#Into the wild book plot summary serial
The writer and critic Kim Newman said of the novel that King had "more or less rewritten Quatermass and the Pit", 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. He also used a poem from his childhood for the book's preamble: In his autobiography On Writing, King attributes the basic premise to the short story " The Colour Out of Space" by H. In the last pages, David Brown is discovered safe in Hilly Brown's hospital room. Very shortly afterward, agents from the FBI, CIA, and "The Shop" invade Haven and take as many of the Havenites as possible (killing nearly a quarter of the survivors), along with a few of the devices created by the altered people of Haven. This results in the eventual deaths of nearly all of the changed townspeople, but prevents the possibly disastrous consequences of the ship's influence spreading to the outside world. With his last ounce of strength, he activates the ship and telepathically launches it into space. Gard enters the ship, near death after his struggle with the townspeople. Ev Hillman, David and Hilly's grandfather, helps Gard escape into the woods in exchange for saving David Brown from Altair 4.
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. As they talk, he shields his mind, pulls his own gun out, and shoots Bobbi. Using a gun, Bobbi forces Gard to swallow a lethal dose of Valium. After exploring the ship and returning to Bobbi's home, Gard plans to kill Bobbi as he can see she is no longer human. Over the course of several weeks Gard, Bobbi, and others continue to unearth 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. Gard feels he has little to live for aside from his friendship with Bobbi and decides to stay with her to try to halt her decline. Gard is also an alcoholic and is prone to binges that result in violent outbursts followed by lengthy blackouts.Īs Bobbi is almost totally overcome by the euphoria of "becoming" one with the spacecraft, Gard increasingly sees her health worsen and her sanity disappear.
The book's central character is James Eric Gardener, a poet and friend of Bobbi, who goes by the nickname "Gard." He is somewhat immune to the ship's effects because of the steel plate in his head, a souvenir of a teenage skiing accident. (Altair 4 is a reference to Forbidden Planet.) The spacecraft also prevents those affected by it from leaving town, provokes psychotic violence in some people, and causes the disappearance of a young boy, David Brown, whom his older brother Hilly teleports to the planet referred to as Altair 4 by the Havenites. The transformation, or "becoming," provides them with a limited form of genius which makes them very inventive but does not provide any philosophical or ethical insight into their inventions. 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. 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.
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