The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) is a novel by Stephen King.
A young girl, Trisha, is out walking in the woods with her mother and her brother. They are squabbling as usual after their parents' divorce and she gets tired of it all. She falls back behind to be able to avoid listening. After a while she leaves the path to pee. When she comes out again, she can't find the others.
She starts walking in the direction she thinks they went, but takes a wrong turn and heads into the heart of the forest, away from populated areas. After taking a spill she falls unconscious, and awakens hopelessly lost in the dead of night. She is left with very little water, some Twinkies, and her walkman. Now and then she listens to her Walkman to keep her mood up. Sometimes she listens to the news to find out where they are searching for her, sometimes she tries to find a baseball game, perhaps even with her favorite player Tom Gordon.
While she starts to take steps to survive by conserving what little food she had with her, picking berries and so on, her mother and brother return to their car without her and call the police and start a search. Naturally, they search in the area around the path, but not as far away as she has gone. The girl decides to follow a creek, rationalizing that all bodies of water lead to a source and eventually civilization.
As the cops stop searching for the night, she huddles up underneath a tree to rest. As she stays out longer, she starts to see things that she rationally shouldn't be able to see. She reminisces often about her misadventures with her bestfriend Pepsi Robechaud to occupy her mind. After a while, she even starts seeing Tom Gordon and talking to him. The prevalence of broken trees and disemboweled, bloody animal corpses above all concern her. (Noting she is in the same area of woods as Louis Creed in Pet Sematary, some even suggest that what Trisha observes are signs of the Wendigo, the bloodthirsty monster that haunts the woods of upper Maine, and the same thing the good doctor saw when he went to bury his son in the Micmac Burial ground.)
Hours and soon days begin to pass, with Trisha wandering further into the woods. At the risk of dehydrating she drinks water from a river only to become extremely ill. Eventually she begins to envision a wasp-faced God who is hunting her down and her trial becomes a test of a very young girl's ability to maintain sanity in the face of seemingly certain death. Eventually she comes upon a road and is almost eaten by a bear but manages rescue from the fortuitous intervention of a hunter.
Somewhat ironically, Gordon now plays for the New York Yankees.
Theology
"The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon" explores theology in three forms: the God of the Lost, the Subaudible and Tom Gordon's God.
The God of the Lost follows Trisha in the form of a large, malevolent bear with wasps for eyes. It also appears along with the Subaudible and Tom Gordon's God as a gray-robed man with a wasp's head.
The Subaudible is mentioned in the beginning and appears to Trisha in the form of her father. The Subaudible is described as a force that influences events towards people's favor; for example a nuclear bomb has not been used since the second World War.
Tom Gordon's God is a reference to Tom Gordon's habit of pointing to the sky before his pitch. According to the image of Gordon that appears to Trisha, God does not appear until the ninth inning.
ISBN numbers
- ISBN 0754013227 (hardcover, 1999)
- ISBN 0684867621 (hardcover, 1999)
- ISBN 0754022390 (hardcover, 1999)
- ISBN 0671042130 (perfect, 1999)
- ISBN 0684835835 (e-book, 1999)
- ISBN 0606183698 (prebound, 2000)
- ISBN 5237029493 (paperback, 2000)
- ISBN 0671042858 (paperback, 2000, reprint)
- ISBN 0783886403 (paperback, 2000, Large Type Edition)
- ISBN 1930161638 (e-book, 2001)