July 10, 2000 Jane Zhang
Book Report - The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
From the moment I got this book "The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon", I couldn't stop reading it. The vivid terror Stephen King created in a nine-year-old girl's endless journey in the woods gave me nightmares about hiking. I have read a few stories on how lost people struggle to survive, but this one is the best in describing the battle between humanity and the indifferent nature.
Trisha McFarland, the main character of the story, is the daughter of divorced parents and lives with her mother and older brother Pete in Maine. Almost on every weekend after the breakup of the family, their mother brings them for an outing which is supposed to be both entertaining and instructive. Nobody has ever imagined that one day one of the trips is to become Trisha's unforgettable adventure alone in the creepy Maine woods.
The story happens in June 1998. It starts with Trisha's attempt to get away from the argument of her feuding mother and brother for a while. She doesn't realize that she has made the worst decision when she tells herself she "could simply walk across the gap and rejoin the main trail" and then turns to look for a shortcut to catch up with mom and Pete. A few minutes later, she knows there is no way to move back any more. In front of her, the unpredictable deep woods in early June is threatening to dash her to pieces with its claws. As she walks on and on with little consciousness, she nearly becomes the slave of all creatures in the woods, wasps, mosquitoes, flies, snakes and so forth. Swelling all over, she also has to face the challenges of the lack of food, the water making her vomit, fever, cough and overwhelmingly, the scaring feeling of being watched and preyed on. Neither Trisha nor the reader can distinguish whether "the thing" stalking her, breathing behind her neck and waiting to feed on her is reality or just her hallucination. But the slash-marks left on tree trunks and the corpses of violently torn animals are too real to be hallucinations. Later, in one of Trisha's dreams, it reveals itself as God of the Lost. The only thing that keeps Trisha sane most of the time is her Walkman, which connects her with the outside world and broadcasts the latest progress of Boston Red Sox's baseball games. She feels her idol Tom Gordon, one of the players of Red Sox, is always with her and guiding her through, as long as her Walkman is working. Little by little, she begins to worship him as God, talks to him and borrows power from him when her nerves have been far beyond the breaking point.
She knows she will have to confront God of the Lost, and she has been too numb to shake in front of it. The imaginary God of Tom Gordon calms her and teaches her to treat the confrontation as a baseball game, in which she could be beaten, could be eaten, but she must never beat herself. Bearing this faith, she establishes her stillness in the first place, turning the Walkman into a baseball and staring into the eyes of God of the Lost, which in fact is a well-grown North American black bear. She is saved by a passerby's gunshot in the end, or as a matter of fact, by her courage and persistence.
Except Stephen King throws in some fragments of the actions of Trisha's family at times, the whole story sticks with Trisha. The thrilling descriptions of Trisha's thoughts and observations are mostly like soliloquies in drama. Therefore, the readers never know whether the little girl is going to survive or not and are urged to explore in the dark with her. For example, Stephen King portrays the bear as following, "It stopped before her and stretched its neck up so its face approached her face as if to kiss. There were no eyes, only two squirming circles, wormhole universes filled with breeding bugs", "It's mouth opened and she saw that its throat was lined with wasps, plump ungainly poison factories crawling over the remains of a chewed stick and the pinkish lump of deergut that served as its tongue. Its breath was the muddy stink of the bog." Few people have been so close to a four-hundred-pound bear, yet the feverish horror is within inches. King proves himself again to be the master of bestsellers.
Moreover, the theme revealed by the story is worth thinking too. The face of God of the Lost "was always shifting and changing - 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 when you were walking home from school…stranger-danger." It indeed seems to represent loneliness and the sense of lost chasing people in the "world with pavement". It's also a dramatic move that Trisha's family reunites only when Trisha's got lost. Faith and persistence are what save us all.
The long lasting impression of the gripping story makes me recommend it to all that love Stephen King and his horror tales. Although it drags a little bit in the middle, it's overall a great book, thus I like it very much.