“New and Improved”

“New and Improved” is the novel’s sardonic label for transformation under the Tommyknockers’ influence: a promise of betterment that increasingly means bodily alteration, diminished agency, and the replacement of familiar identities. Repeated across Haven’s history and its present crisis, the phrase links a town renamed through a preacher’s rhetoric of harvest and refuge to residents who accept disturbing changes as inevitable.

A Promise Made in Haven

The language of improvement has an earlier, human-made precedent in Haven’s renaming. In 1900, a revival preacher called Colson—whom the town historian Myrtle Duplissey later believed to have been named Cooder, the illegitimate son of Albion Cooder—built a following in Ilium with energetic sermons. On a hot August night, he described the town as a haven and connected its identity to a promised harvest. His message turned religious imagery into a case for changing Ilium’s name, and discussion of the proposal began the next day.

Colson’s promise concealed self-interest. At the great Harvest Home Revival, he solicited the largest love-offering of his stay; after the meeting, he exploited his position with six young women. He left town during the night of September 7, 1900, taking the money and abandoning the community to the consequences. The next morning, the tent and preacher were gone. Nine children were born in the area between New Year’s Day and the town meeting in March 1901, and the narrative connects their births to Colson’s departure and the revival. Two days after the town voted to change its name, Paul Clarendon killed his newborn son and wife and then himself. The new name had been promoted as a sign of sanctification and abundance, but its history is entangled with deception, exploitation, and lasting harm.

A Body Made into Evidence

The phrase acquires a more literal and disturbing force as Haven’s residents undergo physical changes associated with visits to Bobbi Anderson’s shed. Newt Berringer has made three visits that he cannot remember afterward; he recalls only that they frightened and exhilarated him. Over the following week, his face grows pale and transparent enough for him to see veins and capillaries beneath the skin. His cheeks feel soft, and pressing them leaves visible indentations. He recognizes a connection between the changes and the shed, but initially tries to explain the fading as the loss of his summer tan.

Newt responds by applying his late wife Elinor’s old Max Factor Pan-Cake makeup, trying to conceal what is happening rather than understand it. Dick Allison has makeup on too, and tells him that the change has affected everyone who has spent time in the shed except Adley, whose first visit was only two weeks earlier. Newt sees his own tongue through his pallid lips and observes finger marks in the skin over his brow. Despite his fear, he begins to imagine he will get used to the condition. A tentacle emerging from his pajama bottoms makes the change impossible to reduce to a cosmetic problem; he tucks it back absently and returns to applying makeup. The phrase’s irony lies in that disjunction: the residents adapt their routines even as their bodies become increasingly unfamiliar.

The New Boss and the New Bobbi

At the start of Book III, the line “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss,” credited to The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” supplies a compact refrain for the novel’s transformations. Its insistence on sameness undercuts the appearance of novelty. The language of a new order does not guarantee liberation from the old one; what changes may be the face of authority rather than the structure of its control.

Gardener recognizes the same contradiction in Bobbi, whose face is darkened with makeup and whose body has begun to change. Her breasts are thickening and beginning to appear as one unit. He also notices that the birds and animals have disappeared, while the affected people remain. The comparison he makes between her and the “new boss” makes the phrase a warning as well as a description: the new form does not erase what came before, but carries its power into a changed body.

The point becomes explicit in the phrase “New and Improved Bobbi.” Gardener believes the old Bobbi has fulfilled what this altered Bobbi considers her final obligation to him. He has returned to save his friend, but stayed to “whitewash” a strange fence, an image that frames his presence as cooperation in a process he does not fully accept. He suspects Bobbi may send him up in the excavation sling and leave him trapped by the hatch, where he would die; instead, she insists that he go first. Her sardonic look suggests that she understands his suspicion without needing to read his mind. The phrase thus marks not merely a physical change in Bobbi, but a rupture in the trust between the two friends.

The Phrase Becomes Action

The conflict surrounding Bobbi’s transformation culminates in an improvised weapon. Dick Allison has brought her a boom-box radio at her request—the same radio Hank Buck used to send Pits Barfield to his death—and Bobbi connects its circuitry to the toy photon pistol in less than twenty minutes. She points the device at Gardener. The words “New and Improved” now describe a changed person who can repurpose an ordinary object into a threat, making transformation a matter of practical power as well as appearance.

At the kitchen table, Bobbi’s transparent face reveals green fluid beneath its surface, while her enlarged, misshapen pupils make her eyes unfamiliar. She has Gardener’s Valium bottle, and two beers sit beside it. Their conversation turns on the question of identity: Gardener asks her to tell him what she is. Her answer, “But we are walking and talking, Gard. We are back,” insists on continuity through the changed body. The words can sound reassuring, but they also evade the distinction Gardener is trying to establish between the person he knew and the being now speaking to him.

A Refrain of Change

Across the novel, “New and Improved” gathers force by attaching a cheerful language of consumer betterment to transformations that are neither simple improvements nor freely chosen changes. Newt’s makeup, the residents’ bodily alterations, Bobbi’s changing identity, and the altered relations of power in Haven all make the phrase’s promise unstable. What is new may be frightening; what is improved may be a euphemism; and what appears to replace the old may preserve its coercive structure.

The earlier renaming of Ilium provides a historical echo. Colson’s language of a promised harvest and a haven helped the town embrace a new name, but the promise concealed exploitation and left consequences that outlasted the preacher. In the present, the same gap between reassuring language and damaging reality recurs on a different scale. “New and Improved” is therefore both a character’s description and a narrative warning: a change can be presented as progress while the people undergoing it lose the power to decide what that progress means.