Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook
1987 Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook read by Edward Herrmann
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Just The Shining has accidentally caught lightning in a bottle how The Tommyknockers does. It is as if King was locked in his study/sweat lodge drawing pentagrams in cocaine, drinking magical potions made of Budweiser, and automatic typing himself right into a hallucinatory state. In The Tommyknockers he is possessed by the spirit of the Great God Lovecraft the doors of perception available, the veil parts, along with the workings of the universe are shown.
Think of King as America’s shaman, juicing up himself on mind-altering materials and stumbling out to the darkness, raving like a madman, but sometimes getting it directly. Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook. He finished the first draft of The Tommyknockers in 1983, while composing The Talisman and Eye of the Dragon, and finished the previous draft May 19, 1987, about six months prior to the sound book hit shelves in November, 1987. After he was finished, King didn’t write for a year. “I would do things and it’d fall apart like wet tissue paper,” he explained in an interview. “I don’t know how to explain it, except it is the impotent, horrible, horrible feeling.” 1988 would be the first year in contemporary history with no Stephen King audio book.
The Tommyknockers went into Putnam and Misery went into Viking. His move to Putnam was sentimental–his beloved editor, Alan Williams (editing King since The Dead Zone) was leaving Viking for Putnam and King wished to demonstrate his support. He’d return to Viking for his next audio book, but it was one hell of a coup to get Williams. As reviled as The Tommyknockers was (Library Journal: “Not one of King’s more original books.” Publisher’s Weekly: “The Tommyknockers is consumed by the rambling prose of its author…”) it was first printing of 1.2 million copies and wound up the third-best-selling audio book of the 1980s with 1.4 million audio books sold. Stephen King The Tommyknockers Audiobook Free Download.
The narrative is relatively straightforward. Bobbi Anderson is a novelist living in backwoods Maine who has a popular series of Westerns for her name. While walking in the woods she stubs her toe on the metallic edge of a buried UFO. The spacecraft radiates a malign influence transforming her into an inexhaustible genius, and she starts to excavate it. As more of it stalks, its own unleashed toxic energies contaminate the nearby city of Haven, the long-dead aliens hijacking the minds of the people, turning them into a paranoid Uni-Mind given to manic bursts of eccentric mechanical creativity. A metal plate in his mind protects him in the alien head meld however, faced with a force he can’t stop, ” he chooses to drink himself into a stupor and observe the UFO come up out of the floor, bearing tanked witness to mankind’s first contact. The Tommyknockers Stephen King Audiobook.
Stephen King The Tommyknockers. The Tommyknockers is derivative as hell. However, King can be pillaging his own audio books. There’s a long digression about the name of this town, much as there is in It, Derry creates an appearance, and using tongue twisters as a weapon is recycled. Even Pennywise the Clown is glimpsed peering from a storm drain. Firestarter’s The Shop plays a important part in the finale, Jack from The Talisman is seen chatting on a beach, Cujo gets a shout-out, Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone comes in coversation, and items get meta using a mention of “that man who writes horror audio books with curse words up in Bangor.” He disappears completely his own buttocks when a boy promises his younger brother a GI Joe action figure. Which one does he need? Crystal Ball, the GI Joe designed by Owen King at a write-in competition, and generally thought of as among the lamest GI Joes of all time. The Tommyknockers Full Audiobook Online.
Clearly, there’s a lack of editorial oversight. As King said in a meeting, You get all this liberty it can result in self-indulgence. I’ve been down that street, probably most notably with The Tommyknockers. But it was not just the lack of editors, but it had been the absence of sobriety. While composing The Tommyknockers King’s drinking and cocaine use were coming to a catastrophe. His wife, Tabitha, staged various interventions, sometimes threatening to leave, and he would placate her by stopping for a while, convinced he could scale back to his own. He could not. It was only in 1988 that he would deign to attend AA, and it wasn’t until 1989 he went cold turkey. Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook.
Stephen King The TommyknockersBut it’s wrong to reduce King’s output to nothing greater than a by-product of his substance abuse. Among his best novels, Cujo, will forever be dismissed due to his statement that he can not remember writing it. Why are Poe’s short stories and poems nothing more than unwanted effects of his dependence? Is Dave Sim’s Cerebus, a staggering and baffling comic audio book accomplishment, nothing more than the detritus of a disordered mind? Some artistic creations transcend the conditions of their creation, and while booze, blowoff, and bad faith helped lubricate King’s brain through the writing of The Tommyknockers, the audio book is visionary. King has described his writing as something that he does in a dreaming state, almost like automatic writing, and his white sexy productivity seems to place him in direct touch with his identity, bypassing his internal editor, and at The Tommyknockers his doors of perception open wide and allow him to paint a nightmarish, multi-layered portrait of America, past and future. Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook Download.
On its surface it is a horror story, one of King’s wildest, containing nightmare fuel imagery like Bobbi’s mysterious vagina eating her sister, along with the lunatic machines that the possessed townspeople create, a fever dream Sears catalog of flying coke machines, laundry racks which spray fire, pickup truck-mounted death rays, dog-powered healing machines, and Bobbi’s composing machine which produces her audio books while she’s asleep, a feeling the hyper-productive King should have been familiar with. This will, in actuality, mark the third time King has written about a magical writing system (“Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” “Word Processor of the Gods”).
Dig a coating, and it’s about dependence, but not just King’s dependence. His tortured, twitching mind gives us an whole culture locked from the sweaty, herky jerky rhythms of dependence. Bobbi lapses into blackouts during which she is incredibly productive, like King, but that are burning her out, like a junkie. Just like King. The Tommyknockers Audiobook Free.
Bobbi was coming towards him her face was gaunt, her eyes deep within her sockets, her brow light and too broad. Her shirt was buttoned wrong. The fly of her jeans was three-quarters of their way down. She smelled sweaty and filthy and…well, as if she might have had an accident in her pants.
“Fine!” This shambling, filthy, stumbling skeleton reiterated. “Thought you had given up on me! Good to see you man! A lot of stuff going on a lot of effort, a hell of a lot more left to do but I am getting there, getting there”.
And she dropped forward semiconscious to Gardener’s arms. Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook Online. She lies about what is happening to her body, regarding the passing of her much-loved puppy, Peter, and above all, concerning the Tommyknocker that possesses her. “It will not do anything to me I don’t want it to,” she says, like an alcoholic who believes she’s got the bottle once the bottle gets her. Gardener believes:
Inform me, Bobbi, did you want to operate until you lost? Did you want to lose as much weight that you seemed just like an anorexic? Did you push, or were you driven? The point-of-view flips out of character to character like someone with ADD and a remote controller, never settling long enough to become comfortable, deflating its narrative drive every time it moves. Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook. Since Haven is taken over by the Tommyknockers, its hyperactive, emaciated residents lose their hair and teeth. These over-productive skeletons hide, building covert killing machines, killing outsiders who stumble into their city, their minds warping, owned of a sly secrecy. Haven is the bleakest facet of this rural America to come, everyone hooked on meth, obsessed with moot gadgets, starving to death, under the influence of a giant, malignant force that has wiped out local industry and harnessed everyone to its needs. The Wal-Martknockers, maybe. Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook Free. The sickly green glow of this Tommyknockers which suffuses the sound book, the hair loss, the weight loss, the loss of bowel control, it’s a audio book that paints a portrait of an untreatable people dying of cancer. Gardener is fixated on the dangers of nuclear energy, and an argument over reactor core meltdowns and mutated infants are what lost him his last job, and it’s a small hop out there to the apparently omnipotent Tommyknockers who promise cheap, plentiful power for everyone at the cost of a sickening of the soul, a reduction of humankind, along with a cancer-ridden body.
Stephen King The Tommyknockers. The image of an alien God, lifeless in his UFO, crashed into an America hungry for cheap energy, is a strong one, and King fast forwards through a damn, paranoid version of American history. Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook Download. Native Americans, the coming of the white man, UFO scares, Area 51, the men in black, mind control signals, Three Mile Island. It is a fever dream of a tumor-ridden country, hooked on its pointless toys, attention spans fragmented, bodies falling apart, brains burning out like light bulbs, and everyone hurrying after useless prizes, dropping their individuality in the face of rising group think.
King claims of The Tommyknockers: It turned out to be a hard one to write, to keep tabs on all those folks in the story. When I finished the first draft, it seemed as the Bataan Death March, with a great deal of cross-outs and materials. I secured myself in the toilet and laughed hysterically and cried and then laughed again. I never did that using a audio book.”
Stephen King The TommyknockersThe medications, the surplus length, the lack of management, the derivative storyline, all of these are necessary evils since King tuned throughout the static and received these messages from someplace? Stephen King The Tommyknockers Audiobook. It’s a harrowing account of his own addiction, a audio book about the curse of his successful output, a sound book about domestic addictions, a audio book about cancer, a audio book about the near future, a audio book about our appetite for cheap energy, a sound book about our hunger for productivity, and a audio book about our hunger to belong, a sound book about our appetite for transcendence, a audio book about our hunger for hunger.
Out of management, full of crashing humiliations and soaring insights, The Tommyknockers veers all over the area like a DUI in the seconds before he runs off the street, but it moves faster and further than a great deal of King’s more polished audio books. It burnt out him, but he moved up in a green mushroom cloud of hallucinatory prose, maybe not with a whimper. The Tommyknockers Audiobook Stephen King.
This novel is divided into three components: “sound book I – The Ship in the Earth,” “audio book II – Tales of Haven,” “music book III – The Tommyknockers.” Audio book I’m, essentially, about Bobbi’s discovery, and Gard’s arrival and participation. From the time it finishes, you are already at the point where you feel as though you’re going to reduce it. Music book II is about the people of Haven as well as the changes that are happening in town. This part of the book is a little bit of a break from the insanity of this rest. Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook Streaming. It starts off nearly as dumb as the beginning of the book, and remains on a fairly even keel during, lulling you into the false belief that this will be the rate for the length. Subsequently audio book III begins, and the plot takes off like a rocket, dragging you along screaming for the rest of the ride.
Sound book I was excellent. Music book III was mind boggling. I must confess I believe audio book II is the reason it took me to read the whole book. While I was reading the first part, I was, as I said, trying to limit my reading to at work just so that I could get some serious writing done in your home, but I snuck in a few hours here and there, since I had to understand what was occurring. Stephen King The Tommyknockers Audiobook Free. When it transitioned, however, I had been content to read just on my breaks at work, actually skipping days when I had a day off or when I found myself discussing the break area with one or more of my fellow employees. When sound book III began to pick up, however, I had to read it to the conclusion, studying the previous 40 pages and forgetting that the bowl was on along with my sister had been enthusiastically cheering, then frustratingly jeering (her team dropped, apparently) only four feet from where I was studying. Of course, music book II has been necessary. It introduced me to significant characters which came into play at the end, and explained that Bobbi wasn’t the only one changing. It also is probably the sole reason why my head didn’t explode while I was reading this. Stephen King – The Tommyknockers Audiobook.