The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon - Stephan King
I'm sure that many of you have seen the “Family Guy” episode mocking Stephen King's dried up creativity with the “lamp monster” gag. Let's be honest, some of Mr. King's work kind of does want you make you stand up and cry out in desperation. However, when he's not writing about angry, possessed cars, cell phones that turn people into zombies or clowns that haunt your dreams and eat you (I'm not making any of this up) he actually is a pretty good writer. Books like The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon serve as sufficient proof of this.

While King's best known for what he does for the horror genre, this book relies a little less on frightening the reader, in spite of what the critiques on the front cover will tell you (though there certainly is a strong element of horror).

Tom Gordon is a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and the girl that loved him is Trisha McFarlane, a nine-year-old girl that gets lost in the woods while out with her mother and brother.

The book starts off with the Trisha trying her best to put up with her arrogant older brother argue bitterly with her recently divorced mother. To get a few moments peace away from them, she wanders into the woods to go to the bathroom while her family continues on without noticing her absence, thus does the story begin.

The story itself is actually quite simple: a girl gets lost in the woods. In trying to find the path again, Trisha becomes more lost and decides to find her own way out, with nothing but a backpack, containing the days lunch and her walkman, which she uses as her only contact with the outside world. With the walkman, she listens to games starring her favourite player: Tom Gordon.

As the story progresses and Trisha slowly resorts to more and more animalistic acts to survive she starts to slip into madness. She is eventually convinced that there is some sort of godly beast hunting her — throughout the novel it is suggested that the beast is real, but the novel is told largely from Trisha's perspective, so the reader is never really sure if it exists or not, something done incredibly well on King's part — and to cope with this, she starts to imagine that Tom Gordon is lost with her, guiding and protecting her. The irony is that in creating an imaginary companion (a decidedly insane act) she maintains her sanity.

While the story is well told and entertaining in its own right, what makes The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon exceptional is what's said between the lines. King touches upon modern apathy on the existence of God, animalistic instinct for survival, isolation, determination and hope and the evident collapse of the nuclear family.

King also does a good job of creating a mystery surrounding the future of Trisha and her family. In getting lost in the woods, she touches upon each of their lives incredibly and even though the narrative rarely spends more than a paragraph at a time describing events outside Trisha's, you really get a sense of the impact this is having on them. By the time the book ends, very little is resolved; there is much that is left open to interpretation. Still, you feel satisfied by the end.

To sum up, King tells an interesting story and throws in some very compelling ideas about people in general, without adding in any dream monsters that travel to another universe on the back of a turtle or anything like that. There's nothing at all wrong with The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, it's not Dickens or Doyle, but it does what it's supposed to do quite well.