History Literature / TheTommyknockers

* TouchedByVorlons: Everyone in Haven (except Gardener and Ed Hillman).

* InfantImmortality: [[spoiler:Almost the entire population of Haven dies at the end. Presumably, this includes the children, but the only ones we actually see - Hilly and David Brown - survive.]]

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 [[HomemadeInventions 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.

* InsufficientlyAdvancedAlien: The Tommyknockers. They don't even begin to understand the technology they somehow managed to figure out how to [[strike: use]] ''make'', and they don't have the common sense to use it to its greatest advantage.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: Gardener's few allies die to get him to the ship, he himself dies after being forced to kill Bobbi, and the rest of the townspeople (who are all irreversibly transformed into Tommyknockers) all either die from withdrawal or are killed by the federal government, but Gardener's sacrifice manages to remove the ship as a threat to Earth and even saves David Brown. The film has a more upbeat ending with most of the town including Bobbi surviving, though Gardener still dies via HeroicSacrifice]].

** The reference to ''The Shining'' is a bit of a special case, as it's specifically a reference to the ''movie'', rather than the book. Given that [[CreatorBacklash King notoriously hated the movie]], this could very well have been meant to imply that the movie was "non-canon" even within his own SharedUniverse.

** 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?"

* IntrepidReporter: A young reporter, John Leandro starts to see that something is wrong with Haven, so he goes there to find out what it is. His colleague, David Bright, ridicules him for it: "And - TA-DA! No One Will Believe This Heroic Young News-Hawk! Creator/RobertRedford Stars as John Leandro in This Nail-Biting Saga of..."

* MyBelovedSmother: John Leandro's mother.

* GreenIsUnnatural: Especially prevalent in the tv-series, where everything associated with the spaceship has an eerie green glow.

* RecycledScript: The story of Becka Paulson first appeared in 1984 as a short story called "The Revelations of Becka Paulson".

* AllWomenArePrudes: Well, at least Becca 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 [[SelfFulfillingProphecy as her mother had told her it would be]], nasty, brutish, sometimes painful, always humiliating".

* BadassGrandpa: Ev Hillman, though [[CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass you wouldn't expect it at first]].

[[quoteright:342:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/tommyknockers_9708.jpg]]

* NeverLiveItDown: In-universe, the only thing that anyone can ever remember about Gardener is that he shot his wife. Never mind that it was non-fatal, she didn't press charges, or any other thing he's ever done, all that important is that he shot his wife. However, this does establish Gard's position as a ClassicalAntiHero and show just how dangerous he can be when his drinking lowers his inhibitions.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: Gardener dies after being forced to kill Bobbi and most of the affected townspeople, but he manages to defeat the Tommyknockers and save David Brown. The film has a more upbeat ending with most of the town including Bobbi surviving, though Gardener still dies via HeroicSacrifice]].

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: Gardener dies, but he manages to defeat the Tommyknockers and save David Brown]].

* DrinkOrder: 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.)

''The Tommyknockers'' is an 1987 novel by Creator/StephenKing.

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

* TheHardHat: Gardener and Ev Hillman are immune to the effects of the spaceship, because they have metal plates in their heads (Gardener because of a skiing accident, Ev because of a war wound). Anne Anderson is somewhat protected by extensive metal dental work. In case of Gard however, several weeks of working day in, day out to dig up the ship eventually results in so much exposure to the ship that despite his metal plate, he too slowly starts to "become", making it harder for him to keep his mind from getting read.

* CanonWelding: Several. Johnny Smith of Literature/TheDeadZone is referenced a few times, as is the Shop from {{Literature/Firestarter}}. {{Literature/It}} appears twice in the novel, first to Everett Hillman as a chuckling noise in the Derry hospital's plumbing, and later to Tommy as the familiar clown with silver eyes and balloons in a sewer. Both characters dismiss it as a hallucination and the two events are never referred to again.
** Gardner wakes up after a bender early in the novel on Arcadia Beach by the Alhambra Hotel from ''Literature/TheTalisman''.

** Gardner wakes up after a bender early in the novel on the beach by the Alhambra Hotel from ''Literature/TheTalisman''.