I am going to start out by saying I am not inherently a fan of Stephen King’s work and not for want of trying and was turned to The Girl who Loved Tom Gordon by my long suffering and loving wife who occasionally tries to direct me away from my preferred genre’s. I have read a number of King’s work from his short stories to his novels and his non-horror works and I have never been able to pin what I don’t like about them even though I genuinely believe that he is a definite genius of our literary age.
King has created genuine terror and fear from his works in the past and present alike. From killer clowns to the enemy of this novella The God of the Lost, a fantastic conjured imagery of the worst that exists in the wilderness that humans are so naturally drawn to and it is all formed out of the imagination of a painfully ill, scared and possibly poisoned nine year old girl with a vivid and creative mind and love of baseball.
Let’s get the good out of the way first; the imagery, creativity and genuine emotional love of both the story and the environment he has written about is nothing more than sublime! Following Trisha McFarlane’s story of slowly unyielding insanity as she traverse’s the forest just hoping for anything of companionship from her beloved Red Sox player, apparently known as a Closer?
Unfortunately this is where my opinions turn sour on a fantastic story and highlights my issues with Stephen King as an author. Due to the continuous and almost non-stop usage of pop culture reference, many of which are very American from baseball terminology to the food she has, it was difficult to feel like I was in the story giving a serious feel of alienation from the subject and removing me from the narrative every time I had to google baseball terms or American snack foods.
After that the issues only mounted when the lack of consistent character image changed in the same chapter with the character going from jeans to leggings and then socks to stockings and then back to socks in one chapter. The lack of care and consistency with character imagery is only highlighted by the accurate time keeping and cartography and, as a writer myself, makes it so much worse. You see you really can trace her journey from start to finish using a map, I checked, and the timing is very accurate; so to have such care for timekeeping and geography only highlights the constantly changing appearance of the main character and made me wonder if, as others have suggested, it was a first draft he never edited to churn out more books. This is not a thought I would have been having if I was fully invested in the story!
There are scenes that caused great discomfort for me from the parents randomly having sex in the hotel room without any prompting to the use of racial driven terms (minstrel show) or ablest terminology (retarded person).
But!
After all that is said I thoroughly enjoyed the story as a great use of horror and timeline creating a perfect image of what this poor girl suffered and accurate research for survival in a wilderness situation and any of my gripes and criticisms eventually boil down to that I cannot get on with Stephen King’s writing style, syntax or use of language.
I heartily recommend the Girl who Loved Tom Gordan to anyone on the fence about Stephen King or just trying to get into the horror genre in general it is genuinely very good and a quick read as you could easily finish the whole read in a medium haul airplane flight.
Reading time: 6 hours
Reread chance: Medium – A good read and an excellent concept, a reread would give better insight into the story
Score 6.5/10
Barons Bookshelf 