Clara’s Verdict
Stephen King has been famously candid about The Tommyknockers – he wrote it during a period of heavy addiction and has since described it as something of a mess. He’s not entirely wrong, and yet the book retains a strange, compelling power that’s difficult to dismiss. Edward Herrmann’s narration, warm and authoritative, brings out the best in King’s characterisation even when the plotting loses its thread, and at 27 hours and 43 minutes, this is the kind of audiobook that rewards patient listeners willing to sit with a story that refuses to behave itself. For King completists, it’s essential. For newcomers, start elsewhere – but don’t let the author’s self-deprecation put you off eventually getting here.
About the Audiobook
Jim Gardener is a poet, a drunk, and a man barely holding himself together when he returns to the small community where his friend Bobbi Anderson lives. What he finds is familiar – the house, the furniture, Bobbi’s ageing beagle, the woods out back – and yet profoundly wrong. Because Bobbi has found something buried in those woods: a partially exposed object, metallic and strange, that sends a peculiar tingle through anyone who touches it. And since she found it, everything in the town has begun to change.
King writes in the shadow of his own addiction here, and the novel’s themes – compulsion, transformation, the seductive horror of something that promises power while extracting a terrible cost – feel lived-in rather than merely imagined. The town’s gradual alteration, as the buried thing exerts its influence, is drawn with his characteristic skill at depicting community dynamics and the slow erosion of what’s normal. Similar in spirit to ‘Salem’s Lot in its focus on a community’s quiet deterioration, it’s a bigger, stranger, and less disciplined book – but strange in ways that linger.
The Narration
Edward Herrmann was one of the great audiobook narrators of his generation, and his work here is a significant part of why this recording holds up so well. His voice has the quality of a seasoned storyteller – deep, unhurried, capable of registering both menace and pathos without effort. He handles King’s large cast of secondary characters with notable care; each one feels distinct rather than interchangeable. The novel’s tonal shifts – comic, horrifying, melancholic – are negotiated with assurance. At 27 hours and 43 minutes, Herrmann makes the length feel like a feature rather than a burden.
What Readers Say
The audiobook carries a 4.3-star rating. One reviewer, returning to the book decades after first reading it at nineteen, found that it had aged into something unexpectedly resonant – “a really good description of the way things are at the moment.” A longer review noted the book’s similarities to ‘Salem’s Lot while acknowledging King’s own ambivalence about it: “written by King whilst suffering from addiction and described by him as an awful book.” I. Shepherd, who expected supernatural horror and found science fiction, appreciated King’s ability to hold interest despite considerable longueur. The consensus is that this is a flawed but rewarding experience – exactly what it is.
Who Should Listen?
Essential for King completists working through his backlist chronologically, and worthwhile for any listener interested in how a great writer’s personal circumstances shape his fiction. Those who enjoyed ‘Salem’s Lot‘s focus on community horror will find familiar pleasures here, albeit in a more expansive and undisciplined form. Not the place to begin with King – but if you’ve already worked through the canonical favourites, this is a fascinating detour. Available on Audible UK.
