Just Finished Rereading Stephen King's The Tommyknockers

As I continue to look back through Stephen King's long bibliography, I just finished reading his 1987 allegorical science fiction novel The Tommyknockers.  While just about all good fiction is allegorical to a degree, this story is especially so.  Set once again in Stephen King's mythical Maine country, a huge chunk of its beginning focuses on Bobbi Anderson, a young writer of western novels who lives on the outskirts of the small town of Haven with her dog Peter.  The two enjoy their walks in the adjacent woods until one day Bobbi trips over some metal object sticking out of the ground.  As she starts to uncover it, she discovers not only that it goes down deep, but that it has an influence over her by giving her the ability to invent amazing things out of the ordinary objects she has around her.  The more the object is dug up, the more it exposes its effects in the air and soon more people in the vicinity and within Haven become similarly affected...one of the by-products being that they loose their teeth.  And they also become telepathic as the air around them changes its composition. Bobbi quickly becomes fanatically determined to fully dig up the artifact, and the townspeople join her...

In the meantime, Bobbi's on-and-off-again boyfriend Jim "Gard" Gardner, a poet of some talent with a drinking problem, has been making the recital circuit in the general area.  He has one issue that he regularly gets himself in trouble about: his adamant opposition to the use of nuclear energy.  One night at a party for the poets, he drinks way too much and encounters someone who is speaking in favor of nuclear power. A big fight ensues and when it is all over he finds himself waking up several days later out on a pier.  Wanting to end it all, he considering jumping into the sea, but mentally picks up the feeling that "Bobbi is in trouble" and returns to Haven.  There the two reunite and work together on the excavation: but Gard is impervious to the effects of what is now revealed to be a huge alien spacecraft because he has a metal plate in his head from a boyhood skiing accident...

So now, while necessarily leaving out a lot in this long book, I have essentially set up the scenario for The Tommyknockers...you're welcome to read it for yourself to find out what happens to Bobbi, Peter, Gard, and the rest of Haven (and others).  Instead, I'd like now to go back to that allegory, which is about the effects of drugs on people...since they are all mind-altering in nature and impart a sense of special power to their users, much like the effect of the ship on Bobbi and the Haven residents.  And abusers of the same chemicals tend to bond more with each other and insulate and rationalize their use against the "outside" world...just like in this story.  Of course, Jim Gardner is himself almost constantly in a state of intoxication through much of the narrative as well.  In the end, though, the altered people...the "Tommyknockers"...are really only smarter in a very specialized way and have very little common sense or social intelligence...

Stephen King himself admits that he wrote Tommyknockers while dealing with his own drug habit and that this was reflected in the story.  Today around us we are confronted with a dire opioid abuse epidemic that stems from carelessly prescribed pain medicine starting a few years ago and is now blossoming into mass heroin addiction across this country, with the death rate spiraling upward.  All drug abuse, from nicotine to alcohol to all sorts of illegal substances, functions to first imitate and enhance the effects of already naturally-established biological processes within our bodies and then, with regular use, to supplant them, thereby shutting them down when use is interrupted, causing withdrawal. Better to never get started with them in the first place, as Nancy Reagan used to urge us.  But seeing things for what they are is an important first step to recovery, and one useful lesson is that using this stuff doesn't really make you wiser or more enlightened in spite of what you might think while under the influence...