO, but he also mentions an indian burial ground, ghosts from mines, all he needed to do to cover all the basses would be to add vampires and telepathy. Odd. Most of these explainations have nothing to do with the story that is going on. So, they just make it longer and more boring.
The worst is the ending. King doesn't have the best record with endings, but this one takes the cake. It is definately not worth reading a novel this long to get to this crappy ending. In fact it's not worth reading at all, because there is little on the way to the ending that is enjoyable.
Had I not read this after some of King's better works (The Stand, It, The Shining, Green Mile..) I would've stopped right away. From his other, better works, I assumed that this long buildup of characters was going to pay-off at some point. At his best King can make enjoyable epics with a large cast of characters. This is not his best, skip it. Don't make my mistake...just walk away.
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