Warning: Includes a mild spoiler for The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.
Everyone calls Stephen King the ‘king of horror,’ but honestly, that doesn’t quite capture everything he does. So many of his best stories aren’t scary at all! Sure, some are terrifying, but a lot of them are just really great dramas about people and life, without any monsters or supernatural stuff. It’s funny, because even though The Shawshank Redemption is an amazing movie, most of his books haven’t done huge numbers at the box office. I think that’s why when they adapt his work, they often play it safe and focus on the horror—like with the new Carrie series Mike Flanagan is doing. They seem to think that’s what people want, but he’s capable of so much more!
The 2025 film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, The Long Walk, has been well-received, earning an 88% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes. This is good news for another upcoming King adaptation, which tells a different kind of survival story. The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon follows nine-year-old Trisha, who gets lost in the woods during a family outing. The story then becomes a frightening test of her mental strength and bravery, as she struggles to escape a mysterious presence while experiencing hallucinations.
Despite Trisha’s aimless wandering in the forest, the story’s strength lies in its simplicity. Similar to The Blair Witch Project, it relies on atmosphere rather than action to create a genuinely frightening experience. Both stories leave room for viewers to decide what’s supernatural, and focus on the unsettling reality of simply trying to survive. This raw struggle for survival in the wilderness is also key to the success of The Revenant, which shares a particularly shocking scene with this story.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon Reveals One Of Stephen King’s Underrated Talents
Stephen King is famous for creating terrifying monsters, but his real skill lies in finding horror within ordinary life. He takes everyday people and situations—things that seem harmless at first—and transforms them into nightmares. For example, a devoted fan turns dangerously obsessive in Misery, a friendly dog becomes violently rabid in Cujo, and what should be a romantic escape quickly descends into gruesome body horror in Gerald’s Game.
Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon builds suspense by focusing on a young girl’s struggle for survival in the wilderness, featuring a particularly disturbing scene with a raw fish. The title comes from Trisha’s favorite baseball player, and she starts imagining conversations with him as her condition worsens. King excels at creating psychological horror without relying on traditional monsters; what’s actually pursuing Trisha isn’t fully explained until the very end, leaving room for interpretation. If adapted successfully, this story has the potential to be a standout survival thriller.
What We Know About The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon’s Upcoming Adaptation
Originally, the famous zombie film director George A. Romero was going to adapt the 1999 novel, but the project never moved forward and he passed away before it could begin. Though Romero’s company later tried to get it going again, it seemed stuck in development. More recently, in 2025, Lionsgate acquired the rights, and JT Mollner is now writing and directing the film. Given Mollner’s work on the screenplay for The Long Walk, he seems well-suited to bring this other Stephen King survival story to life.
This book is getting its first-ever screen adaptation, and it’s surprisingly well-suited for a movie or TV show without relying heavily on special effects. The story features two key ‘performers’: a bear, which can be realistically portrayed using techniques demonstrated in films like The Revenant, and Tom Gordon, the retired baseball player the story is named after, who is a fan of the book and might even make a brief appearance. Considering all the Stephen King novels still waiting to be adapted, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon seems to have a lot of promise, especially following the recent success of The Long Walk.
2026-07-20 02:58