The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Stephen King

INTRODUCTION
PRINCIPAL WORKS
CRITICISM
FURTHER READING

(Full name Stephen Edwin King; has also written under the pseudonyms Richard Bachman, John Swithen, and Eleanor Druse) American novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, nonfiction writer, essayist, and author of juvenile novels.

The following entry presents criticism on King's juvenile novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) through 2004.

INTRODUCTION

Though King has become known as the "Master" of modern horror fiction—a title confirmed by his status as one of the most prolific and popular authors of the twentieth century—he has published a select few works intended for younger readers, most notably, his 1999 juvenile novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. The macabre tale describes the eight-day ordeal of a nine-year-old girl lost in the woods of Maine and New Hampshire. Trisha McFarland, the novel's heroine, learns to survive alone in the wilderness, fearing all the while that she is being stalked by a nameless and terrifying "God of the Lost." Trisha derives her strength and will to survive from contemplating her idol—Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Tom Gordon—as she listens to the baseball game on her radio, her only connection to the civilized world. King's story of girl-versus-nature, written for both adult and young-adult readers, takes place in a ruggedly realist setting, while including elements of the classic fairy tale. While many critics have taken issue with King's adult canon, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, generally received a warm reception from the children's literature critical community, who named the novel a Young Adult Library Association Best Book for Young Adults in 2000. In 2004 King's text was adapted, re-designed, and illustrated as a cardboard "pop-up" book titled The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-Up Stephen King.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947, King moved to Durham, Maine, at the age of two with his mother and brother when his father, a U.S. merchant marine, abandoned the family. His family then moved to various other cities, eventually returning to Durham permanently in 1958. King had a close relationship with his mother, who supported the family with a series of low-paying jobs and read to him often as a child. She later encouraged King to send his work to publishers, but her death from cancer in 1973 occurred before King achieved his enormous success as an author. King published his first short story, "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber" in Comics Review in 1965. He also wrote his first full-length manuscript, "The Aftermath," while still in high school. King received a scholarship to the University of Maine at Orono, where he majored in English and minored in speech. As a student, he wrote a column, "King's Garbage Truck," for the Maine Campus newspaper and actively participated in student politics and the anti-Vietnam War movement. After his graduation in 1970, King worked at gas stations and in a laundry before he secured a position teaching high school at the Hampden Academy in Hampden, Maine. He married Tabitha Spruce in 1974, with whom he has three children. The success of his first novel, Carrie (1974), enabled him to focus on writing full time. In 1978 he worked as a writer in residence and instructor at the University of Maine at Orono, which resulted in his writing Stephen King's Danse Macabre (1981), a series of essays about the horror genre. Since the publication of Carrie, King has become one of the best-selling authors of the modern era, with over 400 million copies of his books in print and numerous movie and TV adaptations of his works. In 1999 King was struck by a van while walking alongside a road near his home, sustaining life-threatening injuries to his spine, hip, ribs, and right leg. During his recovery, he experimented with publishing his fiction electronically, releasing the short story "Riding the Bullet," which he eventually incorporated into his collection Everything's Eventual (2002). In 2003 King received the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

PLOT AND MAJOR CHARACTERS

The chapters of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon are titled after innings in a baseball game, including "Pregame," "First Inning," and so on, ending with chapters called "Bottom of the Ninth: Save Situation," and "Postgame." The story is narrated in the third person, primarily from the perspective of the protagonist, nine-year-old Trisha McFarland, but also broadening out to follow her parents' efforts to find and rescue her. As the novel opens in June 1998, Trisha is setting out with her mother, Quilla Anderson, and her brother, Pete, on a six-mile day hike along the Appalachian Trail of Western Maine. Trisha's parents have been divorced for one year, and her mother and brother constantly bicker about the divorce. Trisha and her father, Larry McFarland, are both diehard fans of the Boston Red Sox. Their mutual idol is Tom Gordon, a relief pitcher known for his spectacular 9th-inning saves and his ritual gesture of pointing to the sky to indicate that God is responsible for his successes on the baseball field. Soon after the hike begins, Trisha wanders off the trail to relief herself, while her mother and brother, who are arguing, walk on ahead without noticing her. Trisha decides to take a short cut in order to catch up with her family, but is soon completely lost and unable to find the trail. She spends the next eight days enduring a series of hardships encountered in the wilderness. Her only tools for survival are the contents of her small backpack, which include some food and her walkman radio. Trisha begins to find evidence of a vicious creature stalking her through the woods, an unseen presence she comes to think of as a "God of the Lost." Meanwhile, she is comforted by listening to a broadcast of a Red Sox game on her walkman. Trisha's ordeals in the wilderness include being attacked by swarms of insects, getting sick from drinking contaminated stream-water, and her constant fear of the mysterious beast who leaves a bloody carcass of a deer in its wake. Trisha derives strength, comfort, and the will to survive from her fantasy-visions of Tom Gordon himself, who appears beside her in her imagination, offering words of wisdom to keep her going. After over a week of wandering, Trisha comes upon an old rural road, which she follows toward civilization. Finally, she is confronted face-to-face by her "God of the Lost," which turns out to be a ferocious grizzly bear. In desperation, she attempts to fend off the beast by throwing her walkman at it. At the exact same moment, a hunter shoots and kills the bear before it attacks the lost girl. Trisha awakens safely in a hospital bed, surrounded by her brother and both of her parents. The text ends with the words, "Game over."

MAJOR THEMES

An overarching theme of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is the classic literary conflict of man versus nature. Much of the novel is focused on Trisha's struggles in facing the challenges of the wilderness without the comforts and conveniences of modern civilization. Alone in the woods, Trisha succeeds in finding food, water, shelter, and protection without the aid of her parents or the modern conveniences of civilized life. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is also a coming-of-age story in which Trisha develops and strengthens her sense of self as an individual who must draw on her own inner strengths and resources to survive. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon additionally addresses the theme of how divorce affects children. While Trisha has outwardly adjusted to her parents' divorce more easily than her brother, it seems her needs are being overlooked because her brother's more vocal and obvious struggles demand all of her mother's attention. During the course of her ordeal, Trisha develops a more mature perspective on her parents' divorce and how it has affected her as an individual. Finally, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon addresses the importance of heroes. Throughout her wanderings in the wilderness, Trisha derives her greatest inner strength from envisioning her hero, Tom Gordon, as a sort of spiritual guide or guardian angel to help her maintain the willpower to survive against great odds. Sharon A. Russell has remarked, "Tom Gordon … represents a stability for the child of a divorce, a connection to the absent father and a code of conduct beyond the divisive arguments of parents and siblings."

CRITICAL RECEPTION

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon has been well received by critics, even though the text represents one of King's shortest novels to date. Edward Bryant has described the novel favorably as "another impressive entry in the King canon." Reviewers have particularly applauded King's characterization of Trisha, noting how well she functions as a nuanced and three-dimensional child protagonist. The Publishers Weekly review has argued that, "King has always excelled at writing about children, and Trisha McFarland … is his strongest kid character yet, wholly believable and achingly empathetic in her vulnerability and resourcefulness." Critics have further admired King's portrayal of the natural environment as both a physical challenge and an allegorical wilderness in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Martin Levin has observed, King's "Maine woods are very much a physical place, but they're also a metaphor for childhood's dogged terrors. Trisha's almost week-long ordeal is an extension of the horrors of her parents' divorce and the willful quarrels of her mother and brother." Jennifer Hubert has similarly remarked, "Few writers can revisit the fears of childhood as well as King." Several critics have also praised how King deftly weaved elements of traditional fairy tales into his more realist narrative. Michael A. Arnzen has characterized The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon as "a modern day fairy tale about a girl who gets lost in the woods, encountering strange fantasy creatures in her quest to find her way back home…. But Tom Gordon is more than just a fairy tale. It is clearly a realist novel, borrowing heavily from the genre of nature fiction and referring endlessly to the real world outside the forest."

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Juvenile Works

The Eyes of the Dragon [illustrations by David Palladini] (juvenile novel) 1987
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (juvenile novel) 1999
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-Up Stephen King [text adaptation by Peter Abrahams; illustrations by Alan Dingman] (pop-up book) 2004

Adult Works

The Star Invaders [as Steve King] (short stories) 1964
Carrie: A Novel of a Girl with a Frightening Power (novel) 1974
'Salem's Lot (novel) 1975
Rage [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1977
The Shining (novel) 1977
Night Shift (short stories) 1978; also published as Night Shift: Excursions into Horror, 1979
The Stand (novel) 1978; revised as The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition, 1990
The Dead Zone (novel) 1979
The Long Walk [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1979
Firestarter (novel) 1980
Cujo (novel) 1981
Roadwork: A Novel of the First Energy Crisis [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1981
Stephen King's Danse Macabre (essays) 1981
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger [illustrations by Michael Whelan] (novel) 1982
*Different Seasons (novellas) 1982
The Running Man [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1982
Stephen King's Creepshow: A George A. Romero Film (screenplay) 1982
Christine (novel) 1983
Pet Sematary (novel) 1983
Cycle of the Werewolf [illustrations by Bernie Wrightson] (novel) 1984; also published as The Silver Bullet, 1985
The Talisman [with Peter Straub] (novel) 1984
Thinner [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1984
†The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels by Stephen King (novels) 1985
Cat's Eye (screenplay) 1985
Skeleton Crew [illustrations by J. K. Potter] (short stories) 1985
It (novel) 1986; first published in limited edition in Germany as Es, 1986
Maximum Overdrive (screenplay) 1986
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of Three [illustrations by Phil Hale] (novel) 1987
Misery (novel) 1987
The Tommyknockers (novel) 1987
The Dark Half (novel) 1989
Pet Sematary (screenplay) 1989
‡Four Past Midnight (novellas) 1990
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands [illustrations by Ned Dameron] (novel) 1991
Needful Things (novel) 1991
Dolores Claiborne (novel) 1992
Gerald's Game (novel) 1992
Stephen King's Sleepwalkers (screenplay) 1992
Nightmares and Dreamscapes (short stories) 1993
Insomnia [illustrations by Phil Hale] (novel) 1994
Rose Madder (novel) 1995
Desperation (novel) 1996
The Regulators [as Richard Bachman] (novel) 1996
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass [illustrations by Dave McKean] (novel) 1997
The Green Mile: A Novel in Six Parts (novel) 1997
Bag of Bones (novel) 1998
Hearts in Atlantis (novellas and short stories) 1999
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (nonfiction) 2000
Black House [with Peter Straub] (novel) 2001
Dreamcatcher (novel) 2001
Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales (short stories) 2002
From a Buick 8 (novel) 2002
The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla [illustrations by Bernie Wrightson] (novel) 2003
The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah [illustrations by Darrel Anderson] (novel) 2004

The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower [illustrations by Michael Whelan] (novel) 2004
Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season [with Stewart O'Nan] (nonfiction) 2004
The Journals of Eleanor Druse: My Investigation of the Kingdom Hospital Incident [as Eleanor Druse] (novel) 2004
The Colorado Kid (novel) 2005
Cell (novel) 2006
Lisey's Story (novel) 2006

*Includes the novellas "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption," "Apt Pupil," "The Body," and "The Breathing Method."

†Includes the novels Rage, The Long Walk, Roadwork, and The Running Man.

‡Includes the novellas "The Langoliers," "Secret Window, Secret Garden," "The Library Policeman," and "The Sun Dog."

CRITICISM

Publishers Weekly (review date 5 April 1999)

SOURCE: Review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King. Publishers Weekly 246, no. 14 (5 April 1999): 224.

"The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted." King's new novel [The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon ]—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.

Martin Levin (review date 24 April 1999)

SOURCE: Levin, Martin. "Lost in the Woods of Baseball." Globe and Mail (24 April 1999): E11.

I confess to having read only one previous Stephen King novel (stranded in a cabin many years ago, I picked up the only available book, Carrie ), but like the heroine of this novel, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, I feel a debt of gratitude to the Boston Red Sox pitcher named in the title. I drafted him in both my fantasy baseball leagues in 1998, the year this novel is set, and he never let me down.

Nor does he let down King's nine-year-old heroine, Trisha McFarland, in this surprisingly effective, suspenseful and short book. (The shortness really is unexpected, the usual King length running to 500 pages and more. But why, other than a kind of genre snobbery, should I be surprised at its effectiveness? Carrie was a good read.)

Trisha, out for a walk in the Maine woods (a favourite King setting) with her divorced mother and quarrelsome older brother, almost immediately gets lost, and has a very rum go of it. Aside from a few not very believable excursions into her parents' world, the entire story is told from the perspective of the lost and wandering Trisha. It's a tale of natural terror, as Trisha, with little to eat and drink, and with only her Walkman and its ability to pick up the games of her beloved Red Sox, faces hunger and thirst, bugs and bogs and brambles, and fear of the dark places. And perhaps something worse.

"The world had teeth in," Trisha comes to realize, "and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted." King is exceptionally good at evoking mounting terror, sprinkled with the sorts of relief that comes just before the teeth bite. His Maine woods are very much a physical place, but they're also a metaphor for childhood's dogged terrors. Trisha's almost weeklong ordeal is an extension of the horrors of her par-ent's divorce and the willful quarrels of her mother and brother. It's also very much in the Grimm fairytale genre: small child, perhaps quite resourceful, is lost, bereft of parental authority and consolation; faces terrible danger (a witch is missing here, but there is an equivalent): emerges whole, often with help from an unexpected source.

That source here is Tom Gordon. At first, Trisha simply tunes in Red Sox games and waits for Gordon to come into the last inning to save the day. Which he almost invariably does. Soon, he begins to appear to her in visions that may or may not be hallucinatory. As the days, and innings (the novel is structured like a baseball game) drag on, he becomes her constant companion, a sounding board for her decisions about what to do next. It all leads toward an inevitable climax. Can Gordon, or Trisha herself, save the day this time?

This is hardly a perfect novel. The minor characters are stick figures, so that success or failure hinges entirely on Trisha. Mostly, I think, King gets her right. But sometimes, her thoughts or language seem anomalous or too sophisticated for her age. Early on, for instance, she characterizes the bickering between mother and brother as "like some sick form of making out." I don't think so.

Still, this little book, which was apparently a complete surprise to King's publisher (the cynical might say that he knocked it off in a spare weekend), is an effective thriller with a winning heroine. It will not disappoint King's many fans, who have already propelled it to the top of the bestseller list. Meanwhile, Tom Gordon has gone on the disabled list with an elbow injury. Perhaps it will console him to know that there are other things than ball games worth saving.

BusinessWorld (review date 21 May 1999)

SOURCE: "Court Side: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon." BusinessWorld (21 May 1999): 1.

I was finally able to put down The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon the other night. It wasn't really vintage Stephen King; there was hardly any horror of the kind he was used to churning out, but it caught my fancy anyway because it dealt with the essence of sports. Nope, it didn't read like Playing for Keeps or The Jordan Rules. In fact, it was a simple story, short for King's standards, centering on how a girl, after having been lost in the woods, was able to keep her wits and survive on the strength of her adulation for a major league pitcher.

Sure, King's newest work is the stuff of fantasy. The climax of the story, in particular, had a slight supernatural flavor, perhaps more subtle than that in The Green Mile, but nonetheless evident for page turners to see. On the other hand, it's also grounded in the truth; everything from Gordon to the Appalachian Trail to the emotions the title character felt for her hero is easy to swallow and accept. It was all about empathy, much in the way we share in the glory and the pain of our sports idols. King was right; some days you eat the bear, and some days the bear eats you.

Perhaps the easiest to understand is the bond the girl shared with Gordon; she could have been anybody else with an affinity for any other sports figure. When in a bind, we all turn to sources of inspiration, and it takes no great effort to identify ourselves with the likes of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, of Cal Ripken and Ronaldo. Inevitably, we place great expectations on our role models, counting on them to hurdle every obstacle in their path, to overcome every impediment on the way to success. We always want Sachin Tendulkar to score a century, or Jaromir Jagr to perform a hat trick. We're behind them, rooting for them, so they can't, mustn't fail.

In any case, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon strikes a chord because it celebrates the mastery of the human spirit. As with Allen Iverson on the hardcourt, or with Steve Young on the gridiron, or with Michael Johnson on the track oval, we find ways to cope with life's constant challenges, seeking solace in the blessings we have and hope in the triumphs of others. We stumble once in a while, but we pick ourselves up, learn from our experience, and move on. In short, we survive.

As we look around us, we realize the important message that organized sports, for all their frailties, brings. We look to Gordon and the American League record he made as a closer for the Boston Red Sox last year, and we can't help but admire his nerves of steel, his willingness to put everything on the line, his confidence and determination to do the task at hand regardless of the circumstances. We look to ourselves and we can't help but wonder why we sometimes give way to doubt. If we do as Gordon does and point to the sky in gratitude whenever we emerge from our daily trials unscathed, we will know that nothing can break us. Not now, not ever, and not with Him on our side.

Edward Bryant (review date June 1999)

SOURCE: Bryant, Edward. Review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King. LOCUS 42, no. 6 (June 1999): 27.

[In the following review, Bryant commends The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon as "another impressive entry in the King canon."]

One thing about Stephen King—he feels no compulsion to be predictable. Last time out, Bag of Bones, that thick epic of downeast haunting, cost enough trees to blanket a small eastern European nation. Now there's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, a volume slim and exquisite, a compact tale of survival, personal spirit, and a lost young girl believing she's being stalked by something monstrous in the nearly impenetrable New Hampshire woods.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon illustrates a couple of basic realities about the man who's arguably America's most popular novelist. First, he's got the clout to do pretty much whatever he wants. Fortunately King's possessed of abundant talent, ambition, and the integrity to continue experimenting with form and variation, and to keep on growing as a writer. The second thing is he's still a damned fine storyteller. These days, there are some who have tried to corrupt the meaning of "storyteller" and turn it into a barely polite euphemism for a practitioner of cheap, lazy, commercial hackwork. I don't hold with that. For me, a storyteller is exactly that—a guy or a woman creating a narrative tale with the charismatic immediacy of talking to me alone over a kitchen table or a flickering outdoor fire.

The focus of Stephen King's storytelling in his new novel is pretty tight. The girl of the title is nine-year-old Trisha McFarland. Trisha's fairly mature for her years, but that maturity's about to take a quantum leap upward when she goes on a deceptively tame nature hike with her brother Pete and their divorced mom. Quilla Andersen—Mom—is something of a tough cookie. Trisha reflects that "Maybe if her mother had been at Little Big Horn the Indians still would have won, but the body-count would have been considerably higher."

Trisha's not overjoyed about being on this junket into the great out of doors. She lags her family farther and farther, then takes a break to pee. Her bickering mother and brother don't notice she's gone for all too long a time. And when they do, Trisha, disoriented, is thoroughly lost in the thick forest.

In fact, she's well on her way to Canada. Only 400 miles to go. She has no idea where she is, and no sense of how to get back to safety. She's got a Walkman and a fannypack with a small amount of comestibles.

The novel's chapters correspond to the innings of a baseball game. Remember the title? For the record, author King is one of the Boston Red Sox's greatest fans. And Tom Gordon is one of the Sox's greatest players. In real life he's a pitcher, a "closer," a Mr. Fixit who's brought in to save the day when the team's behind close to the end of the game. As skill and ability would have it, Tom Gordon's record is pretty good at pulling dire situations out of the fire.

Trisha, on the other hand, doesn't even have the advantage of a fire. As she walks farther, reaching no sign of civilization, she plays it smart, rationing her small store of food and drink. But it's not going to last forever.

Our protagonist is no dummy. She quickly registers the seriousness of her situation. Trisha's also got a healthy imagination. When she confronts a cliff temporarily stymieing her progress, "She saw herself falling toward that jackstraw pile [of rotting trees and branches], screaming and waving her arms as she went down; saw a dead branch punching through the undershelf of her jaw and up between her teeth, tacking her tongue to the roof of her mouth like a red memo, then spearing into her brain and killing her." The author's delight in the precise grisly image is still alive, well, and healthily enthusiastic.

Trish sparingly uses her Walkman to try to ascertain from local newscasts whether anyone's noticed she's missing and is searching for her. She also tunes in Red Sox games for solace. She's always been a Tom Gordon fan, thanks to her dad. In her present fix, Trisha discovers that the persona of Tom Gordon in her head has taken on a growing importance, a symbolic significance that clearly affects her will to survive.

Trisha also comes to suspect that she's not alone in this environment that sometimes seems like a perfectly explicable wilderness of trees and rocks, other times resembles a darkening magic woods. It may be her imagination—it may be a deeper perception that begins to run riot:

It's a special thing, Trisha—the thing that waits for the lost ones. It lets them wander until they're good and scared—because fear makes them taste better, it sweetens the flesh—and then it comes for them. You'll see it. It'll come out of the trees any minute now. A matter of seconds, really. And when you see its face you'll go insane. If there was anyone to hear you, they'd think you were screaming. But you'll be laughing, won't you? Because that's what insane people do when their lives are ending, they laugh … and they laugh … and they laugh.

At this point in the narrative, Trisha's not so dehydrated, not so famished, that she doesn't recognize the dangers of incipient hysteria. And yet she knows there's something—or someone—out there, be it ancient god, modern psychopath, or deadly natural creature.

The author expertly manages the continuously changing portrait of a girl simultaneously learning survival techniques, even as those new skills waver on the edge of instant obsolescence as her body and mind begin to degrade and fail under the enormous privation she experiences.

As compactly constructed and told as The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is, it still manages to achieve a series of valid multiple identities. It's a young adult novel and a novel for grownups. It's a fairy tale and a realistic account of painful detail. It's a horror story about ever-lurking death and the monster that skulks at the edge of the light, and it's a luminous tale of faith and the tensile resilience of the human spirit. An allegory about sports heroes and life in today's America? Yep, that too.

All in all, another impressive entry in the King canon.

Jennifer Hubert and Andrew Bowns (review date August 1999)

SOURCE: Hubert, Jennifer, and Andrew Bowns. Review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King. Voice of Youth Advocates 22, no. 3 (August 1999): 72.

Most of us can remember being lost at least once or twice in our lives. No one ever forgets the sickening feeling that rises from the pit of your stomach when you realize you have wandered off the path. One sunny morning in June, nine-year-old Trisha McFarland falls victim to that feeling when she loses her family on a hiking trail in the Maine woods [in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon ]. With only a sack lunch and her Walkman, Trisha wanders in the forest for nine days in search of the elusive trail. During that time she experiences sickness, injury, and frightening nighttime hallucinations of a lurking beast that may or may not be real. Her only comfort is the tinny sportscast emanating from her Walkman that describes the exploits of her baseball hero, Red Sox relief pitcher Tom Gordon. When Trisha finally confronts her fear, which in typical King style has morphed into a huge bear, she does so by winding up and pitching her Walkman right into the bear's face, just like Tom Gordon. The beast is exorcised, and Trisha is finally rescued by a friendly out-of-season hunter.

Few writers can revisit the fears of childhood as well as King, and for most teens these terrors of years so recently lived are especially vivid. While Trisha is younger than some of the teen characters in earlier works, like Christine (Viking, 1984) or Carrie (Doubleday, 1974), the legions of young adult King fans who eagerly await the publication of each new novel will not particularly notice or care.—Jennifer Hubert.

I thought the theme was that life can teach us valuable lessons even if we leave the "trail." Trisha used her head, learned her lesson, and found her way back. Looking at the cover, I thought, "This book is for guys." Then I read it and as a young gentleman, I felt that certain feminine details did not really appeal to me. But I think this book is an eight out of ten, and I would definitely recommend it to a friend.—Andrew Bowns, Teen Reviewer.

Charles De Lint (review date September 1999)

SOURCE: De Lint, Charles. Review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King. Fantasy and Science Fiction 97, no. 3 (September 1999): 28-9.

It's a sure sign of the end-of-the-millennium apocalypse: Stephen King has turned in a short book.

Okay, I'm joking. But it is a rarity for the writer who is usually a man of many words.

To be honest, when I first heard about this new novel, I wasn't particularly taken with the premise: a young girl is lost in the Maine woods and keeps her spirits up by listening to baseball games on her Walkman, and by imagining the presence of baseball player Tom Gordon with her in the forest. I'm not a huge fan of baseball, to begin with (sacrilege, I'm sure, to many of the readers of this column, not to mention King himself), and the premise sounded too narrowly focused, reminding me of my least favorite King novel, Gerald's Game, all of which took place in a single room.

But the thing about King is that he's so often able to pull off what he shouldn't be able to, and these less supernatural-based novels (I put The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon in the same thematic class as, say, Dolores Claiborne ) are often the books of his I like most. It's because he's always so good with characterization and in these, where we don't have the bogeymen and monsters sharing page space, there seems to be that much more room to bring the characters more fully to life.

So I started the book with reservations, but soon forgot them.

Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland's ordeal in the forest makes for a riveting read, especially when you know how easy it is to get turned around in the bush and become lost.

Trust me, the way it happens to Trisha is highly believable. And once we're lost in the woods with her, it's claustrophobic at times, certainly, but hardly as narrowly focused as I was afraid it might be.

As for the baseball aspect of the book, it's important, certainly, but you don't have to be a fan to appreciate it. My only real quibble is Trisha's age. King puts her at nine, but she seemed older to me—eleven or twelve. But I don't have kids, so what do I know?

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon stands right up there with the best work that King's produced, and that's very fine work indeed. In Trisha, he has created a wonderfully believable little girl. She might be scared and suffering from hunger, incessant bug bites, and all the other perils of the deep bush, but she has a heart as big as all of Maine.

And it's how King portrays that heart—her despair, yes, but also her determination to beat the immense odds set against her—that makes this such an outstanding novel.

Pam Spencer (review date March 2000)

SOURCE: Spencer, Pam. Review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King. School Library Journal 46, no. 3 (March 2000): 264-65.

YA—Tired of the continual bickering between her mother and her older brother, nine-year-old Trisha [in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon ] lags behind them on the Appalachian Trail, leaves the path to go to the bathroom, takes a shortcut, and is promptly lost. She follows a stream searching for other people or a road, but unknowingly hikes further and further away from civilization. Her time alone is spent searching for food, mulling over her parents' divorce, and listening to Red Sox games on her Walkman radio. Relief pitcher for the Sox, Tom Gordon, becomes her imaginary companion and provides the comfort she needs to overcome her fears and loneliness so that she can concentrate on staying alive. One feels Trisha's terror as she endures drenching thunderstorms, tromps through mud-sucking swamps, sees gutted deer carcasses, and falls down rocky slopes. Will she survive? Readers aren't sure and the tension builds as hunger and weakness wear her down. Excitement, fear, and anxiety, coupled with vivid descriptions of the Maine-New Hampshire forests alongside the normalcy of listening to play-by-play baseball games, add up to a top-notch read.

Michael A. Arnzen (essay date April 2002)

SOURCE: Arnzen, Michael A. "Childhood and Media Literacy in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon." New York Review of Science Fiction 14, no. 8 (April 2002): 1, 8-11.

[In the following essay, Arnzen examines King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon in terms of feminist reader-response criticism.]

Fairy Tale Survivor

There is a point at which people who are cast upon their own resources stop living and begin merely surviving…. Things get wiggy around the edges. Trisha McFarland approached this borderline between life and survival as her second afternoon in the woods wore on.
(King 121)

Stephen King calls his 1999 book, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, his personal "Hansel and Gretel … without the Hansel" (qtd. in Shindler). (Because the inspiration for Tom Gordon came to him as a surprise, King also quipped that "if books were babies, I'd call The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon the result of an unplanned pregnancy" [qtd. in Anthony].) The Gretel comparison is accurate, insofar as Gordon is a modern day fairy tale about a girl who gets lost in the woods, encountering strange fantasy creatures in her quest to find her way back home. Trisha McFarland's imaginary friend of the title, Red Sox closing pitcher Tom Gordon, is one of those strange fantasy creatures, a guardian angel of sorts whose games she listens to on her trusty Walkman. Through sage baseball metaphors he advises the nine-year-old how to "get the save" or, literally, to save herself from the dangers of the wilderness she is lost in (85). But there's an evil creature in the forest as well—a shadowy "something" out there in the woods, stalking Trisha. This something could be merely a manifestation of her creeping paranoia, or it could be a very real grizzly bear. Whatever it is, Trisha feels certain that it is a metaphysical creature she terms a "God of the Lost." Much like the old witch in the forest who fattened Gretel with gingerbread to get her ready for the cannibalistic oven, this God of the Lost simply awaits Trisha's impending demise. It watches from the forest, patiently letting her plump up with an all-consuming fear that "sweetens the flesh" before the creature will come out of hiding to eat her alive (98).

But Tom Gordon is more than just a fairy tale. It is clearly a realist novel, borrowing heavily from the genre of nature fiction and referring endlessly to the real world outside the forest, if not the text. After all, Tom Gordon really is a pitcher for the Red Sox.

In his postscript to the novel, King's disclaimer takes pains to claim that famous people are both real and imaginary: "There is a real Tom Gordon, who does indeed pitch in the closer's role for the Boston Red Sox, but the Gordon in this story is fictional. The impressions fans have of people who have achieved some degree of celebrity are always fictional, as I can attest of my own personal experience" (263). This remark not only echoes the themes from Misery, but also reader response criticism, in that King posits the difference between a real author and what critics like Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish term an "implied author" (a construct of the reader's imagination).

While the novel posits Trisha's journey as a fantastic allegory for a "tween-aged" girl's coming of age, we might more accurately compare the text to other "lost in the woods" narratives that have only recently come to dominate contemporary media culture. Whether in the form of "extreme" realiTV game shows like Survivor, or postmodern mockumentaries, like The Blair Witch Project, turn of the millennium texts enjoy tossing the modern civilians of consumer culture back into their uncivilized past, leading to both a psychological and cultural form of regression. In these texts, modernized representations of primitivism become the topoi of the real. In Blair Witch, especially, the regression to the past that the woods generates also invalidates modern technology as a form of salvation from man's primitive nature. (This observation was made by Joseph Andriano.) The characters fixate on a movie camera as their link back to postmodern culture, but it merely records their demise—and, in the end, its own. The primitive world (whether the forest or its spectral inhabitants) wins.

But as much as Tom Gordon throws Trisha back to a land of "the lost" in order to "reenter the food chain" as one critic puts it (Lundegaard), King's work somehow answers texts like The Blair Witch Project with a less nihilistic and more optimistic ending. For in King's novella, Trisha eventually finds her salvation through media technology. And—more importantly—through her active, imaginative use of media, she survives the forest. For one thing, Trisha survives by using her radio as a beacon to keep her tuned in to her culture. It keeps her spirits and her fantasy alive. It also becomes a hand tool that protects her, a weapon that she literally pitches at the brown bear in the closing chapter called "Bottom of the Ninth," in order to "save" herself in the game of survival. This bear, the God of the Lost, ultimately comes to represent either a diseased superego or a bricolage of Trisha's fragmented identity. When she confronts her fear, she sees randomness: "It was the face of teachers and friends; it was the face of parents and brothers; it was the face of the man who might come and offer you a ride…. It stank of death and disease and everything random" (250).

Trisha's journey culminates in controlling the media, both physically and imaginatively. King, in other words, dramatizes the movement into adulthood as a problem of media literacy, or of learning to master and manage the signs of consumer culture.

In this essay, I want to bring together two areas of study to understand King's novel: fan culture criticism and feminist reader response. First, I want to suggest that for all that Stephen King seems to fetishize commodity culture, he at the same time invites what reader response critics call "active reading" as a form of empowerment for those of us caught within that culture. Second, because this book has female fandom at its center—much like King's earlier work, Misery —I want to suggest that King invites a feminist reading position through his representation of childhood—one that investigates and challenges the signs of patriarchy even while it remains heterosexist in its assumptions about filial love.

Trisha as Consumer

She now looked back on her panicky plunge through the woods with the mixture of indulgence and embarrassment adults feel when looking back upon the worst of their childhood behavior….
(King 51)

In his characterization of Trisha McFarland as a nine-year old girl lost in the woods, King obviously plays on the reader's sympathies. She seems wholly under-prepared by her upbringing to deal with this situation, if only because she is young and female. The whole world—which King says in the opening line "had teeth and could bite you with them anytime it wanted"—threatens to chew her up if left alone. By choosing such a character, King's book manifests our culture's essentialist assumptions about childhood and femininity (two traits which are often equated in patriarchy). The fact that Trisha can battle the wilderness alone and survive powerfully vies against such assumptions.

It is not simply Trisha's gender and age, however, that posit her as vulnerable and sympathetic. Rather, it is that she is abandoned. True, she is responsible for wandering off the path to tend to her bladder, but King makes it seem as though her parents' recent divorce is to blame for his misfortune. As her brother and mother argue ahead of her on the path, the last words she'll hear are her brother Pete's accusation of Quilla, their mother: "[I] don't know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong" (19). This statement, presented in italics at the very moment of Trisha's departure from her family, overtly places the responsibility for Trisha's harrowing ordeal at the feet of her parents. Numerous moments in the text further confer blame on the parents—especially on the father's alcoholism, which King suggests is the cause of the McFarland family breakdown. In children, divorce commonly generates feelings of abandonment by the absent parent. But by positing that her abandonment is generational, King also implicitly indicts the cultural environment into which Trisha is born. If we empathize with her plight, it may be because—as a culture that inherits a heavy history—we sometimes feel like we have to pay for what our parents' generation has done wrong. In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, King dramatizes this burden in the figure of a child born into a commodity culture so saturated by media and the cult of celebrity that she must learn how to survive the forest of its signs in order to become a proper adult.

Indeed, Trisha herself realizes that she has to grow up early in her forest isolation, when she first gives in to hunger and wakes up from "her very first fainting spell" (44). Recognizing that a lack of food is responsible, she unpacks what little rations she had stowed for the hike and realizes that "she could think like a kid again once she was out of the woods, but for the time being she had to think as much like an adult as possible…. You had to conserve your supplies" (45; italics in original). Nonetheless, Trisha chugs "three big gulps" from her lemon-lime soda and eats both a hard-boiled egg and a Twinkie (which tastes so good it is "SECK-shoo-al," she says, borrowing her friend Pepsi's catchphrase (47)). In the midst of all these references to careful consumption and choice making, she not only "think[s] … like an adult" but also stumbles upon her radio in her pack, a discovery which King describes in childish terms through indirect discourse: "Her Walkman! She had brought her Walkman! Yeah, baby!" (47). Pepsi's "SECK-shoo-al" remark and Trisha's passing catchphrase from the Austin Powers films are not merely references to sexuality and teen culture, but childish refigurations of those very ideas in relation to brand names and consumer goods—in other words, she is fetishizing food.

Of course, Trisha is being deprived of this food—this is why she must think like an adult and consciously ration it. The key point is that King places this lack in a context of commodity fetishism: It's not that she merely needs nutrients, but that her only way of comprehending both her suffering and her salvation is through prefabricated food and commercial brand names. What is of utmost importance, naturally, is her media technology—her Walkman—as significant to her as the very food she needs to live. Later in the book, she will learn a lesson about the "use value" of natural food that offers an environmentally correct epiphany, when, virtually starving, she discovers a bevy of beechnuts. She eats them raw, discovering "more than peace … experiencing her life's greatest contentment" and wants to tell the world how "simple [it] really is…. Just to eat … why, just to have something to eat and then be full afterward …" [165].

Faith and Literacy

Now, however, praying was hard. Neither of her parents were churchgoers—her mom was a lapsed Catholic, and her Dad, so far as Trisha knew, had never had anything to lapse from—and now she discovered herself lost and without vocabulary in another way.
(King 68)

In his 1995 essay, "Deconstructing Horror," Steffan Hantke argues that much of King's fiction questions how we value material objects: "in every transgres-sion of the demarcation line between the mundane and the fantastic, an object is used as a catalyst, a messenger or go-between" (43). In this novella, Trisha's Walkman radio becomes that catalyst, connecting her highly real situation to the fantastic character of Gordon. Hantke also notes that commodities occupy a central role in postmodern horror, generally, and that such objects should be read in relation to "their existence outside of, and in opposition to, the sphere of consumer society" since their value in the narrative often outweighs the value of everyday commodities in the story by rendering them metaphysical (45). Hantke has in mind objects like magic amulets or possessed '57 Chevies—objects which are invested with a spiritual power that lifts them out of the commodity culture and suggests they work in ways other than just economic exchange. Thus, an object like Trisha's Walkman is displaced from its economic context in such a way that it "cannot be properly owned, or bought and sold. Yet its value is so immeasurable that the fate of the entire narrative universe depends on its circulation and exchange" (45). Material is fantastically rendered spiritual, given a soul and life all its own by capitalist ideology.

Trisha's Walkman functions in two ways: as an educational device that trains her in the discourse of baseball (and the fantasies attached to it) and as a tool that she must utilize to escape the Wilderness (both figuratively and literally). Near the ending, when Trisha wields the Walkman as a weapon against the God of the Lost—the bear that has been hunting her—it becomes a baseball in her hands (248), one that she pitches at the creature at the very moment that a hunter shoots it. The convenient synchronicity of this occurrence is enough to test the skepticism of any reader of realist fiction, but it is beside the point in King's allegory. Trisha's courage to fantasize is all that matters; her courage and her knowledge as sports fan. What would otherwise be trivial information—pitching technique—here becomes figured as a method of survival. Fan knowledge and the courage of the childish imagination in a culture of passive consumption is given a sort of power in this book that it does not have in everyday life. Trisha's Walkman is the fetish object that is invested with this almost supernatural power, and when it hits the bear "dead bang between the eyes … she s[ees] a couple of Energizer double A batteries fall out of it onto the road" (253). King's metaphor is more significant than one might realize upon first glance, because it dramatizes an exchange of power between reality and fantasy. The bear is rendered as artificial as a robotic machine that one just needed to remove the batteries to vanquish; her imaginary baseball—which really does have batteries in it—is rendered real.

Trisha's Walkman functions in a number of other interesting ways, primarily in that it acquires a supernatural ability to reify fantasy. Generally speaking, the radio functions as an educational device that initiates Trisha in the media literate culture of fandom. This function is so important that it returns the idea of fandom to its etymological origin in the concept of religious fanaticism. (In his study of fan culture, Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins traces the derivation of "fan" from "fanatic," meaning "a temple servant," to its use in nineteenth-century journalistic accounts of baseball games [12].) King makes media technology not merely a communicative medium, but raises it in abstract power to the status of a bible, one that magically gives Trisha access to both the community of her fellow fans and the spiritual plane. Indeed, ten hours into her journey, she dares to test her Walkman in the wilderness, expecting to hear only silence, but what happens is described as a religious epiphany:

She pushed the button and like a miracle her head filled with the sound of Jerry Trupiano's voice … and more importantly, with the sounds of Fenway Park. She was sitting out here in the darkening, drippy woods, lost and alone, but she could hear thirty thousand people. It was a miracle.
(74)

Media technology is miraculous not only because it can connect people across radically disparate spaces (like a forest and a ballpark), but also because it vicariously connects an alienated individual to an entire culture. It miraculously constructs a social relationship that does not exist in reality. And it also teaches Trisha lessons. The event of the ball game reaffirms her commitment to survive the forest by investing faith in the sports hero and rendering him a role model in charge of her own fate: "It was stupid, of course, as dopey as her father knocking on wood … but it also seemed irrefutable, as obvious as two-and-two-makes-four: If Tom Gordon got the save, she would get the save" (79). And six pages later, when Gordon indeed saves the day and points skyward (his signature gesture) to thank the heavens above, Trisha too reaches a religious epiphany:

She cried harder than she had since first realizing for sure that she was lost, but this time she cried in relief. She was lost but would be found. She was sure of it. Tom Gordon had gotten the save and so would she.
(85)

The obvious "once was lost but now am found" reference will not be lost on a Christian reader. King's prodigal daughter doesn't simply find her way home in this book; she discovers religious faith through a sports-hero-turned-prophetic-angel.

If Trisha McFarland is abandoned into a situation of rugged individualism and blinded by the forest of consumer culture, she nonetheless learns to see the trees through the communal promise of fandom. Through her faith and resilience she manages to stay alive, despite all the threats to her survival. And in the process, her literacy increases and empowers her. Throughout the book, Trisha studies the jock talk on the radio as though it were both a vocabulary textbook and the Book of Proverbs, wrapped in one. She mimics the dialogue of radio announcers and commercial personalities, as though reading from script. The book dramatizes Trisha's progressive mastery of language and signification even as it describes her loss of innocence. She moves from using the euphemisms of her teen friend, Pepsi, to using "The Terrible Effwords" of her brother Pete when she summons the courage to scream at the God of the Lost that's stalking her from a distance (140). Immediately afterwards, she imagines cursing at her brother the next time she hears Pete mope about their parents' divorce, saying "Hey Pete, fuck you, deal with it instead of trying to be either all quiet and sympathetic or all bright and cheery and let's-change-the-subject" (141). Painting her character with the maturity of one who has "dealt with" far worse problems, King progressively aligns Trisha's language use towards the sophistication of an adult. She also gains control over language through punning on radio jingles for windshield repair. And at one point she finds herself arguing with the "idiotic" on-air personalities of a sports talk show, revealing not only her deep knowledge of baseball but also the strength of her voice in that community, inherent in the act of speaking up for herself as a dedicated fan (180). It is fitting that she literally hears herself on the radio when she gets frustrated with the talk show speaker's ignorance about the Red Sox: as she changes the channel, she stumbles upon the sound of her own name on the airwaves, as a newscaster mentions that search parties have no knowledge of her whereabouts (182). Throughout the novel, moreover, she questions the meaning of clichés like "happy as a lark" and near the climax she patently refuses to use them any longer: "Blue-eyed miracle. Was that [expression] her mother's or her father's? 'Who gives a rat's ass?' Trisha croaked. 'If I get out of this, I'm going to make up some sayings of my own'" (239).

When King dramatizes Trisha's acquisition of literacy in this way, he also scribes a narrative of empowerment over the signs she has been powerless against. She has become an active reader. Active readers take charge of the production of meaning in a text. An active reader can transform the passive reception of language into an active, creative process whereby one can both criticize the assumptions behind other people's language and also utilize the power of literacy "to make up some sayings" of one's own.

The Reader's Game

Some days you eat the bear. And some days the bear eats you.
(King 264)

However empowered Trisha may become through this process, she does not, however, abandon the sayings of sports culture. It is instead a culture that she has become more intimate with—as important to her as her family because it has at this point become integrated into her identity. It's worth wondering whether Trisha's empowerment is gendered—whether King treats Trisha as a girl learning what it means to be a woman in a society in which gender roles and the power relations that come with them are handed down from generation to generation and replicated on the airwaves. In some ways, I believe Trisha's characterization invites the reader to adopt a feminist reading position. In their analysis of adolescent stories like The Tower Room and In Summer Light, John Stephens and Robyn McCallum argue that fiction featuring young women as protagonists often engages in dialogic strategies to "challenge the ideological gendering both of genres and of social practices directed at young people, exposing the processes whereby femininity is constructed and naturalized in texts and enabling more autonomous forms of female subjectivity to be expressed" (131). In other words, teen girl fiction explores how girls relate to and operate within social definitions of girlhood, often resisting them.

On the surface, King's novel seems to do just that, exposing the way Trisha has been constructed as a girl, and in the process of acquiring literacy and mastering the patriarchal language (of brothers and baseball), she enters into a more personally empowered subject position. When she claims the right to "make up some sayings of [her] own" Trisha claims the right to self-determination and asserts the agency she clearly has earned as a survivor on par with anything in a Jack London novel. Having suffered along with Trisha, we cannot help identifying with her position as a human being in conflict with nature; the social ideologies that she explores during her journey are in many ways critiqued as artificial constructs along the way.

But on the other hand, there is also the issue that Trisha's development and self-actualization operate outside of a social context, inasmuch as her relations with others are imaginary and occur through the oneway communicative vehicle of her Walkman. She protests patriarchy, in other words, but she does so alone. She has no transmitter; her radio is only a receiver. So how much power does she really acquire? This is the classic "if a tree falls in the woods" problem, and it merely requires a conscientious reader response to "hear it." King structures the book in a metafictional manner: each chapter is entitled an "inning" and the reading process, as spectator sport, echoes the themes and issues in the book, treating reading too as though it were a social relationship among fans, much like baseball. If Trisha does become the hero she emulates, then as the hero of the book we are likewise asked to emulate her. The power conferred upon Trisha is also acquired by the reader operating outside of the text.

Secondly, we have the problematic ending of the book, in which Trisha awakens in a hospital bed and her family reunites around her. In one way, this is a somewhat dangerous childhood fantasy—whose moral lesson is that if you run away, you can repair a broken home. But in another way, this ending also betrays a patriarchal conceit on King's part: that the return of the father and the resurrection of the nuclear family into an organic whole is a necessary component to a unified female subjectivity. In the closing passage of the book, Trisha's mother is virtually absent. From her hospital bed, Trisha nonverbally gestures to the father who stands by her side, signifying her approval of his return to the family: she points to the god in the sky. Her father smiles, and they all live happily ever after, so to speak. "Game over," King writes in the closing sentence, as though he were merely umpire to the reading event (262). The fairy tale and the sports fantasy are brought right to the surface, and the book closes like a game that has been won.

I believe it would be an oversimplification, however, to say that the patriarchal conceits embedded in this ending "win" and that Trisha's identity has been wholly appropriated by a male-dominated culture. As a male reader, I myself cannot claim to know how a female reader—let alone a teenaged girl—would respond to the closure of this text. I assume, though, that her reading might be just like mine: if not out-rightly resistant to any pat "father knows best" sort of closure, then at least highly conscious of the symbolic level of the reading experience, brought right out into the open by Trisha's last gesture and King's proclamation that reading this book has been like playing a baseball game. The book ends, after all, in allegory. By imitating Tom Gordon's sign and pointing toward the sky, Trisha literalizes her imagination within a context that is no longer simply roleplaying with her imaginary icon. And to some extent Trisha's spiritual victory in this book should remain private, secret, and sacred—not only autonomous, but "sub-audible," beyond spoken words.

If reading is itself a game, then the game is not really over, as King's proclamation in the last sentence suggests. A book is a game only inasmuch as the reader takes charge of it. Tom Gordon is a text that asks to be re-read and actively interpreted, rather than consumed once and discarded. The book's male conceits are part of a "game" of life, too, that Trisha will ostensibly play again; one which involves actively reading, rereading, and responding to the various discourses we are all immersed within.

Works Cited

Anthony, Ted. "King's 'Unplanned' Offspring Is Reader's Joy." Jefferson City News Tribune Online. 25 April 1999. 〈www.newstribune.com/stories/042599/ent0425990026.html〉.

Berkenkamp, Lauri. "Reading, Writing and Interpreting: Stephen King's Misery." In The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King's Horrorscape. Ed. Tony Magistrale. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. 203-11.

Hantke, Steffan. "Deconstructing Horror: Commodities in the Fiction of Jonathan Carroll and Kathe Koja." Journal of American Culture 18.3 (Fall 1995): 41-57.

King, Stephen. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. New York: Pocket Books, 1999.

Lundegaard, Erik. "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon." Erik Lundegaard's Book and Movie Reviews. April 1999. 〈home.earthlink.net/∼elundegaard/girlwholoved.htm〉.

Postman, Neil. The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Vintage, 1982.

Shindler, Dorman T. "Baseball Tied to Wilderness Survival." DenverPost.Com. 25 April 1999. 〈63.147.65.175/books/bkgirl0425.htm.

Stephens, John, and Robyn McCallum. "Discourses of Femininity and the Intertextual Construction of Feminist Reading Positions." In Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children's Literature and Culture. Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet, Eds. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. 130-41.

Sharon A. Russell (essay date 2002)

SOURCE: Russell, Sharon A. "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)." In Revisiting Stephen King: A Critical Companion, pp. 127-37. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.]

Jim Milliot (essay date 13 January 2003)

SOURCE: Milliot, Jim. "S & S to Publish King Pop-Up Book." Publishers Weekly 250, no. 1 (13 January 2003): 12.

Stephen King has signed an agreement to publish a pop-up book. Last week, the horror book master inked a deal with Robin Corey, publisher for novelty and media tie-ins at Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, to do an abridged, pop-up edition of his 1999 bestseller The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

Corey said that King has long been one of her favorite authors. When she approached him about a project, "he fell in love with the idea of doing a pop-up book." After talking things through with King, Corey said that Tom Gordon "made the most sense" to make the transition to a pop-up. Although written for an adult audience, Tom Gordon did very well among young adults; it was nominated for the Washington State Evergreen Young Adult Book Award and was named a 2000 Young Adult Library Association Best Book for Young Adults.

Corey, who will edit the book for the Little Simon imprint, said she is close to selecting an artist and paper engineer for the project. Because of the long lead time needed to create a pop-up, the title will not be released until fall 2004 at the earliest. Corey said she expects King to be "very involved" with the project and hopes that Tom Gordon "is just the first of many" pop-ups King will do.

Kim Ford (review date September 2003)

SOURCE: Ford, Kim. Review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King. Voices from the Middle 11, no. 1 (September 2003): 76.

Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland is tired of the constant fighting between her brother and mother [in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon ]. She longs to go back to the days when her parents were together, but knows that she can't; her father is an alcoholic. She finds some comfort in her obsession with baseball, especially the Boston Red Sox, and she thinks Tom Gordon (relief pitcher) is really cute. During a six-mile hike with her family, Trisha stops at a fork in the Appalachian trail, but she becomes hopelessly lost, and soon gets the notion that something is watching her; the "thing" puts many dead animals and other fearsome things in her path. She fights to stay alive, knowing that if she does, she will have to face her worst fear. She does have one imaginary companion, though—Tom Gordon. He gives her puzzling clues on how to get out, but does she?

I can't think of a time when I was as scared as the author portrayed Trisha to be. This was an exciting page-turner, and I would definitely recommend it!

Publishers Weekly (review date 20 September 2004)

SOURCE: Review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-Up Stephen King, by Stephen King, adapted by Peter Abrahams, illustrated by Alan Dingman. Publishers Weekly 251, no. 38 (20 September 2004): 62.

Chilling things pop up in [The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-Up Stephen King, ] 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 popup. Ages 8-up.

John Peters (review date November 2004)

SOURCE: Peters, John. Review of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-Up Stephen King, by Stephen King, adapted by Peter Abrahams, illustrated by Alan Dingman. School Library Journal 50, no. 11 (November 2004): 148.

Gr. 4-6—King boils down his 1999 novel of the same name to short-story length for this elaborately engineered pop-up version [The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-Up Stephen King ]. The plot and nightmarish atmosphere remain broadly the same; nine-year-old Trisha takes a wrong turn in the Maine woods, and only gets through an increasingly grueling week of being scared, hungry, attacked by insects, and afflicted with hallucinations by listening to the exploits of (now ex-) Red Sox closer Tom Gordon on her Walkman. The text is printed on accordion-folded side flaps, flanking large-scale outdoor scenes enhanced by the occasional pull tab or acetate window; moving parts are few but deliciously scary—particularly one flap that flips open to reveal a face made of swarming wasps, and another that reveals a preternaturally toothy bear. Despite a happy ending, and a design sturdy enough to endure repeated readings, this is definitely not for younger "scary story" seekers.