by Jay Wilburn
The plan is to reread all of Stephen King’s works in the order that they were published. Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance had the vision. I’m doing it because I am a writer and I want to improve my fiction. And I love Stephen King’s stories. I think there is something to be learned through this process.
You can also go back to the beginning and read Before Carrie or any of my other posts up through this one and beyond by checking out this link to the Master List of all my #StephenKingRevisited posts.
I believe I have heard or read Stephen King himself say once that The Tommyknockers was his worst book. I know a lot of readers and King fans who place this book at or near the bottom of the list for his books in order of greatness.
I like the book. I’d have to think really hard whether it would make the top ten or top twenty of Stephen King books for me, but it certainly wouldn’t be at the bottom.
Some of these scenes from this book stick with me still. Some of the horror still haunts me. Specific lines and moments still dance around my brain when I think of Stephen King. Put together and broken apart in its pieces, I think this story really works. The more I think about it the more excited I am to revisit it.
I read this in high school within the first couple years after I picked up on King after reading It. I believe this was a used bookstore buy that my father brought home to me. I doubt that I would have picked up on it on my own at that time. I still have the same copy with the marker lines on the outside of the pages that meant something to the store selling it at the time, but is just and artifact now.
This book is one I think deserves far more love than it has gotten. We’ll see if I make the case for that in my next post or if the rereading results in me seeing bigger flaws I missed my first time through.
My next post will be After Tommyknockers which will be linked on the Master List of all my Stephen King Revisited posts.
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