Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers

[Don’t read the summary on Wikipedia; it makes the book sound lousy.]

The Tommyknockers is in the vein of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where this lady, Bobbi, stumbles onto part of a spaceship, inadvertently lets out alien gas, and slowly turns herself and everyone else in town into the aliens that formerly piloted said crashed ship.

‘Tommyknocker’ is a term that the aliens adopted (based on whatever their hosts name them) from her friend Gard, our hero, who was randomly thinking about it when Bobbi named the aliens.

[Imagine if he were thinking about Butthead from Beavis and Butthead.]

Gard is the only one immune to the gas, because he has a metal plate in his head, souvenir of a skiing accident. As we go through the book, we find out that anybody with a large piece of/enough metal attached to their body can ward off the effects of the gas.

[Don’t mean they don’t die later, though.]

People who slowly turn Tommyknockers gain psychic abilities (kinda like a hive-mind, similar to the Borg, minus Alice Krige) and become electrical and electronical geniuses, inventing all sorts of weaponry (as long as they have batteries) from household items to drive off/kill outsiders late on in the book, including a huge Coke machine that runs around running people over (it WAS controlled by a Tommyknocker, who later died because Gard destroyed one of the weapons she was controlling, and the backlash of energy flowed back to her through her controls and made her brains explode).

Stephen King is a big fan of the exploding-head-and-brains routine.

As the townspeople gradually become more alien, they depend on the polluted town air for survival, as evidenced when two young Tommyknockers drive out to buy batteries and barely made it back, one dead, and the other one blinded.

In the end, with the ship finally unearthed, Gard makes it take off into space, sacrificing himself in the process. The rest of the Tommyknockers are rounded up, and they slowly dwindle and die away.

All in all, I loved it. The book scared the crap out of me. It's really quite refreshing to read this after the bore-fest that was Bag of Bones. I mean, it didn't suck, but it was really, really, REALLY slow in the beginning.