The Tommyknockers

On June 21, 1988, Roberta "Bobbi" Anderson, a western novelist living in an inherited farmhouse outside the small town of Haven, Maine, trips over a metallic protrusion while walking in the woods with her aging beagle, Peter. Digging around it, she discovers the object extends deep into the earth: smooth, gray, and unscratchable. Peter reacts with fear, refusing to approach. Bobbi becomes obsessed, losing track of time whenever she digs and experiencing early menstrual bleeding and disturbing dreams of green light and falling teeth. Tracing the curvature with a compass, she estimates the object is roughly 300 yards in circumference and becomes certain she has found an alien spacecraft buried millions of years ago.

As Bobbi digs, strange changes begin. Peter's cataract shrinks and his muzzle darkens; the dog appears to grow younger. Dead animals turn up near the site with no flies on them, and during a thunderstorm, Peter's remaining cataract glows green in the dark. Bobbi's health deteriorates as she works around the clock, compelled by a force she cannot resist.

Bobbi's closest friend is Jim Gardener, a gifted but self-destructive poet with a steel plate in his skull from a teenage skiing accident, a history of alcohol addiction, and an obsession with the dangers of nuclear power. While on a poetry reading tour, Gard falls into an eight-day blackout binge, coming to on a breakwater on July 4th, ready to drown himself. A powerful intuition that Bobbi is in danger overrides his suicidal impulse. He hitches north and arrives at her farm that evening to find her shockingly emaciated, filthy, and barely coherent. She collapses into his arms.

While Bobbi sleeps, Gard explores the house and finds the cellar transformed into a workshop full of electronic components and batteries. The water heater runs on D-cell batteries wired to circuit boards, with a tiny sun of energy floating inside it, held by an invisible force field. Bobbi's typewriter has been similarly modified, and beside it sits a completed novel far superior to anything she has written before.

When Bobbi wakes, she tells Gard about the ship and demonstrates her telepathic typewriter, which transcribes her thoughts from another room. She claims the ship's long-dead occupants broadcast a residual force that gives her abilities she cannot understand. When Gard mentally asks who "they" are, the typewriter types a children's rhyme: "Late last night and the night before / Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door."

Bobbi takes Gard to the excavation, a massive trench with the ship's curved edge rising from the earth. When he touches the ship, an earsplitting blast of music erupts inside his skull through the steel plate. The same plate shields him from the ship's telepathic influence, making his thoughts unreadable to the increasingly altered townspeople. Bobbi argues against reporting the find, insisting the government would seize everything and bury the technology, and proposes they dig until they can fly the ship free. Gard agrees, drawn by loyalty, the ship's seductive promise, and his own ruined life. He does not know that Bobbi watches from the kitchen with a loaded shotgun aimed at his head.

The narrative expands to reveal the ship's influence across Haven. The entire population undergoes a "becoming," an involuntary transformation: Residents lose their teeth, develop telepathy, and build strange gadgets from household items and batteries. Rebecca "Becka" Paulson, receiving telepathic messages she attributes to a picture of Jesus on her television, builds a lethal device that kills her husband and herself. Hillman "Hilly" Brown, a ten-year-old compelled by the ship, constructs a machine that makes objects genuinely disappear. At a backyard magic show, he makes his four-year-old brother David vanish, but David does not return, teleported to a distant place designated "Altair-4." Hilly collapses into a catatonic state.

Ruth McCausland, Haven's constable and moral center, resists the "becoming" more fiercely than anyone. She discovers she cannot leave town: An invisible barrier pushes her back at the town line. Ruth detonates explosive devices in the town-hall clock tower, killing herself but sending a signal visible for miles. The Tommyknockers project a holographic illusion of the intact tower and kill two state troopers sent to investigate.

Hilly's grandfather, Ev Hillman, partially protected from the ship by steel plates in his skull from a World War II injury, takes the comatose Hilly to a hospital in Derry and attempts to alert authorities. Dismissed as senile, he persuades state trooper Butch Dugan to enter Haven with him. They reach the dig site but are captured by armed townspeople and taken to Bobbi's shed. Inside, suspended in green liquid and wired to a transformer, are Ev, Peter, and Anne Anderson, Bobbi's domineering older sister who arrived to drag Bobbi home and was captured. All three serve as living batteries powering the Tommyknockers' technology. Dugan is released with his memories erased; a post-hypnotic compulsion later kills him.

As weeks pass, Gard excavates while growing increasingly disturbed. Bobbi returns from the shed partially bald and translucent-skinned, her body thickening into something inhuman. On the night they reach the hatch, Gard breaks into the locked shed while Bobbi is away and discovers the living batteries for himself, along with a pistol and an empty cabinet wired and waiting for him.

The next day, they enter the ship and find a hexagonal control room with desiccated alien corpses killed fighting each other during the crash, and a bunkroom full of chained bodies wired to cables: galley slaves who powered the vessel. After they return, Bobbi confronts Gard with a modified weapon capable of disintegrating him and offers a lethal dose of Valium as a kinder death. She reveals the Tommyknockers are violent wanderers who transform each world's population into extensions of themselves. Gard swallows pills to buy time, then tries to shoot Bobbi. The first round misfires. In the struggle, Bobbi's modified radio explodes, setting her on fire. The dropped pistol shatters Gard's ankle, but he retrieves it and kills Bobbi, sending an agonizing mental scream through every mind in Haven.

After forcing up the Valium, Gard staggers to the shed. Guided by the dying Ev, he uses the transformer to attempt retrieving David from Altair-4, directing the machine to place the boy in Hilly's hospital room. He then sets the shed ablaze, mercy-killing Ev, Peter, and Anne. Hundreds of Tommyknockers converge on the farm, but Gard activates a device projecting green fire that incinerates dozens. The farmhouse burns, and fire spreads into the surrounding woods.

Gard fights through burning woods to the ship, enters the control room, and connects to its systems through alien headphones. The ship draws energy from him and from every remaining Tommyknocker, killing many outright. It pulls free of the earth and rises into the sky. Gard dies as the ship leaves Earth's atmosphere, dreaming of returning to Haven in better times, Bobbi on the porch, Peter barking.

Most of Haven's population dies in the forest fire. The fewer than 200 survivors dwindle through despair. When the Army enters Haven, fewer than 80 remain; all are taken to a government facility where they eventually die. But David Brown is found alive in Hilly's hospital bed, his tracks beginning in the middle of the floor as if he materialized from thin air. The novel closes with the two brothers embracing in sleep, a small human restoration against the vast catastrophe.