[I]t was good to be with your friends, good to be where you belonged...good to have some safe haven to come to.
After last year's unintentionally timely, and much-needed It reread, I decided I was going to spend 2024 tackling the Stephen King novels I haven't yet read. The man's written a lot of books, so that should keep me happily in doorstop novels well into next year, especially given my lack of reading time.
My first read of the year was The Tommyknockers.
Despite its whopping 864 pages, this one reads as a much quicker book than It. As opposed to the monolithic study on childhood, and the impossibility of returning to it that is It, The Tommyknockers has a distinctly pulpy feel. That's not a mark against the novel; I love the way pulp novels can bravely throw wild, sometimes silly ideas out there and then catch you with a sideswipe that cuts straight to the bone. There's often a lot of truth in silly, and The Tommyknockers is no exception. It left me very nostalgic for the books of the eighties and nineties which were concerned with storytelling in the truest sense, as opposed to "being edgy," whatever the heck that actually means.
The horror in this novel is of the big, existential kind, and is undercut by the personal horror of, in Gard's case especially, the struggle with addiction. The "Becoming" is a science-fiction means of amplifying all the ways the people of Haven are terrible; these are ways in which all people, to a certain extent, are terrible in a non-evil, but still oftentimes harmful way. Horror - effective horror - takes real world, small-scale fears, and spins them into something supernatural and fanged. King's great gift when it comes to the genre, and storytelling in general, is rooting that horror deeply and believably in a cast of very flesh-and-blood characters who feel knowable to the audience.
My favorite lines are always those little nuggets of broader-reaching gold that are so terribly true, and perhaps not the sort of thing general audiences would expect to find in a novel of this sort - but which I'm always counting on from one of my all-time favorite authors.
All the intelligence and determination in the world cannot create art without a bit of talent, but intelligence and determination can create some great forgeries.
Last night I started Needful Things, and it's another great big chunky book, so I look forward to falling into its version of Maine for the next couple of months.
I cannot wait!
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