A review by quadrille
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

4.0

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.

It’s oddly fun jumping from Salem’s Lot in 1975 to this book, published in 1999: a leap of twenty-four years, which is still just about half of King’s career(!), seeing so clearly how he’s grown better over time and polished his skill to something sharper. I actually really love his shorter books like this one, compared to the sprawling epics of The Stand etc; these ones are tighter, punchier, a quicker thrill ride, and so don’t wear out their welcome.

I’m internally categorising it more as “thriller” than “horror”, since despite some paranormal undertones, this is primarily a survivalism thriller about a nine-year-old girl lost in the woods. Which is sorta way up my alley tbh, as a kid of the 90s who grew up reading Hatchet and Julie of the Wolves.

King’s prose is so lovely at times, nailing the visceral and horrible and desperate experiences that Trisha goes through while she’s lost, in addition to his usual flair for dramatic irony and foreshadowing and stoking that tense knot of anxiety in your stomach. I would occasionally just find myself highlighting sentences because they were so beautifully-written and evocative: In that tender place between her chest and her stomach, the place where all the body’s wires seemed to come together in a clump, she felt the first minnowy flutter of disquiet.

And the whole way through, Trisha makes so many mistakes like a nine-year-old girl would, but she also shows so much grit and pluck and resolve that it’s riveting following her journey and rooting for her, hoping she’ll survive. The book is about the logistics of how she gets through each day and night, but also about the harrowing emotional/spiritual/psychological journey she goes through, too, in trying to keep her senses and her nerve about her, even as her sense of mind unravels.

In the end, it winds up being a nice little story about faith, belief, hope, and bravery. I teared up towards the end. Good stuff.