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The Tommyknockers: Difference between revisions
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=== ''[[The Tommyknockers]]'' provides examples of: ===
* [[The Alcoholic]]: Jim Gardner. Unfortunately, he's a mean drunk.
* [[All Women Are Prudes]]: Well, at least Becka Paulson is. At first, she's actually relieved when she suspects that her husband is having an affair, because this means he doesn't have sex with her anymore. To her, sex was "just [[Self
* [[Author Avatar]]: See [[The Alcoholic]]. Stephen King had substance abuse problems for years, and it sneaked into his writing a lot (much to his own surprise, after he sobered up enough to notice).
* [[Auto Erotica]]: Gardener remembers that he and Bobbi once had sex in her truck "during some stupid Ryan O'Neal picture".
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* [[Body Horror]]: The process of "becoming". For most people, it's just teeth falling out, but a select few's skin becomes transparent, and tentacles appear in the place of their genitals.
* [[Celebrity Paradox]]: Stephen King himself is referenced in the book; the townspeople think that Bobbi writes good stories, "not all full of make-believe monsters and a bunch of dirty words, like the books that fellow who lived up Bangor way wrote". Also, when Gardener wants to get into the shed, he considers grabbing an ax "and make like [[Jack Nicholson]] in ''[[The Shining]]''". However, events in ''[[The Dead Zone]]'', ''[[IT]]'' and ''[[Firestarter]]'' are mentioned as fact or at least hearsay, not as fiction.
* [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass]]: Ev Hillman first appears as a "garrulous-going-on-tiresome" old man. However, he proves to be very brave and heroic, when he [[Papa Wolf|tries to save his grandson]].
* [[Disappearing Box]]: Played with. Hilly Brown made a machine that didn't make things disappear, but sent to Altair IV. However, he uses it with the intent of making things vanish under an ordinary cloth as a magic trick.
* [[Disproportionate Retribution]]: After gaining mind-reading abilities, Hank Buck, one of the Havenites discovers that a member of his poker circle, "Pits" Barfield regularly used to cheat. Hank teleports him to "Altair 4", a faraway, desolate planet that hardly has any air. This story is included to show the Tommyknockers' crazy temper.
* [[Doorstopper]]: Actually, many parts could be cut, as they [[Filler|don't really advance the plot]].
* [[Drink Order]]: Late in the story, Bobbi's sister Anne shows up. Watch what happens when she orders a drink at a hotel on her way to Haven. (It's not so much the drink itself that's revealing, mostly the way she orders it.)
* [[Evil
* [[Flare Gun]]: Ev Hillman has one; he originally wants to use it to give an emergency signal, but he ends up killing one of the Havenites with it.
* [[Flashback Nightmare]]: Gardener regularly has them about his teenage skiing accident (after which he got the steel plate in his head).
* [[For Want of a Nail]]: All the events are triggered by Bobbie stumbling in a piece of metal. The book actually starts with this sentence: "For want of a nail the kingdom was lost - that's how the catechism goes when you boil it down."
* [[Go Out With a Smile]]: {{spoiler|Gardener}} dies smiling, because, as he lies dying, he has a happy dream.
* [[Hair
* [[The Hard Hat]]: Gardener and Ev Hillman are immune to the effects of the spaceship, because they have metal plates in their heads (Gardener bcause of a skiing accident, Ev because of a war wound). Anne Anderson is somewhat protected by extensive metal dental work.
* [[Hate Plague]]: Thanks to the [[Hair
* [[Homicide Machines]]: The Havenites built several of these, to guard the city borders. One of them is a floating Coca-Cola vending machine {{spoiler|which kills John Leandro}}.
* [[Insufficiently Advanced Alien]]: The Tommyknockers. They don't even begin to understand the technology they somehow managed to figure out how to <s> use</s> ''make''.
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* [[It Tastes Like Feet]]: After the owner dies, the food at the Haven Lunch gets crappy: a character thinks the fried eggs look like "broiled assholes" and taste that way too "although he'd never actually eaten an asshole, broiled or any other way."
* [[I Want My Mommy]]: {{spoiler|Leandro}}'s last thought, right before he's killed is "Mama!"
* [[Jerkass]]: Bobbi's sister, complete with introductory [[Kick the Dog]] moment (she reduces an airline stewardess to tears, seemingly for the hell of it). When she was younger, she bullied her own parents. (One such incident involved her habit of grinding her teeth until she had to get dental work done. She tried to force a guilt trip on them for not stopping a habit that she herself refused to give up). When she tells her mother that she called Bobbi to tell her that their father was dead, she said that Bobbi laughed (untrue). Then she goes to Haven and tries to pull this on the locals. BIG mistake. {{spoiler|She ends up as a [[
** Also Joe from the TV miniseries who not only cheats on his wife, but he throws her lunch for him and his sons, laughs evilly after making his wife feel bad for herself and abandon a search for a lost kid to have an affair again knowing that his wife would be more concerned about the search than him.
* [[Last
* [[Living Battery]]: {{spoiler|The people in Bobbi's shed. The ship also worked with power drained from aliens}}.
* [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]
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* [[Touched By Vorlons]]: Everyone in Haven (except Gardener).
* [[Understatement]]: When Gardener gives a rant against nuclear power at a party, he mentions that before the opening of the power plant at Three Mile Island, it was discovered that the plumbers accidentally hooked a tank for liquid radioactive waste to the drinking fountains instead of the scuts. The people investigating wrote in their report that hooking up radioactive waste-coolant pipes to the ones feeding water to the drinking fountains was a "generally inadvisable practice".
* [[What Did I Do Last Night?]]: Before the start of the novel, Gardener shot his wife in the face during a binge (she survived). He woke up in a prison cell, not remembering it; when he asked the deputy what did he do, he answered: "Shot your wife. That's what you did. Good fucking deal, uh?"
* [[Year Outside, Hour Inside]]: Time is a lot slower on Altair 4; that's why David Brown can be brought back alive about a month later he was sent there, despite the fact that the planet hardly has any air.
{{reflist}}
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