43 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingThe Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Sixth Inning”
Trisha wakes up feeling ravenous and weak. She hallucinates Tom Gordon again as she walks along the stream, although she is now certain she will die in the woods. Meanwhile in Castle Rock, detectives question Pete and Quilla about Trisha’s disappearance. The investigation focuses on her supposed abduction. As search parties tighten their perimeter around the area where she first went missing, Trisha unknowingly crosses the border from Maine into New Hampshire.
Trisha finds checkerberry bushes and eats many, even consuming a few leaves. She spots a doe and two fawns and enjoys watching them bound away. Realizing that the forest floor is littered with edible beechnuts, Trisha fills her pack with berries and nuts and returns to the stream restored. On the opposite side of the stream is a small clearing full of butterflies. Watching them, Trisha experiences a deep inner peace that makes her think the Subaudible might be real. She thinks of her father—his alcoholism and his aging. It occurs to her that “life could be very sad…and mostly it was what it could be” (192). She feels able to accept this fact as she is “almost ten and big for her age” (192).
Trisha sees three figures in the clearing, wearing robes that obscure their faces. Two of the figures wear white robes, while the third figure’s robe is black. Trisha calls out for help, but they do not answer. One white-robed figure steps forward and lowers his hood—he looks like Mr. Bork, Trisha’s science teacher. He tells her that he comes “from the God of Tom Gordon,” (194), who cannot help Trisha because there is too much going on in the world. The other white-robed figure looks like Larry McFarland and introduces himself as the Subaudible. He tells Trisha that he is too weak to help her. The black-robed figure steps forward and reveals a set of claws. Underneath its hood is a buzzing cloud of wasps that claim to come from the God of the Lost, the creature that has been watching Trisha. The wasps warn her that the world is a terrible place made of stingers and bone. Trisha looks away to wipe her tears. When she looks back, the figures are gone and the light has shifted, indicating that several hours have passed.
Trisha concludes that the figures were a hallucination brought on by accidentally eating the checkerberry leaves. She crosses into the clearing, determined to prove that it was only a dream. She finds one of the fawns from earlier, brutally disemboweled. A nearby tree bears a set of claw marks. Terrified, Trisha knows that the God of the Lost is watching her again. Unwilling to spend the night in the clearing, she sets off downstream, singing to herself for comfort.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Top of the Seventh”
As night falls, Trisha finds a rocky patch of forest floor overlooking a valley. She lies on a makeshift bed of pine boughs and tries to tune into WCAS but cannot find the signal. On a different station, two talk-show hosts announce that the Red Sox will not be playing that night. Trisha also learns that Connecticut police arrested Francis Raymond Mazzerole on suspicion of her abduction. Discouraged, she shuts off her Walkman and gazes up at the sky in time to see the start of a meteor shower, which delights Trisha as she drifts off to sleep.
Trisha dreams of standing in a meadow with Tom Gordon, who leans on a wooden post. She asks him why he points at the sky and he replies that “it’s God’s nature to come on in the bottom of the ninth…especially when the bases are loaded and there’s only one out” (214). The sound of her own chattering teeth wakes Trisha up. It’s the middle of the night and she is weak, achy, and has a painful cough. She hears an inhuman grunt from somewhere nearby and buries herself in the pine boughs, certain that the God of the Lost has finally decided to eat her alive. Cowered, she eventually falls asleep again.
The following morning, Trisha sees that a spot on the forest floor next to her is disturbed and knows that the God of the Lost has decided to spare her for one more night. Tom Gordon warns her that it will soon be back. At the stream for another drink, Trisha sees several small fish in the water. She fashions a makeshift net out of her poncho and catches a small trout, which she eats raw. Some of her energy restored, she follows the stream, conversing with Tom Gordon. While telling him about a gift she and Pete plan to buy for Larry, she notices that the stream will soon become marshland again. Although this marsh is not as daunting as the bog from earlier, it makes Trisha realize that she is never going to escape the woods. She cries out for her mom and Pete and her doll Mona, even though she knows she is too old to have a tantrum. Unable to stand the thought of crossing another marsh, she turns northward. Although she doesn’t know it, this is a bad decision. On the other side of the marsh is the small town of Devlin Pond. However, she is now heading toward the Canadian border.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Seventh Inning Stretch”
Over the four days that follow her decision to turn northward, Trisha experiences many things that blur the line between hallucination and reality. Tom Gordon is constantly at her side as she walks, and her best friend Pepsi appears as well. Trisha sees several disturbing sights, including thousands of deer carcasses hanging from the trees and a drowned face in the stream. As her sickness worsens, the God of the Lost becomes another constant companion. She knows that their fates are tied together, and “[will] remain so until she [dies],” (243). Meanwhile, she is presumed dead and her mother and father tentatively start planning her memorial service.
Later, Trisha is overcome by an intense coughing fit and grabs onto a tree stump for purchase. Straightening up, she realizes that what she’s holding onto isn’t a stump but an old gatepost. She is in a meadow—the same meadow she dreamt of nights before. Tom Gordon warns her that it is “late innings,” and this is her last chance at salvation. Carefully, she searches the area and finds a second post half-buried in the ground. Certain that there must be a path nearby, Trisha walks to the edge of the meadow in several different directions. As she turns southwest, Tom Gordon points out another post almost hidden in the woods. Trisha follows this post to another and then another, unknowingly walking the remains of a wood-drag trail laid by a farmer in 1905. After seven hours she comes across a second set of gateposts and the start of an old road. Upon realizing what she has found, she falls to her knees with joy.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
At the start of Chapter 8, “Sixth Inning,” Trisha’s morale has reached a new low. The logical part of her thinks that she will die in the woods as her health worsens and her supplies dwindle to almost nothing. Still, she pushes on, unwilling to let go of her small chance at survival. Despite her fraught relationship with her surroundings, Trisha experiences moments of appreciation for nature that bring her peace and joy. By contrasting the beauty of natural phenomena like meteor showers with the brutality of sights like the disemboweled deer, King conveys that nature is a multifaceted force that contains both beauty and danger.
As her situation worsens, Trisha reflects on the darker parts of life. While she’s been in the woods, she’s experienced many unpleasant and dangerous things, but it is thinking of her father’s lonely life that finally makes her conclude that life is sad and unfair. Although she has watched Pete rally against this unfairness, Trisha wonders if it isn’t better to accept it as part of life. She again describes herself as “almost ten, and big for her age” (192). Trisha has used this phrase to describe herself before. When it first occurred, it was a purely physical descriptor, but its reoccurrence after Trisha’s revelation highlights her growing emotional maturity. At only nine, she has accepted a harsh fact of life that many adults cannot bear. The arrest of Francis Raymond Mazzerole, the pedophile falsely accused of abducting Trisha, echoes Trisha’s acceptance of the unfairness of life and the difficulty of confronting life’s problems. The police’s pursuit of Mazzerole has derailed the search for Trisha; Mazzerole is undoubtedly evil, but in Trisha’s scenario he is also a dangerous distraction. Although Mazzerole and Trisha never meet, he serves a reminder of the evil that hides in the everyday.
Trisha’s interaction with the robed figures plays out her conflicted feelings on faith. The God of Tom Gordon is too busy to care about her, feeding into her fear that she might be alone in the world with no one looking out for her. The Subaudible would like to help her, but it is too weak. After days upon days of pain and fear, it makes sense that Trisha feels that there is not a lot of good in the world. The fact that this weak power looks a lot like her father reflects the fact that Larry McFarland is an imperfect parent, too absorbed with his own demons to be the father Trisha needs him to be. The God of the Lost makes the biggest impression of all on Trisha. It reaffirms all of her worst fears, telling her that the world is a dark place and that she belongs to the lost ones. Until now, the horror genre aspects of the novel have been hinted at, but the God of the Lost introduces a concrete, supernatural and sinister antagonist to the story. Although she can make peace with parts of life being sad, Trisha is shocked and upset by the God of the Lost’s pronouncement that the very core of the world is evil.
As Trisha gets sicker, she begins to hallucinate often. King uses Trisha’s feverish state of mind to blur the line between fantasy and reality, lending a heightened sense of dread to the story through her gruesome visions. The characters in Trisha’s imagination become increasingly lifelike because of her illness, especially Tom Gordon, who goes from an imagined voice to a near constant and visible walking companion. Trisha continues to turn to him for counsel and comfort. As the tough tootsie discourages her and the God of the Lost stalks her menacingly, Tom Gordon continues to represent the part of Trisha that is smart, resourceful, and unwilling to give up. It is this determined part of her spirit that eventually leads her to the dirt road, the first spot of real hope in days.
King continues to use the format of a baseball game to structure Trisha’s story. During one of their conversations, Tom Gordon tells Trisha that God tends to “come on in the bottom of the ninth” (214). As each chapter is named after a baseball inning, this pronouncement foreshadows that salvation may be waiting for Trisha in the penultimate chapter of book. For now, though, he warns her that it is “late innings”—the “game” is almost over. This feeling is reflected by Trisha’s certainty that the God of the Lost is almost upon her. Even as the “Seventh Inning Stretch” offers Trisha a brief respite in the form of new hope and echoes the traditional break in a baseball game, the reader understands that play will soon resume and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is building toward its climax.
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