The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon | |||||||||
Stephen King | |||||||||
Scribner Books, 224 pages | |||||||||
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A review by Georges T. Dodds
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 Wendigo," In: Algernon
Blackwood, The Lost Valley and Other
Stories, New York: Vaughan & Gomme, 1914)
Where King is superior to Blackwood is in his character development. First, the story, while
not narrated in the first person, describes Trisha's reactions and thoughts throughout her ordeal,
personalizing the story. In much of Blackwood's stories on a similar theme, the main thrust is how
the mysterious forces of nature impact upon individuals who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Blackwood's story is frequently told by a narrator/observer who, while present and involved, recounts
in a somewhat detached, impersonal manner events and their effect on his and others' frame of
mind.
Also, Blackwood's human characters have minimal baggage: in "The Wendigo" we have an older
French Canadian guide, and a young doctor on his first trip to the deep woods, but besides a short
description of their physiognomy we know nothing of who they are. This is partly because, to Blackwood,
the main character(s) in his stories are not the people, but that which threatens them. In
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon we learn intimate details about Trisha's relationship which each
of her divorced parents, with her school friends, and with, in particular, her baseball idol, Tom
Gordon. This is also where King and Blackwood's approaches differ. To Blackwood the threat can never
be a crazed psycho with a big knife, because anything human is weak and insignificant compared to
Nature, which will always triumph in the end. To King, man is an intelligent, resourceful creature
that can adapt and survive most of what Nature throws at him, biological, supernatural or otherwise.
Did The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon completely change my opinion about Stephen King? Well
I did pick up his six-part serial novel The Green Mile at a garage sale,
something I wouldn't have even considered before.
Unlike many of his previous titles, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a book with an
engrossing story that can appeal to and is appropriate for both young and old. How it rates in
the author's pantheon I will leave those wiser in the ways of Stephen King to decide.
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. |
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