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A buried UFO slowly turns locals into gizmo-building alien mutants.

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Commentary

It doesn't matter that in this one a flying saucer -not vampires, telekinesis, Wendigos or a demonic clown in the drains - invades Stephen King Country; nor does it matter that this small Maine town is called Haven instead of Jerusalem's Lot or Derry. The science fiction trappings only add a new decor to the nightmare Stephen King tells over and over: something terrible comes Down Home and draws all its inhabitants, whether we like them or not, into its power. The story is frightening each time because the likable characters are so appealing they seem incorruptible. But then. . . .

The Tommyknockers live in a giant spaceship buried for eons in the backyard of self-sufficient Bobbi Anderson, who writes westerns. Bobbi feels compelled to dig it out; her dog becomes strangely revitalized; she digs some more; she turns into a mechanical genius. Then her former lover Jim Gardener, known as Gard, turns up. He is an alcoholic poet crazed by visions of nuclear disaster and thinks the ship might contain an alternate power source that will save the world. Bobbi and Gard dig it out together - and terrible things happen to the citizens of Haven. Teeth fall out; minds get taken over; Stephen King plays cadenzas on his obsessions with menstruation and vomiting.

The first third of ''The Tommyknockers'' is wonderful. With his usual eerie effortlessness, Mr. King attaches us to Bobbi and Gard, taunting us with menace neither they nor we can define. When evil starts gobbling Haven with a vengeance, swollen prose and comic-book grue spurt out one authentic gem (a little boy's magic show) and instill in us a creeping terror of good country folks. The last third of the novel is Armageddon, as is usual with Mr. King.

In his early novels, Stephen King certified his authenticity by dropping brand names, but now instead of Flair pens and Marvel Straight cigarettes he pours out torrents of literary allusion. H. G. Wells, Stephen Jay Gould, James Dickey, Doris Lessing, Mother Goose, Stephen King himself (shamelessly), Herman Melville and The Who are only some of the people woven into this fat book. (Toward the end, Gard mutters: ''It's hard to spend such a long time thinking you're . . . Homer. . . . and discover you were . . . Captain Ahab all the time.'') It's hard to take such epigrams seriously; it's virtually impossible to take seriously the cumbersome machinery whereby the Tommyknockers do or don't do their murkily defined mission. But Mr. King's presumption that we are afraid of everything makes him a great and terrible storyteller - even when he is saying ''EEEEOOOOOOARRRHMMMMMMM!'' or ''Hurts! It hurrrrr - .'' Whether he is making these noises or quoting ''Moby-Dick,'' we believe him. -- Nina Auerbach, New York Times

Quotes from the Book

"Tommyknockers Tommyknocker Knocking at my door."