Stephen King – The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Audiobook

Publishers have learned to be indulgent when their bestselling authors become bitten by the sports bug. In 2004, John Grisham released Bleachers and three decades after he published his football book, Playing for Pizza. In 1993, Tom Clancy became part-owner of the Baltimore Orioles. And in 1999, Stephen King suddenly decided he wished to publish a slim (for King) 244-page publication called The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. “If books were infants, I would call The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon the consequence of an unplanned pregnancy,” King said in a letter to the media, and Scribner chose to roll with it, eager to discharge anything from their new star, who definitely had some blockbusters in the pipeline after he obtained this Tom Gordon crap off his torso. Expecting something forgettable, rather they wound up publishing a little miracle. Stephen King – The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Audiobook.
The thought of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon came into King during a Red Sox game when he was at a lull between completing Bag of Bones and beginning Hearts in Atlantis. King has regularly used the interval between novels to write a novella (which is how most of the stories in Different Seasons came about) but he had never written a totally new book during one of those breaks before. However, as he says, “Stories need just one thing : to be born. If that is inconvenient, too bad.” Nine years old and scared of the dark, Trisha winds up stumbling through the woods for nine days, wandering farther and farther from civilization as she attempts to make her way back home, striking out confidently in exactly the incorrect direction again and again. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Audiobook Download. As she walks, thirst, dehydration, and exhaustion induce her to hallucinate, and she starts to think that she is being stalked by a supernatural monster known as The God of the Lost. Her one contact with civilization is listening to Red Sox games on her Walkman as pitcher Tom Gordon, her personal hero, sets a record with 43 consecutive saves from the 1998 season. As Trisha becomes more and more beat down by nature and also The God of the Lost, ” Gordon seems to her in a vision to offer guidance and counsel (King obtained Gordon’s acceptance to use him at the publication before he started writing). At the end of the publication, Trisha confronts the God of the Lost, who turns out for a black bear, defeats him and finds her way home. It’s a little story, however, King informs it from Trisha’s point of view, and inside her hectic brain it’s a metaphysical epic.
Gordon4King, like Nathaniel Hawthorne and countless American authors before him, finds a flinty spirituality in the wilderness, and what makes Tom Gordon such a spectacular coming of age novel is that it addresses faith, something that’s all too frequently left from young adult books as a result of nervous editors who don’t want to offend readers. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Audio Book Free. The truth is, at some point in their teenagers, most kids grapple with the idea of God with an intensity that could place many adults to shame. King portrays the wrestling which Trisha does with no ounce of condescension, coping with her religious battle honestly. Within this endless forest, Trisha, that does not really believe in God, comes to believe that something bigger is happening about her. Guided by Tom Gordon, who ritualistically points into the sky after each rescue, Trisha’s interior life and outside life merge in a set of hallucinations that lead her to believe in her own version of God. According to her, “What’s God? The one who comes in at the bottom of the ninth.”
King eliminates so much that editors wouldn’t permit these days. The story of one woman lost in the woods for eight days matches in neatly with his novels including Misery (two people trapped in a home) and audio bookld’s Sport (one woman trapped on a mattress), but now an editor would likely insist that Tom Gordon is “too small” and need some sort of high concept spin. Stephen King The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Audiobook Download. I can certainly imagine an editor insisting the God of the Lost and Trisha struggle throughout the publication, whereas King lets the challenges which face Trisha mostly be mundane — hunger, thirst, hard walking, cliffs. She is stalked from the God of the Lost throughout but only confronts him 17 pages by the end.
Gordon3King can also be allowed a level of ambiguity that I think a lot of writers could have a hard time getting since, in my experience, editors typically require items to be spelled out clearly for viewers. An editor would likely insist that the God of the Lost either be a supernatural phantom, or even a bear, but it would need to become one or another. Rather, King gives us an ambiguous monster that could be just a bear, but is also somehow bigger than that. King strikes a middle ground between dreams and reality, investing his novel using a symbolic weight, rooting it both in the reality of wilderness survival and at the reality of spirituality. The result is a book that’s smaller in concept than what I think would be acceptable today, but is ultimately so much bigger in spirit. It’s a still, small marvel of a publication, one of King’s most spiritual and most moving, accomplishing a lot of the Green Mile set out to perform only with less plot machinery and visible work. Stephen King – The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Audiobook. While it had been among the, King went out walking in the woods himself one day, just rather than encountering the God of the Lost that he was hit by a van and almost died. He would not write for five weeks, and by the time he returned he had been away from the wagon and addicted to painkillers. It would be a long time before his composing got this great again.