Published in 1987, this blended horror/sci-fi novel is King’s 26th book, and is considered by most to be the last book written before Stephen King got sober (with The Dark Half being written during his transition period, and Needful Things being the first novel to come out post sobriety.) The book is dedicated: For Tabitha King, “…promises to keep.” For those keeping track you may recognize that dedication, the same Frost quote was used in the dedication of ‘Salem’s Lot, but to Naomi King, his daughter who was five at the time. The meaning here seems to have evolved, from a promise to his young daughter about balancing his creative life with his life as a Dad, to a much heavier resonance, a promise to his wife, a promise he intends to keep, even if it is not yet fulfilled. As I said last blog, this book has long been a favorite of mine, and this was my fourth time reading it. I have some thoughts this read through, complications and revelations and some big shifts, so let’s get into it.

The plot here is deceptively simple, a woman stumbles over a small metal object jutting out of the soil in the woods on her property. She begins to dig up the object. Her best friend joins her in the dig. As the object, which turns out to be a massive UFO, is uncovered, it emits…something into the air that affects first those close to it and soon the entire tiny town of Haven, Maine. The people are changed by this object. Boom. Again, what a great idea for a book.

My first revelation was Roberta “Bobbi” Anderson. Bobbi is approaching 40, has an old beagle named Peter who is blind in one eye, and lives in a farmhouse in the woods of rural Maine. Bobbi is a writer of western novels that sell just well enough to allow her to live in the old farmhouse she inherited from her Uncle, to write, and to care for her land. She is independent, a bit reclusive, and she has carved out a life she loves. She has a best friend, sometimes lover, named Jim Gardiner, who she calls Gard, a poet who drinks too much. I’ve always loved Bobbi. When I first read this book when I was 16 my way into this thing was through Bobbi. But reading it now, at 44, I was struck with how much my own life looked like her’s, in ways it did not back then. The house, the old dog, being a writer, even her temperament and spirit felt very close to the bone for me. “My god, I’m Bobbi,” I found myself mumbling less than a dozen pages in, and I had never clocked that before, because we had never been so similar before. My next revelation was with the town of Haven, Maine. Haven is described as a bit north of Augusta and a bit south of Unity, off the beaten track (not near any highways or tourist destinations), a small town of about 2,000 people, big enough to have a town government, church, etc., but small enough that everyone knows everyone, and the village is mostly woods on the boarders. I have lived in many towns like this in the interior of central Maine. I live in one now. This, more than any King-believe town in his universe, is a place I understand. The town of Haven, and the culture there, loomed very large for me in this reread.

“Peter approached, sniffed at it, and then did a peculiar thing. The beagle backed off two dog paces, sat down, and uttered a single long howl.”

Bobbi trips over this piece of metal jutting out of the ground, touches it, experiences something, and decides she is going to dig it up. Her very old beagle Peter does not like the object, because dogs are wiser than us. Immediately both Peter and Bobbi are affected by the object. Bobbi begins to menstruate, heavily, and out of time with her cycle, and Peter’s vision starts to return in his bad eye, and his weak back-legs seem more limber. These are startling changes. Right before we dip out of Bobbi’s timeline we see them together in a dark room as a storm rolls in, Peter in her lap, scared of the thunder. There is a stream of green light coming out of Peter’s healing eye. This green light will soon be spilling out of all kinds of creepy places.

We meet Jim Gardiner. Jim is in his 40s and he is a poet, he lives in Unity in a shack, and he is an alcoholic. Gard is on a poetry tour, which he does every year despite hating the woman who runs the thing. He travels around New England with a group of poets doing readings, getting sloshed, and eating up the free food. While on this tour he goes on a drinking jag, blacks-out repeatedly, gets fired (loosing his promised money), and wakes up on a beach in NH. We learn Gard is obsessed with the dangers of nuclear power, and that he shot his wife in a black out years ago. She lived, but decided she wanted a different kind of life, one that didn’t involve despair and violence on the reg, and so she left his sorry ass. Gard has been on the downward (and at high velocity) ever since. “The last six years of his life had been bad, and the last three had been a nightmare time in which he had become inexplicable to himself and scary to almost all the people who really knew him.” Gard considers suicide when he wakes up on the beach but something inside him tells him Bobbi is in trouble, big trouble, so he hitchhikes back to Haven, Maine to check on her, hence sealing his fate.

When Gard arrives Bobbi has lost 30 pounds and her home and life seem to be in disarray. She is filthy and sick, the house is a mess, and Peter is nowhere to be found. Bobbi tells Gard about the ship and shows him all the new inventions she has made; a telepathic typewriter (on which she has written, while out at the dig, a new novel, her best ever), a hot water heater that runs off its own tiny green sun, a hovering tractor. Bobbi then shows him the ship, which she has been digging up for days now. It is very clearly a flying saucer. Gard touches it and blood erupts from his nose. Gard has a metal plate in his head from a skiing accident, which interferes with the effects the ship has on people, not blocking them altogether but buffering them tremendously. And where is Peter? Dead, Bobbi tells him, but he died of old age, nothing to do with all this. It’s a lie, and Gard knows that, but not what part exactly. There is much she is not telling him, and when she realizes the ship doesn’t affect him the way it does other people she marks him as “other.” She is a part of it, and the people in Haven who are now being exposed to the ship’s juice are a part of it, but Gard is now marked an outsider. She asks him to help her dig it up. He agrees. He knows she is lying, knows he is now an outsider here, can feel that, but he is drawn in by the ship nonetheless. They start digging it up, and Gard starts drinking hard.

We dip out of that storyline and into the town of Haven. The ship is emitting something and it is in the air all over town. We meet Rebecca and Joe Paulson. Joe is the mail carrier and is having an affair with his co-worker Nancy Voss. The 3-D picture of Jesus on top of the Paulson’s TV tells Becca about the affair. Becca tinkers with the TV (the ship plants all kinds of fun ideas and inventions into people’s minds) turning it into a weapon. It kills both Joe and Becca, leaving Nancy alone at the post office with her invention, a mail sorter that makes creepy scratching spider sounds. We meet Hilly Brown, who is ten, and his brother David who is four, and their Grandpa Ev, who is old, and just happens to have two metal plates in his head. Hilly wants to be a magician, and after lackluster magic show in his backyard he “invents” a new trick using these great new ideas that keep popping into his head. He makes his brother disappear. But then he cannot make him reappear. The town searches but the four year old is gonzo (gone to Altair-4 it turns out). Hilly has a breakdown and Ev takes him to the hospital in Derry. And we meet one of my faves, Ruth McCausland. Ruth is the town constable and the widow of a State Trooper. She is deeply respected and loved by the town of Haven. She has a doll collection (suspish). The dolls begin to talk to her. Ruth understands something is happening in Haven, something bad, but it’s happening to her too. She wants to get help for her town, but she knows in Haven you don’t call in outsiders. It is the one thing you just don’t do, especially now. So she tries to call for help in a sort of wild and ultimately stupid way, by blowing the town hall clocktower up into the air like a rocket, with explosive laden dolls. The town closes ranks. The air in the town is now making outsiders sick. At Ruth’s funeral (she dies in the clock tower explosion) people are getting bloody noses, throwing up, and loosing teeth. The residents of Haven are used to this air/changed by this air, so they watch and sneer at these intruders now fleeing the town. Things have changed in Haven.

The book up until this point was fantastic. But things do begin to fall apart a bit here. We start toggling all over the place, from Gard and Bobbi and the dig, to the people of Haven, to an assortment of outsiders who know something is up in Haven and try to go investigate (most of them die), to an in-group within the in-group: the Shed People (we’ll circle back to the damn shed). There are important plot points in here but they are buried in a lot of noise, and things start to move real slow. There is stuff about the history of Haven, and the old Garrick place (Bobbi’s land); and stuff with cops, journalists, Ev Hillman up in Derry, sister Ann shows up (who is a bonkers character) and various other Havenites; but I did start to loose the thread with all of it. Bobbi at this point is almost entirely absent as an emotional character because she is not Bobbi anymore, she is stranger to Gard, but she is also a stranger to the reader and I missed her. There are piles of metaphors for addiction all throughout here, but after a while it was like, I get it! I don’t need ten more of these. So when Steve was quoted as saying the book was too long, this reading, I would have to agree, this really needed to be tightened up. A lot.

So here is how Bobbi looks at this point, “Bobbi’s entire head and neck were transparent and jelly like. Her breast had swelled bulbously outward and seemed to be merging into one single nipple-less outcropping of flesh. Ann could see dim organs that looked nothing at all like human organs – there was fluid circulating in there, but it looked green. Behind Bobbi’s forehead she could see the quivering sack of a mind. Bobbi grinned toothlessly. At Bobbi’s crotch a grotesque thatch of tentacles like seagrass wavered from the sunken valley that had been her vagina.” Later we get the idea that long bulbous snouts are in the mix. There is a lot of body horror in this book that I had forgotten about in and around the physical changes happening to the people of Haven, and the Shed People especially. Gard is digging the ship with Bobbi, living with her, and at one point midway through her changes they make love out on the dirt next to the ship. Yeah, he fucks her halfway-to-alien-weird-body like a man starving for it. No hair, no teeth, see-through skin. I think this is the biggest swing in the book, and I loved it, it is some gnarly shit.

Amazing fan art by Alexandria Cole

So about the shed, it has been padlocked since Gard got back. Occasionally, while Gard is passed out on the porch, a group of Havenites, led by Bobbi, go in there and green light spills out into the night from the cracks and windows, excellent imagery. The group emerges juiced up and further along in “the change” than those not visiting the shed. Gard sometimes fakes being passed out, so he knows this is happening. He could sneak a look in there, but for a long time he doesn’t. Gard has buried his head deep in the sand. His friend Bobbi is literally turning into a monster in front of his eyes, in every sense of the word, and the town around him is now full of aliens who are all tapped into a hive mind (and all actively hate him), but he just keeps digging and just keeps drinking. Again, great metaphor for addiction. There’s nothing good about this ship, that is crystal clear, but Gard can’t change course. Finally Gard does go into the shed, and even though I was rode hard by the book at this point AND already knew what he would find in there, it was the same emotional gut-punch as the first time I read it. Peter is in the shed. And what Bobbi has done to Peter is so inhumane, so monstrous, and so cruel, that it shattered me all over again. The devastating realization that Bobbi, the real Bobbi, way back before Gard even got there, could do that to her old dog Peter, well it changes everything. There are other things (and people) in the shed, but Peter is the heart of the matter, for he is the heart of the book. Gard decides to try and fight back.

The last 100 pages of this book were, to be honest, a trial for me. I am trying to do a close, deep-read of these books, and I had to fight the urge to skim tooth and nail, and take lots of breaks to work (and it was work, painful work) through the end of this thing. A lot is happening, but it is slow. Gard and Bobbi find the hatch and they enter the ship. It is stark and dull inside, which says a lot about these so called Tommyknockers (oh did I even mention that yet, that’s what the people of Haven refer to the aliens as, collectively) who seem to have no interest in beauty, nature, art, humor, joy, or love. They find some dried up dead Tommyknockers in there, who seem to have crashed because they were fighting (that tracks). It’s sad. All of this for what? The animals are all gone from Haven, fled or died from the bad air, the people are changing into heartless, soulless jelly creatures that fight and squabble and build battery powered weapons, everything has turned to shit, and for what? A metal ship full of bad ghosts. They leave the ship and Gard knows it’s the end. Bobbi will kill him now, but he has decided to fight (although he waffles back and forth on this endlessly too). But in the end he does get a gun, and he shoots Bobbi. So she is dead. Gard is a hot mess at this point physically, emotionally, spiritually, and he is dying, but he goes in the shed and he gets David (remember him) back from Altair-4 with a mind computer (it’s an anticlimactic and overwritten scene that seems to never end). FINALLY Gard gets in the damn ship. Bobbi’s house and yard are on fire, and this fire will spread and burn down most of the town, killing everyone, pretty much. Gard flies the ship into outer space. I was furious at this point, from the flogging this book had given me, but then Steve shocked me with a wallop of raw powerful emotion. As Gard dies, laying on the floor of the spaceship, which is a screen that acts like a windshield showing where the ship is traveling, so he is laying on the stars in a pool of his own blood, he sees Bobbi’s dooryard at twilight, and Bobbi and Peter (tail wagging) coming off the porch to greet him, and he thinks how good it is to be with friends, how good it is to be where you belong – and I was sobbing. Somehow, through it all, this book still works, emotionally, and truth be told I love it. I love the characters, I love the town, I love the story, and I love what an unapologetic, complicated mess it is. I also love that I see it through such a different lens now, as a person that has read so much and written so much in the years between 16 and 44. I see the flaws clearly, but I feel the emotional truth here even more profoundly. I’ve battled addiction, I’ve lost people I loved, I had a Peter in my life who died in my arms, these things give real depth to what I felt reading this tremendous book.

I am taking a break from my reread project for the remainder of the summer (The Tommyknockers really ran me ragged), but I will be back in late September with The Dark Half. You can find all of my Stephen King Reread Project here: Reread project.