Trivia / The Tommyknockers

• Creator Backlash: King said that the book is awful because he was a heavy user of cocaine when he wrote it.
  I've thought about it a lot lately and said to myself, "There's really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back." The book is about 700 pages long, and I'm thinking, "There's probably a good 350-page novel in there."
• Creator Breakdown: There are these two main characters. Both of them are writers. One of them is an uncontrollable alcoholic with an ugly side that the drinking unleashes and who is battling increasingly irresistible suicidal thoughts. The other falls increasingly under the thrall of a malign influence which fills her with unbelievable reserves of energy and creativity that seems to flow automatically and unstoppably out of her, but at the cost of gradually reducing her to a lifeless husk going through the motions with barely any control over her life, her work, or even her own bodily functions. Did we mention that the author was at the absolute depths of his addictions to cocaine and alcohol while writing this one? And it perhaps says something about how deep in thrall to his demons King was that, upon sobering up, he was genuinely surprised on re-reading at how clearly the characters had been drawn from his own miserable situation.
• Reality Subtext: King's cocaine addiction was at its worst when he was writing this. In On Writing he said he would be up late at night writing it with his pulse going a hundred beats a minute and cotton balls and Q-Tips stuffed in his nose to staunch the blood. The idea of Bobbi finding an alien technology which makes her writing become almost automatic while slowly trashing her body was, he realized later, as much a metaphor for the addiction as Annie Wilkes was in Misery (also written during that period).
• Recycled Script: The story of Becka Paulson first appeared in 1984 as a short story called "The Revelations of Becka Paulson".

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