The monster

This article is about the Stephen Kings novel. For his film adaptation, see Tommyknockers - Das Monstrum ; for the German film of the same name see Das Monstrum (film) .

Das Monstrum - Tommyknockers (English The Tommyknockers ) is a 1987 novel by the writer Stephen King . The German publisher Hoffmann und Campe published the translation of the novel by Joachim Körber in 1988. It was listed at number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list for a week that same year .

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Bobbi Anderson stumbles upon a spaceship from a distant galaxy that is just waiting to be excavated on her sprawling property in the small town of Haven , Maine .

Out of sheer curiosity, the writer begins to dig deeper into some western novels and only slowly does she realize that she suddenly has ideas that have never crossed her mind. But she's not the only one with groundbreaking ideas. All of Haven seems to be in a state of upheaval. After a short time, the place will be disconnected from the local power grid because you can now provide the energy yourself. And James Gardener - failed poet, alcoholic and ex-boyfriend of Bobbi - is very astonished when he sees that Bobbi, otherwise technically rather untalented, has made inventions for a few days that could change the world.

Bobbi gets Jim Gardener to help her dig up the ship. The residents of Haven, especially Bobbi, are now increasingly able to read minds. Only Jim, who has a metal plate in his skull as a souvenir of a skiing accident, is excluded from this development ("He and the rest of Haven still played poker the old-fashioned way").

But digging out the ship is not all good. The inhabitants of Haven are changing. First their teeth fall out, then hair loss follows and suddenly Jim, who is lagging far behind in development due to his partial immunity, realizes that people are also changing physically. He also notices callousness and lust for murder among the "new and improved" Havenians. He separates himself more and more from Bobbi, whom he hardly recognizes anymore; He realizes more and more clearly that the situation for humanity is getting worse.

When they have uncovered the spaceship and climb inside, Jim, who has not been infected by the hysteria, realizes that the Tommyknockers , the aliens, are long dead. But their technology has survived and has now cast a spell over Haven, so that the residents are gradually becoming Tommyknockers as well. He decides to put an end to the matter and flies into space on the spaceship.

The name Tommyknockers comes from a little verse Jim has in mind when he comes to Haven. Bobbi reads the name in his mind, and since it doesn't matter what the "invaders" are called, she ends up using it. According to Bobbi, those mutating to Tommyknockers don't care what name they are given. They had already been to several worlds, and they were sometimes called that way, sometimes differently; in any case, the name is unimportant.

useful information

The 1993 film Stephen King's Tommyknockers was directed by John Power . The four-hour mini-series ran on US television and was originally released on VHS in Germany with a seventy-minute shortened version. The private broadcaster Sat.1 showed a version shortened to half of the original in two parts on German television. However, the DVD was released completely uncut.

Links with other works

• In the full version of The Stand , one of the main characters reads chapters from a book by Bobbi Anderson to a terminally ill friend.
• Reporter David Bright previously interviewed Johnny Smith on Dead Zone ; he is a real figure, a friend of King's.
• King refers to himself without giving his name when they speak of a guy in Bangor who puts these dirty novels on paper.
• Joe Paulson's wife Rebecca already immersed in it up when she finds at several points in their house money while the club of losers against ES in the fight draws.
• The ominous shop appears for the first time in Feuerkind .
• The little boy, who temporarily disappears during his brother's magic trick, appears in Roland's world The Dark Tower and dreams of him.
• A notable link is to the American science fiction film Forbidden Planet ( Forbidden Planet ) from 1956. In King's novel a little boy disappears without a trace during a harmless magic piece. When asked about the whereabouts of the child, the boy's brother can only say that he is on Altair 4 . In the film, the planet Altair 4 is home to the Krell, a highly developed alien species that developed the ability to instantly turn their thoughts into reality. However, the Krell were annihilated by their own invention, as the aggressive tendencies of their subconscious manifested monsters directed against them. The spaceship discovered by Bobbi Anderson is also controlled by the power of thought, just as it corresponds to the technology of the Krell.
• Jim Gardener knows about the military's mysterious Arrowhead Project, the fateful experiment that triggered the events in Stephen King's novella The Fog , to be found in the short story book Im Dawn .
• There is also another allusion to the novel Es: The story takes place in Haven, Derry's immediate neighbor. And when a certain Tommy was in Derry, the following happened to him: “... as he drove through Wentworth Street, he thought he saw a clown grinning at him from an open sewer - a clown who was replacing glittering silver dollars eyes and holding balloons in his clenched, white-gloved hand. “You don't have to be a Stephen King fan to find out which clown is meant by that.
• Jim Gardener meets the boy Jack Sawyer, the protagonist from The Talisman by Peter Straub and Stephen King , on the beach at Hotel Arcadia Beach .
• According to King's autobiography Life and Writing , another inspiration was the story " Color Out of Space " by HP Lovecraft, who is a fan of King. Here a Gardner family appears, which, through the power of a being from outer space, begins to mutate to the most hideous. The being steals energy from the land and causes a glow in a color unknown on earth.
• The Krefeld band Blind Guardian has released two songs called Tommyknockers and Altair 4 on their album Tales from the Twilight World , which relate to the plot.

literature

• Stephen King: The monster. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-455-01902-1 .
• Stephen King: The Monster - Tommyknockers. 18th edition. Heyne, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-453-03697-2 .
• Stephen King: The monster. Unabridged edition. Ullstein, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-548-26311-9 .

Web links

• The monster . In: StephenKing.com (English)
• The monster in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (English)
• The monster in KingWiki

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from December 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive )