Stephen King Doesn't Like This Sci-Fi Show — Or The Book He Wrote That Inspired It

I remember reading the 1987 novel "The Tommyknockers" as my second or third Stephen King book during my mid-teens and being bummed about how tedious it was. It felt convoluted, too long, and unexciting to such a degree that I quit reading it about midway through. It turns out that King himself doesn't even remember it fondly. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the author called "The Tommyknockers" "an awful book" that he wrote before quitting drugs and alcohol. Though, he also stated that, "There's really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back."

Well, if you also had no idea that his novel received a two-part TV series adaptation in 1993 from ABC, starring Jimmy Smits and Marg Helgenberger, I'd like to welcome you to the club. King hated that, too, by the way, and considering its miserable critic and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes (or any other review-aggregation site), you can have a pretty good guess why. And yet, his reasoning was kind of funny.

In retrospect, King said that his novel was about "700 pages too long" (out of its whopping 900+-page length), and that there may be "a good 350-page novel in there." Which is a little odd considering that he also told the New York Times that the TV adaptation of it "should have been much longer" than a mere three hours. I guess you can never really comprehend the horror master's peculiar thinking — just take a look at the only movie King ever directed — or wild opinions when it comes to television shows and movies (especially productions based on King's work). He also claimed that the ABC series "felt kind of cheap and thrown together, missing the sense of the book [entirely]."

In gist, "The Tommyknockers" followed some local residents in the fictional small town of Haven, Maine, who fell under the spell of an ancient spaceship buried in the woods. The craft emits a green and malignant energy that enabled the residents to come up with brilliant inventions — before their bodies began to mutate in numerous eerie and creepy ways. Naturally, there are aliens too (if you get deep enough), as this was King's attempt to spice up his usual horror scenarios with some intriguing science fiction. And while the novel became a bestseller despite its shortcomings and mammoth length (the King fever was high and ubiquitous in the '80s), the ABC series couldn't repeat its success and was quickly buried after its 1993 run, most likely for the better.