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The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Stephen King

Gothic Elements: Atmosphere, Mystery, and the Supernatural

Gothic Elements: Emotion

Summary

  • Trisha is understandably very emotional. There were many instances where she broke down into tears; her almost dying from diarrhea and vomiting was one of them.
  • Although there is a lot of emotion, I would not say it is dramatized or exaggerated. She is only 9 years old, so the experience would have been extremely traumatizing for her.
  • Throughout the book, I felt like Stephen King could have been a bit more descriptive to create an atmosphere which evoked more fear, but it may be that my tolerance for horror has increased through the unit.
  • One part which I thought gave a good sense of mystery and the supernatural was when Trisha, the book's main character, enters a new section of the woods. She climbs through a shrub and the setting changes from a lush temperate forest to one filled with death; slaughtered, headless deer on the ground and not a single leaf to be found on the trees. I took this as a sort of metaphor for Trisha's internal feelings, representing her fear and hopelessness. This also set the tone for the plot: an unknown mystery figure hunting her down.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is about a girl named Trisha who finds herself lost in the woods and struggles with both her physical environment and her internal feelings to survive.

One day, during a forest hike with her family, her brother and mother get in an argument which according to Trisha occurs very often. She gets fed up with this and goes off the path, partly because she had to use the bathroom but also to see if they would notice her disappearance. Unfortunately, she strays a bit too far off and can not find her way back. After a couple hours, she is hopelessly lost, and struggles to stay calm. As the days go by, her sanity slowly deteriorates and soon, she is imagining that an unknown supernatural killer is out to get her. Eventually, she discovers this "killer" was just a black bear, and is saved by a hunter from a town near Montreal. The entire time, she used her Walkman to listen to commentaries of Boston Red Sox games, her favourite baseball team. She is a huge fan of their pitcher, Tom Gordon, and she imagines that he is her guardian, protecting her from the dangers of the forest.

Gothic Elements: Setting

Conclusion

The Way out

  • The story takes place in the woods of the northeastern U.S, a suitable place for a horror novel in my opinion.
  • I found the setting to be almost cliche, with the "spooky forest at night" kind of description. It does do the job however, and I found the setting to be very gothic.

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King, because of gothic elements I have found within the story, could very much be considered a gothic Novel had it been written during the appropriate time period.

The influences of English gothic novels are evident, such as the overall mood and atmosphere, as are the differences, such as fear coming from the mind rather than from the environment, but in the end, I would say that modern horror stories are more successful at evoking fear, while gothic stories are more successful at teaching a lesson.

Influences from Gothic novels

Differences between Gothic and it's Modern day equivalent

  • One difference I found is that English Gothic novels tend to teach an important lesson, usually something along the lines of not messing with nature. Modern horror novels however, don't really have this same purpose, and I feel that they are mostly just for entertainment.
  • The main difference however is that a lot of fear created by modern day horror novels is internal and psychological rather than external. For example, in Dracula, you have a creepy looking man who sucks blood and lives in a secluded mansion. This is what provides the fear in that book. However, In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Stephen King never focused on the physical attributes of Trisha's stalker, and yet manages to create a fear greater than that of English Gothic Novels in my opinion.
  • There are many similarities I found between gothic novels and modern horror novels. One of them is the setting and overall mood or atmosphere. They all take place in spooky rundown or secluded areas, or have elements of these within the setting. For example, in Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde, the setting was a city. But within the city, there were much less friendly areas such as the place where Mr. Hyde clubbed Sir Danvers Carew, or the house in which Mr.Hyde lived.
  • Another similarity I found was that there is always an evil or opposing character, whether they're are real or not. The character has traits that not only make them bad personality wise, but also creepy, such as the Dracula.
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