The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Nine-year-old Trisha McFarland gets separated from her family on a hiking trail in the woods of Maine and New Hampshire and must survive alone for nine days. She has no survival training. Her only company is her Walkman, through which she listens to Boston Red Sox games—and the voice of real relief pitcher Tom Gordon.

Tom Gordon was a real Boston Red Sox closer, famous for his pointing-skyward gesture after saves. During Trisha's ordeal he becomes an imaginary companion—her courage is borrowed from his example of composure under extreme pressure. He appears to Trisha in hallucinations and becomes the anchor she uses to stay sane.

Something follows Trisha through the forest—a presence she senses before she sees it clearly. King keeps it deliberately ambiguous: it may be a bear, it may be something supernatural. The novel's genre is horror-adjacent survival story, and the threat functions as both real animal danger and psychological manifestation of fear itself.

Yes. At roughly 219 pages, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is one of King's shortest novels—closer to a novella in scope. King has said he wanted to write a pure survival story that stayed claustrophobically close to one character, and the short form suited that intention.