The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

September 20, 2004
Chilling things pop up in this book by King, who revises his harrowing 1999 novel about a nine-year-old lost in the Maine woods. Due to the format's limited space, the exposition is condensed and rushed: Trisha, the title girl, is on a hike with her recently divorced mom and sullen brother, Pete. While her mother and brother argue, Trisha steps off the trail to relieve herself, and loses her bearings. Beset by bloodthirsty insects (represented on a transparent plastic screen that spins around her face) and menaced by a nameless "special thing that comes for lost kids," Trisha struggles to stay sane and alive. She takes comfort in hallucinations of her hero, Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon, who offers fatherly advice. Like the original, this version follows a baseball structure, from a calm "first inning" to an alarming "top of the ninth" where Trisha faces the supernatural "God of the Lost," a bearlike monster with spiny teeth. King mentions (but the illustrations do not show) things like "the severed head of a deer, terrified eyes wide open" from the original; Dingman creates seven spreads, heavy on the nauseous green and shadowy brown, as Trisha grows increasingly haggard and startling things emerge from trapdoor pages (e.g., a hideous wolfish head or clawed paw appears, then swoops behind a bush). Where the novel built malicious suspense, this production demands that readers lift flaps and peek through transparent windows to heighten the horror. Daring and, ideally, mature King fans will appreciate this scary, perversely funny combo of horror and children's pop-up. Ages 8-up.

Starred review from April 5, 1999
"The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted." King's new novel--which begins with that sentence--has teeth, too, and it bites hard. Readers will bite right back. Always one to go for the throat, King crafts a story that concerns not just anyone lost in the Maine-New Hampshire woods, but a plucky nine-year-old girl, and from a broken home, no less. This stacked deck is flush with aces, however. King has always excelled at writing about children, and Trisha McFarland, dressed in jeans and a Red Sox jersey and cap when she wanders off the forest path, away from her mother and brother and toward tremendous danger, is his strongest kid character yet, wholly believable and achingly empathetic in her vulnerability and resourcefulness. Trisha spends nine days (eight nights) in the forest, ravaged by wasps, thirst, hunger, illness, loneliness and terror. Her knapsack with a little food and water helps, but not as much as the Walkman that allows her to listen to Sox games, a crucial link to the outside world. Love of baseball suffuses the novel, from the chapter headings (e.g., "Bottom of the Ninth") to Trisha's reliance, through fevered imagined conversations with him, on (real life) Boston pitcher Tom Gordon and his grace under pressure. King renders the woods as an eerie wonderland, one harboring a something stalking Trisha but also, just perhaps, God: he explicitly explores questions of faith here (as he has before, as in Desperation) but without impeding the rush of the narrative. Despite its brevity, the novel ripples with ideas, striking images, pop culture allusions and recurring themes, plus an unnecessary smattering of scatology. It's classic King, brutal, intensely suspenseful, an exhilarating affirmation of the human spirit. 1,250,000 first printing; major ad/promo; BOMC and QPB featured alternates; simultaneous audiocassette and CD, read by Anne Heche.