I finished The Tommyknockers today. The book started slow. Jim Gardner did not strike me as too sympathetic, and I could not wait to hear the narrative from Bobby Anderson’s perspective again. The first “book” inside The Tommyknockers is titled The Ship in the Earth. The first chapter is titled “Anderson stumbles.” This is the first section of the first chapter, in full

For want of a nail the kingdom was lost — that’s how the catechism goes when you boil it down. In the end you can boil everything down to something similar — or so Roberta Anderson thought much later on. It’s either all an accident… or all fate. Anderson literally stumbled over her destiny in the small town of Haven, Maine, on June 21, 1988. The stumble was the root of the matter; all the rest was nothing but history.

The book is a story of betraying your own kind. It is much more sad than it is scary. I read it because of the simularities to “The Colour Out of Space,” but shades of “The Dunwich Horror” and even “At the Mountains of Madness” were also apparent.