The master of horror. The lord of frighteners. He has many names, yet only one seems most fitting: the King of terror. He is none other than Stephen King, author of more than 20 national bestsellers, and one of the few modern professional writers in America to achieve the superstar fame usually reserved for big screen actors.
And once again, King has graced the American public with another work of suspense and fright. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, recently released in paperback by Simon and Schuster, strays from King's normal focus on the supernatural. Like its predecessor, Hearts in Atlantis, the new book is very dissimilar to his early work, but still has all the elements that make a King novel a masterwork of pulp fiction.
Pulp fiction is, quite frankly, the best classification for King's horror. Many critics of his work claim that they are nothing but trash, and, in prefaces to many of his novels, King claims that his own mother would refer to them as "trash." Instead of relying upon intellectual rhetoric and artistic wordcraft, King falls back on a very basic, often vulgar use of the vernacular. Then again, so did Dante. It is King's use of vulgar argot that makes his work so amazingly clear and realistic, and it is his strongest point. In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, King manages not only to write in the common tongue of the average American reader, but to write in the tongue of the average middle school child.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon centers around Trisha, a nine-year-old girl who has somehow managed to become lost in the woods and is attempting to survive in the Maine wilderness without her mother and brother, with only her walkman (tuned to a Boston Red Sox game) and her fantasies about pitcher Tom Gordon, her personal hero and first celebrity crush. It's a very rare thing to find a book that manages to paint a child so realistically; in fact, most modern writers seem to avoid trying altogether. King, however, has found great success with children as main characters, such as his band of "losers" in his early '80s masterpiece, It. King's use of younger characters does not at all hinder his ability to paint individuals so realistic that the reader has no choice but to develop a strong relationship with them.
Another thing that makes King's novels so wonderful is that they all express the horrible "what if" that is needed to give a horror novel true impact. In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the fact that every single possible death that little Trisha is faced with could happen to any child, or any person lost in the woods, only adds to the mounting terror. King's vivid imagination paints each of her fears wonderfully, and readers are left on the edge of their seats, with images of small children torn to bits in ravines haunting their thoughts as well as their dreams for days to come.
With his usual sixth-grade reading level, and without his usual tangential descriptions, King manages to make The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon one of the quickest reads available, good or bad. His ability to paint characters as realistically as possible is at its peak, and never before has his skill been so apparent. This latest offering from King is a wonderful example of his maturation as a writer in which he manages to retain his perfectly honed skills of expressing terror and realism.
