Stephen King, American Master: A Creepy Corpus of Facts About Stephen King & His Work by Stephen Spignesi

Author:Stephen Spignesi [Spignesi, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror & Supernatural, General, Literary Criticism, Books & Reading, N/A, Trivia, reference
ISBN: 9781682616062
Google: aHRGuAEACAAJ
Publisher: Permuted Press
Published: 2018-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

Essential Stephen King ranking: 6

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999)

“During a six-mile hike on the Maine-New Hampshire branch

of the Appalachian Trail, nine-year-old Trisha McFarland…

wanders off by herself…”

• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon may have been inspired by William Blake’s two connected poems, “The Little Girl Lost” and “The Little Girl Found.” King has also said that for this novel, he wanted to write Hansel and Gretel without Hansel.

• In “The Little Girl Lost,” the young girl (the Trisha McFarland character in Tom Gordon) is named Lyca. She is seven years old and ends up lost in a “desert wild.” Like Trish, Lyca “wander’d long,” slept under a tree, “while the beasts of prey,/Come from caverns deep,/View’d the maid asleep.” Also, there is a scene in the poem where Lyca watches the moon rise, echoing a similar scene in Tom Gordon.

• Blake’s companion poem to “Little Girl Lost” is “The Little Girl Found.” It contains a scene in which Lyca is found and carried in the arms of her rescuer (“In his arms he bore/Her, arm’d with sorrow sore”). This scene is similar to the scene in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, in which Travis Herrick carries Trisha out of the woods (“She wanted to tell him she was glad to be carried, glad to be rescued...”).

• In the “Author’s Postscript” to this novel, King tells us that even though Tom Gordon the baseball player is real, the Tom Gordon in the novel is fictional. King then makes a revealing comment about the nature of fame and his own celebrity: “The impression fans have of people who have achieved some degree of celebrity are always fictional, as I can attest of my own personal experience.”

• In a March 5, 1999 letter to reviewers, King wrote, “My heroine (Trisha) would be a child of divorce living with her mother and maintaining a meaningful connection with her father mostly through their mutual love of baseball and the Boston Red Sox. Lost in the woods, she’d find herself imagining that her favorite Red Sox player was with her, keeping her company and guiding her through the terrible situation in which she found herself. Tom Gordon, #36, would be that player. Gordon is a real pitcher for the Red Sox; without his consent I wouldn’t have wanted to publish the book. He did give it, for which I am deeply grateful.... The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon isn’t about Tom Gordon or baseball, and not really about love, either. It’s about survival, and God, and it’s about God’s opposite as well. Because Trisha isn’t alone in her wanderings. There is something else in the woods— the God of the Lost is how she comes to think of it—and in time she’ll have to face it.”

• Director George A. Romero was attached to write and direct a film adaptation of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon as early as 2001, but the project stalled in 2005. Romero died in 2017.

• In 2004, the

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