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I remember once being lost while hiking in Prince William Forest Park in Virginia.
This wasn’t the hopeless, horribly lost like those poor souls consumed by the hungry Bermuda Triangle, but still lost enough to experience discomfort. My hiking boots were a poor fit, and nickel-size blisters had torn open on the soles of my feet, causing the raw skin to rub with each agonizing step. This is how I imagine poor lost little Trisha McFarland in Stephen King’s novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
Feverish and sick, thin as bones from malnourishment, she nonetheless pushes on, moving deeper and deeper into the Maine-New Hampshire woods, deeper and deeper into the nightmarish landscape of the soul’s dark imagination.
Or is it her imagination? Much like King’s book Insomnia, the line between fantasy and reality becomes blurred, not only to the characters but to the reader himself.
This causes the reader to become absorbed with the young girl’s predicament, thinking and re-thinking, living and re-living each painful decision, until you silently yell: “Why did you turn left when the trail forked back there? Stupid girl! You’re going deeper into the woods! You are more lost than ever!”
But King makes it clear, like no other modern writer can, that we are never alone. Something always waits in the wings, something evil that thirsts for our blood, and Trisha McFarland is no exception. Something horrible is clawing trees and mutilating deer as it stalks her through the dark forest.
But the forces of good are also at work here in this magical wood, in the form of Tom Gordon, a closer for the Boston Red Sox. Gordon is Trisha’s favorite player, and he appears to Trisha (real of imagined? You decide!) in her darkest moments.
King cleverly organizes the book into the nine innings of a baseball game, and like his non-fiction book Faithful, which chronicles the journey of the Red Sox to eventual victory in the World Series, his love for the Red Sox is ever-present in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon as well. The book is a short, crisp read, quite enjoyable to digest over a long summer weekend at the beach of a Labor Day camping trip. It is part outdoor adventure, part survival story, and part sacred journey into the self.
Admittedly, as a King fan, his later works have often puzzled me, several times lost me, and even once or twice completely turned me off (shades of From a Buick 8 here).
But pun intended, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a home run – a mesmerizing page-turner with a satisfying ending that despite its emotional subject matter will never leave you feeling struck out at the bottom of the ninth. | 
