While maintaining a horror style, the novel is an excursion into the realm of science fiction for King, as the residents of the Maine town of Haven gradually fall under the influence of a mysterious object buried in the woods.

While walking in the woods near the small town of Haven, Maine, Roberta "Bobbi" Anderson, a writer of Wild West-themed fiction, stumbles upon a metal object that turns out to be a protrusion of a long-buried alien spacecraft.

Once exposed, the spacecraft begins to release an invisible gas into the atmosphere that gradually transforms people into beings similar to the aliens who populated the ship.

He witnesses the transformation of the townspeople, discovers the torture and mutilation of Bobbi's dog Peter, and people being killed or worse when they pry too deeply into the strange events.

As Bobbi dies, she telepathically screams and alerts the townspeople, who then swarm to her home, intent on killing Gard for fear that he intends to harm the ship.

The writer and critic Kim Newman said of the novel that King had "more or less rewritten Quatermass and the Pit",[3] a television serial from the late 1950s in which an alien spacecraft excavated in London evokes latent psychic abilities in some of the people who come near it.

[4] In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, King acknowledged that the quality of his writing suffered during his period of drug use, saying "The Tommyknockers is an awful book.

[5] A two-part television miniseries based on the novel was shown in 1993 on ABC, starring Jimmy Smits as Jim Gardner and Marg Helgenberger as Bobbi Anderson.