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I am perhaps the best and worst person to review a book by Stephen King. This is only the second Stephen King novel I've ever read (the other being The Shining, over 20 years ago) and I only saw Carrie because I had huge crush on Sissy Spacek. Thus, I have few expectations, besides all the media hype, of what a Stephen King book should be. On the down side, I'm really not in a position to compare it to the rest of his work. I must also plead guilty to assiduously avoiding overexposed authors of 1000-page doorstops, though this is somewhat hypocritical given all the equivalently long 19th century novels of Alexandre Dumas and Paul Feval I have devoured over the years.

However, perhaps my greatest beef against Stephen King, Robert McCammon, Peter Straub and many of today's best known horror writers is their brand of horror -- what I might term "event-based" horror. Stephen King stated in an interview a few years ago that he was not so much interested in creating atmosphere for its own sake, but rather to scare his readers through tangible events, people or things. While this brand of horror is obviously very popular, I personally prefer the work of the British atmospheric horror writers of the early 1900s, particularly Algernon Blackwood. I point out Blackwood for two reasons: (i) his ability to write classic horror stories with few if any acutely horrific events, yet an incredible sense of suspense and horrors lurking just out of sight, and (ii) because his classic novella "The Wendigo" has much the same theme -- something inimical to man, lurking in the woods -- as King's short novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

King's novel is about a resourceful 9-year-old girl lost in the Maine woods. While bushwhacking her way out, she views her situation, and particularly the threat of something lurking in the shadows, through the metaphor of the danger-filled situations that her hero, Red Sox relief pitcher Tom Gordon, faces in the late innings. Notwithstanding all the things that I might have, in my prejudice, held against the book, I very much enjoyed it, though much more as a tale of survival than as one of suspense or horror. As a biologist, I consider that if someone gets lost in the woods and is killed and eaten by one or more of the members of the local fauna, it is more a question of survival of the fittest than of anything horrifying. As both a big baseball fan and someone who enjoys bushwhacking alone (with a compass and topographic map) in the woods of northern Quebec, this book certainly touched a chord. I particularly enjoyed the realistic portrayal of Trisha's gruelling passage through a wetland full of dead trees, sucking mud, hummocks of grass, and mosquitoes galore. Certainly the depiction, from Trisha's point of view, of what it feels like to be lost in northern woods and the reactions of a city kid were very well done in terms of the psychology, if somewhat weaker in the sense of the vastness and mystery of the woods.

In Algernon Blackwood's "The Wendigo" a group of moose hunters are out in the woods of northern Canada -- two of them are alone around a campfire on the shores of a remote lake:

"The forest pressed round them with its encircling wall; the nearer tree-stems gleamed like bronze in the firelight; beyond that -- blackness, and so far as he could tell, a silence of death. Just behind them a passing puff of wind lifted a single leaf, looked at it, then laid it softly down again without disturbing the rest of the covey. It seemed as if a million invisible causes had combined just to produce that single visible effect. Other life pulsed about them -- and was gone."

("The Wendigo," In: Algernon Blackwood, The Lost Valley and Other Stories, New York: Vaughan & Gomme, 1914)

Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP, the newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association.