In Which We Discuss Four Past Midnight

Four Past Midnight is a collection of short novellas, similar to Four Seasons though rather less famous and with a greater focus on horror and the supernatural.  It's Stephen King's 31st published work by my count, in 1990.

I had read it before, although I didn't remember much of it.  I remembered The Langoliers but not the details of Secret Window, Secret Garden which was the very story I picked the collection up for.

The Langoliers focuses on a few people who wake up on a plane with everyone else gone.  I like the Langoliers, the supernatural monsters that turn up halfway through.

Secret Window, Secret Garden was turned into a movie starring Johnny Depp.  That on focuses on plagiarism.

The Library Policeman was also very good; however, I do find it interesting that Stephen King mentions that 'the library policeman' was a fear of his younger son, Owen.  The character who is pursued by it pictures it in that form because he was raped by a man calling himself a 'library policeman' at an early age.  I'm not sure I'd be able to separate the two characters once one had grown from the other.  That's one of the many reasons why Stephen King is a much better writer than I am.

Sun Dog is a weird little story about a camera.  Rather enjoyable in its own way.

James Smythe points out in his article that many people focus on The Langoliers, like I did.  He's also reminded me that Sun Dog is part of a series with Needful Things and, I think, either The Dark Half or The Tommyknockers.  It also features Pop Merril as a main character, Pop being the uncle of Ace from The Body and related to several characters in The Tommyknockers.  A character in the Sun Dog also refers to the divorce and suicide of The Dark Half's Thad Beaumont.

So now, on to The Wastelands, the third Dark Tower novel.  I'm also part of the way through Haunted Heart, a biography of Stephen King which I hope will give me some interesting background.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 13/52

Six books this week!  That's 4th to the 11th of November.

Three of these I'd read before - Animal Farm, Soldier Girl and A Hopscotch Summer.  Hopscotch Summer and Soldier Girl are parts one and two in a series set in 1930s-40s Birmingham.  The first book focuses mostly on Emma Brown, who ends up caring for her three younger siblings at the tender age of eight, when her mother develops post-natal depression.  When a spot of marital-rape and shouting at her doesn't sort it out, her husband sends her off to her sister while he has an affair.  I'm not totally sure why their getting back together is seen as a good thing.

In Soldier Girl Emma is in her late teens and gets married.  However, the book mostly focuses on her friend Molly, who appeared in A Hopscotch Summer as a side character.  Molly, who I've discussed in more detail here, was abused as a child but makes something of herself as an ack-ack girl in the army.  I quite enjoy stories about life building - see Rose Madder - and there's another link with her being a Brummie.  At first I was a little offended; the accents are very broad considering the main characters live in Nechells.  On the other hand, this was the thirties; regional accents were broader then.  Having now listened to something like twenty hours of this woman speaking (I'm midway through the third part of the series) I've gotten used to it.

Soldier Girl is my favourite one of the series, and not just because Molly is my favourite character.  It's a very odd experience walking down New Street and hearing about St Martin's church being bombed.

Both Tommyknockers and The Great Gatsby were new to me, and I wrote more about each of them in the linked post.  Perhaps I should have compared the two.

Finally, Murder in the Dark, a collection of short prose pieces by Margaret Atwood.  I like that Atwood's idea of short is one or two pages, since that's close to mine.  The best of them was one I'd read previously, Happy Endings which you can read online at Perdue.edu.

In Which We Discuss Tommyknockers

Tommyknockers is Stephen King's 3074th novel, published in 1979.  I'm kidding, it's more like his 28th.  It was also the last novel published before I was born, which probably doesn't mean a great deal to Stephen King but it's interesting to me!  I didn't notice this, but the book is actually set in 1988, making it five minutes into the future at the time it was published.

The book's about a small town in Maine; not Derry or Castle Rock but an even smaller place called Haven.  A writer, Bobbi Anderson, begins digging up a huge, strange ship and as more of it is exposed to the air more and more people are changed.  They become.

Anderon nicknames the former owners of the ship 'Tommyknockers', from an old children's rhyme that both Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha King, were familiar with;

Late last night and the night before,
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers knocking at the door.
I wanna go out, don't know if I can
'cause I'm so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.

In the introduction, King mentions that 'Tommy' is an old name for a British soldier.  It is, but it only goes back to world war I, where "Thomas Anderson" was the example name written on a soldier's paybook.  That was discussed in Terry Pratchett's Johnny and the Bomb, or possibly Johnny and the Dead.  One or the other.

I know the rhyme as well.  It's a skipping rhyme, and we'd sing;

Not last night but the night before,
Twenty-four robbers came knocking at my door,
As I ran out to let them in, to let them in, to let them in....

...and you'd run back and forth under the rope while you chanted.

So we know that in both England and the US something happened, perhaps not last night but the night before, but possibly on both nights.  In England we let them in.  Perhaps the Americans blew up the English robbers to a ridiculous, boogyman extent?

Anyway, in story, it's just a nickname, literally a word pulled out of the air by the characters to label something inexplicable.

I want to talk about something a little spoileriffic now, so please clear the area.

Spoilers

Near the end of the novel, Gard, who is somewhat immune to the 'becoming' enters the spaceship.  'Becoming' involves several physical and mental changes, including telepathy, teeth falling out and growing snouts and claws.  Inside the spaceship he finds several snouty, toothless, claw-having creatures who appear to have killed one another in an argument.  He reflects that the Tommyknockers are good inventors but have low maturity.  They invent better ways of killing each other instead of finding out how not to.

Gard manages to send the spaceship flying off to find another planet, preventing the 'becoming' proceeding on earth.  In the process, he dies from wounds received in combat.

Earlier in the novel, Gard reflected on the cuckoo-like nature of the Tommyknockers.  They come to new planets and 'improve' them, taking their technology further.

So, my theory is that the creatures who had died in the ship weren't the original Tommyknockers.  They were the remains of the last victims.

Perhaps the fact that the 'becoming' involved specific physical changes indicates that the original Tommyknockers did resemble that.  However, the 'becoming' seems to be powered by a virus-like substance.  Perhaps this was sent out in the ship - which is highly automated - to terraform new planets?

I said that Gard is somewhat immune to the 'becoming'.  He's not completely immune; it just takes a lot longer.  Perhaps the changes continue to work after he has died, so the next species to locate the ship while find just another snouted, toothless, clawed being on the upper decks?

Gard does think about most of this.  However, I'm not sure he considers the idea that not all of the Tommyknockers were fully affected by the virus-thing and that they died not because the virus makes them psychotically unstable but because some of them were in opposition to becoming.

End Spoilers

When it comes to references to other books, Johnny Smith of The Dead Zone and the Shop of Firestarter show up a few times.  One of the characters also sees a clown peeking out from the sewers as he drives through Derry - a reference to It - and at one point Gard has a conversation with Jack of The Talisman.  Stephen King himself and his novel The Shining are also mentioned as in-universe.

Tommyknockers is one of the novels published as Stephen King was coming to the end of his period of severe substance abuse.  King has said previously that the issue was so bad he doesn't remember writing Cujo at all.  Cujo was published in 1981, six years prior to Tommyknockers.

This experience of substance abuse is expressed in Gard, an alcoholic who managed to shoot his wife while drunk.  James Smythe's post focuses on this. Apparently after the bookwas published Tabitha King staged an intervention.  In 1979 their eldest daughter, Naomi, turned nine.  Joe Hill was seven and Owen King was only two years old.  Both Joe Hill and Owen King became writers and have said in a rather sweet interview that they are Stephen King's fans as well as his sons.  To my knowledge, Naomi King has not been interviewed because she is not a public figure, which is fair enough.

There's a film of Tommyknockers, which I only discovered when I was looking up info on Nightmares in the Sky.  I'll watch it if I can get ahold of it.

I'd really call the book more sci-fi than horror, but I've not been scared by any fiction in a while.  That might be a result of moving in with my partner - it's harder to be frightened when there's someone else in the house, especially when it's such a small house.

Following Tommyknockers no major novels were published until 1989, and that was The Dark Half.  However, there was a work published in 1988 - Nightmares in the Sky.  It's a collection of photographs by f-stop Fitzgerald (not a typo) with text by Stephen King.  I've ordered a copy from German Amazon which should arrive by the 27th.  Abe books cancelled and refunded my order, on the grounds that they have no copies in stock, though their website still claims twenty available.

I do quite like The Dark Half which I've read before, so I might just start on that early and read Nightmares in the Sky later.  James Smythe - who is doing the same kind of project two years ahead - didn't read it as part of his challenge.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 12/52

Only two books this week - 29th October to 4th November.  Stoner I already wrote a longer post about.  Seven Deadly Sins was part of the Gaiman Humble Bundle.  Seven short graphic-novel stories around the seven deadly sins, by different authors and artists.  Gaiman's Sloth was uncompleted, as a bit of meta-fiction.  The most interesting was Alan Moore's Lust - a retelling of World War II told as if it were a sexual encounter between Germany and Russia.  The line "afterwards, we both lay there smoking" was particularly chilly when juxtaposed with the image.

I've spent much of the week reading Stephen King's The Tommyknockers which I aim to finish this evening.  After this, we'll finally be up to books published within my lifetime!  Nightmares in the Sky was published when I was two months old.  It's a collection of photographs with text by Stephen King, and it sounds kind of like the project Who Killed Amanda Palmer?.