The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, by Stephen King

Trisha is a nine-year old girl hiking on the Appalachian Trail with her mother and brother Pete. Post-divorce, her mother is always arranging weekend outings with her two children. Trisha loves the outings, but Pete complains constantly. Tiring of the bickering going on between them, Trisha allows herself to fall behind, and then becomes lost when she leaves the trail and tries to find her way back by a short cut. As night approaches, she realizes that she has to conserve her food and find someplace safe to sleep. She becomes convinced that she's being watched by something in the woods, and as she finds the corpses of animals that have been killed, her fear grows. Over the course of the week that she wanders in the woods, she faces falls, insects, hunger, thirst, and rain. She sees the monster that's following her, and we're never sure whether she's hallucinating from the effects of fear and weakness, or whether there's really a monster out there.

Throughout Trisha's ordeal, she uses her Walkman to keep her courage. She's a big fan of the Red Sox, and especially of pitcher Tom Gordon. He becomes her conversational companion as she walks miles every day trying to find civilization again, and the broadcast Red Sox games help her in the evenings when she's alone. She's careful to conserve her batteries to make them last as long as needed, but she falls asleep one night with the radio on, and she's finally all alone in the woods.

This is a short novel (224 pages) but completely riveting. Almost no monsters or supernatural happenings at all; the most frightening things in this book are being completely alone in the dark, and completely lost in the world. Stephen King is always an excellent writer and this book is no exception. I would recommend this to anyone who is a King fan, or enjoys a good fright.

Stephen King. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. New York: Scribner, 1999. 224 pages. ISBN 0684867621.