When I was a teenager, the concept of addiction – of something being a need, not a want – was foreign to me. I didn't understand the many ways that Paul Sheldon in Misery was reliant on Annie; I simply understood that the pills were keeping his pain away, but of course there's more to it than that. So when I first read The Tommyknockers, the same themes of addiction didn't sit with me as they should. Probably more than any other novel in this rereading project, The Tommyknockers is a different book to me now, because I can see it for what it is: a book about addiction, and probably the best example in the canon of King writing metaphorically.

Published at the tail end of 1987, the last of four books King released that year, it stands as one of King's longest novels. The paperback is a brick. The story is simple, and hugely in debt to Lovecraft, Quatermass and the Pit and Invasion of the Body Snatchers: a spacecraft is discovered buried in the woods, and when excavated releases a gas that makes the townsfolk turn into the alien race that once inhabited the craft. The plot is fairly slight; it's the characters that give the book its bulk.

I was used to King's flawed protagonists, so many of them fundamentally broken and trying to find a way out of their own personal holes. But the teenage me had never been so confused as when I met Gard. He's a writer and an addict (two King tropes that have come up again and again, and will continue to do so as we head deeper into this project), but there's an almost disarming honesty about him. King's addicts are often ruined, but they try. They want to be better people: either by kicking their addictions, or by making it clear that the addictions don't necessarily define who they are. Gard is different; he's broken, but for most of the novel it seems as if there's no way for him to fix himself. He's an alcoholic, and that alcoholism defines him absolutely. He has fugue states, periods of memory loss and violent temper, all of which he regrets but shows no real desire to stop. His friend Bobbi (another writer) is the one who discovers the spacecraft, and she's the one who drives Gard through the novel. He sees the changes in her, and he knows that something is wrong. But he's caught up in his own mess, in himself.

She becomes more lost because he's too distracted by his own issues to notice when she needs him. By the time that the alien presence has possessed most of the town – Gard is spared because of a metal plate in his head, though that can't save him from his personal demons – he is a wreck, yet somehow the only one who can save his community; and, indeed, the world.

I mentioned in my Misery reread that to me, Misery, The Tommyknockers and The Dark Half all represent different stages of addiction; and that The Tommyknockers is the darkness of addiction writ large. There's the possession of everybody in the town by this thing that forces them to change who they are; Gard's own addictions; Bobbi's possession, and forcing of painkillers on Gard to be able to read his thoughts; Gard's final decision, which reads like a cry for help, a suicidal howl that destroys the lives of everybody he's ever known. There's pain on the page, for better or worse.

Unfortunately – you knew this was coming, right? – it's painful to read in a few other ways as well. The Tommyknockers is a mess. That's hard for me to say, because I love King's writing, but out of the sixty-something books there were bound to be a few duds. It's both confused and confusing, and far too long. It was written when King was at the worst stage of his addictions by all accounts, and it reads like one long, cocaine-fuelled late-night paranoia fantasy, where everybody is part of some conspiracy that only the addict can truly see. If you consider the novel's two writers as proxies for King, it's almost glaringly apparent: one has been changed by the presence of the spaceship for what they perceive to be the better; the other changed irrevocably for the worse. It's obvious, when you lay it out, but also unsatisfying. Not only is the book no fun to read, it's harder still when you feel King's own pain lifting off the page.

I didn't like the book back when I first read it, but I couldn't express why. Now, I can see that it isn't a novel; it's a cry for help. And the best thing I can say about it is that, after he published it, King's wife, Tabitha, intervened. King didn't write for another two years, getting clean and suffering horrific writer's block as a result. When he came back, he'd written The Dark Half, a book I class among his greatest; and from there he entered a run of novels (Needful Things, Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne, Rose Madder) that challenged both King as a writer and all those readers who thought they knew what King was capable of. One of the most common themes with addicts is that you have to hit bottom before you can pick yourself up. I don't like The Tommyknockers, but I don't think it's meant to be liked; it's important that it exists, but for reasons beyond the page.

Connections

The Tommyknockers is jam-packed. Gard has a fugue-state conversation with Jack from The Talisman after a drinking session; there's a sighting of Pennywise in a storm drain; there's a reference to Johnny Smith's coma, from The Dead Zone; to a dog "acting like a regular Cujo!"; and then to the Shop, the government department which pops up in countless other King books (and which really needs its own book now, I think).

Next: The sparrows are flying again: it's The Dark Half.