GP Putnam's Sons. 1987, Stephen King, "The Tommyknockers", US First Edition/First Printing. dj/HC, Full number line as required: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. "Permissions to come" as stated. 448 pps. Price of $19.95 still intact on dust-jacket. ISBN # 0-670-82982-X. Black boards. A Fine example of this original hardcover book.
Condition
Fine/Fine. Clean & straight boards. No markings, writings, or stampings. No attached bookplates or signs of any removed. Dust-jacket free of tears, creases, etc. A well-cared for book, protected from any potential damage. This book stands out as having had exemplary care. Square and tight spine. Excellent original example. Collector's grade hardcover book. Dust-jacket protected in brand new Mylar sleeve. Price not clipped.
Book Photos
King's new novel, a numbing variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, offers
its own best commentary on itself. Nearly one-third of the way through the
560-page book, protagonist Bobbi Anderson, a writer of westerns, describes what
she has stumbled upon in her backyard to her friend Gardener, an alcoholic poet:
"It was a flying saucer. No self-respecting science-fiction writer would put one
in his story, and if he did, no self-respecting editor would touch it with a
ten-foot pole.. . . It is the oldest wheeze in the book." After the vampirish
Tommyknockers in the spaceship have wrought their evil magic upon the
inhabitants of Haven (Tommyknockers live on the blood of comatose humans
circulated through mind-reading PCs connected to VCRs), the unfortunate
townspeople have, it seems, "become" (the word, over-used and never explained,
is King's) "something else" (the vague words are also the author's).
The Tommyknockers is a 1987 horror novel by Stephen King. While maintaining a horror style,
the novel is more of an excursion into the realm of science fiction for King, as the residents of
the Maine town of Haven gradually fall
under the influence of a mysterious object buried in the woods.
In his autobiography, On
Writing, King attributes the basic premise to the short story "The Colour
out of Space" by H.P.
Lovecraft. It also draws fairly obvious parallels with the classic 1956
movie Invasion of the Body
Snatchers and the 1959 novelette The Big Front Yard by Clifford Simak. King
wrote the book during a period of acknowledged substance abuse, and has written that he
realized later on that the novel was a metaphor for that addiction.
Knockers, Knackers, Bwca (Welsh), Bucca (Cornish)
or Tommyknockers (US) are the Welsh
and Cornish equivalent
of Irish leprechauns and English and Scottish brownies. About two
feet tall and grizzled, but not misshapen, they live beneath the ground. Here
they wear tiny versions of standard miner's garb and commit random mischief,
such as stealing unattended tools and food.
Their name comes from the knocking on the mine walls that happens just before
cave-ins – actually the creaking of earth and timbers before giving way. To some
of the miners, the knockers were malevolent spirits and the knocking was the
sound of them hammering at walls and supports to cause the cave-in. To others,
who saw them as essentially well-meaning practical jokers, the knocking was their way of
warning the miners that a life-threatening collapse was imminent.
While some variety of "little people" was common to all Celtic and northern Germanic peoples, the origin of knockers
probably comes from early Welsh mythology, in which they may have been
the pre-Brythonic inhabitants of
the west of Britain. Skilled in the arts of mining and tunnelling, they taught
these arts to the Britons. These legends
may have influenced Tolkien's concept of the Dwarves, consummate miners and
stoneworkers who taught these skills to men.
According to some Cornish folklore
however, the Knockers were the helpful spirits of people who had died in
previous accidents in the many tin mines in the county, warning the miners of
impending danger. To give thanks for the warnings, and to avoid future peril the
miners cast the last bite of the pasties into the mines for the Knockers.
In the 1820's, immigrant Welsh
miners brought tales of the knockers and their theft of unwatched items and
warning knocks to western Pennsylvania, when they gravitated there to work
in the mines. Cornish
miners, much sought after in the years following the 1848 gold rush, brought them to California. When asked if they had relatives back in
Cornwall who would come to work the
mines, the Cornish miners always said something along the lines of "Well, me
cousin Jack over in Cornwall wouldst come could ye pay ’is boat ride", and so
came to be called Cousin Jacks. The
Cousin Jacks, as notorious for losing tools as they were for diving out of
shafts just before they collapsed, attributed this to their diminutive friends
and refused to enter new mines until assured by the management that the knockers
were already on duty. Belief in the knockers remained well into the 20th
century. When one large mine closed in 1956 and the owners sealed the entrance,
fourth, fifth, and sixth generation Cousin Jacks circulated a petition calling
on the mineowners to set the knockers free so that they could move on to other
mines. The owners complied.
A British TV channel broadcast a children's TV show in the 1980s called "The
Knockers".
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