Stephen King's writing career has had its ups and downs, as has his personal life, but there's a particular book of his he thinks is downright awful. It's no surprise that not all of King's novels and short stories have been winners, and that's nothing he should be ashamed of. No author has a perfect track record, especially when they produce the crazy amount of new content that King tends to on a yearly basis.
Between his writing and the movie and TV adaptations of those works, King is almost an entertainment industry unto himself, cultivating his brand into one fans feel like they can trust to meet at least a certain level of quality. It's rare that a new King book fails to catch on with the public, or worse, makes some question if the author still has what it takes to rule the horror fiction arena going forward. One such book was 1987's The Tommyknockers, which spawned a 1993 ABC miniseries of an almost equally questionable nature.
In the case of The Tommyknockers, which concerns a small town being slowly taken over by an alien force, leading them to "become" something new, King has been very vocal about his problems with his own work. Here's why he's come to hate The Tommyknockers.
The Stephen King Book The Author Now Hates
It's no secret that Stephen King has had several battles with addiction, and his nadir in that department took up a good amount of the 1980s. That's cited as why King's one and only directorial effort, 1985's Maximum Overdrive, is so bad, as he was using insane amounts of cocaine at that point. The Tommyknockers was written and published in 1987, right near the tale end of King's years-long cocaine binge. In a 2014 interview, a sober King looked back on The Tommyknockers with disgust, calling it an "awful" book, and the last one he wrote before escaping from his drug-fueled haze.
King doesn't think every aspect of The Tommyknockers is worthless, but feels that it's way too long and unwieldy, and believes he might end up with a good novel were he to go back and cut the book by about half its 700-page length. Obviously, he never ended up doing that, and despite Stephen King's own issues with The Tommyknockers, Hollywood wants to remake it, this time as a feature film produced by James Wan. Unlike with The Shining, this may be a case where King hopes the adaptation deviates greatly from his prose.