The Tommyknockers: Difference between revisions

While walking in the woods near the small town of Haven, Maine, Roberta "Bobbi" Anderson, a writer of Westerns, stumbles upon a metal object which turns out to be the slightest portion of an alien spacecraft that crashed into Earth in prehistoric times. She begins to dig it out, and slowly becomes obsessed with it. Meanwhile her best friend, alcoholic poet Jim "Gard" Gardener, reaches the nadir of his life and decides to kill himself, but changes his mind when he feels that she is in trouble. He travels to Haven, and finds Bobbi at the point of complete exhaustion. While the spacecraft has no effect on him because of a steel plate in his head, he still decides to help her in unearthing it, hoping to change the world for the better with the power it holds. As more and more is exposed of the ship, the inhabitants of Haven begin to change (the process is called "becoming"), and they become like the aliens who built it (dubbed the "Tommyknockers" after a nursery rhyme); they gain telepathic abilities, and [[Homemade Inventions|build futuristic devices from simple household appliances]]. Gardener, seeing that their intentions are far from his idealistic goals, starts to doubt himself, and thinks he should do something against them.

 

 

It was adapted into a 1993 miniseries starring Jimmy Smits, Marg Helgenberger, E.G. Marshall, Joanna Cassidy and Traci Lords.

* [[Badass Grandpa]]: Ev Hillman.

* [[Berserk Button]]: Don't praise nuclear power in front of Gardener.

* [[Bittersweet Ending]]: {{spoiler|Gardener dies, but he manages to defeat the Tommyknockers and save David Brown}}.

* [[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.

* [[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!"

** 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-Name Basis]]: Jim Gardener is called "Gard" by Bobbi, his best friend. The narration also refers to him as "Gardener" or "Gard".

* [[Smoldering Shoes]]: Two cops are almost completely disintegrated with a Tommyknocker weapon. All that remains is a single smoking shoe. With a foot still in it.

* [[Stage Magician]]: Hilly Brown, a [[Child Prodigy]], wants to be one; when he gains technical abilities, he builds a machine that sends things to a faraway planet ([[Shout-Out|referred as]] [[Forbidden Planet|Altair IV]]), then brings them back, and uses it for magic tricks. However, when he sends away his little brother, David, he can't bring him back; rescuing him later becomes a major plot thread.

* [[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?"