Shoutout to the ending of 'The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon' by Stephen King

I just finished this book last night and the ending totally threw me. The whole story is about a little girl lost in the woods for like a week surviving on bugs and wild berries, and I was ready for some big showdown with a monster or a rescue scene. But instead, the ending is super quiet and almost surreal. She runs into a giant bear that might not even be real, and then her dad shows up out of nowhere. It left me sitting there for a solid five minutes just staring at the last page. Has anyone else read this and felt like the ending was way too strange for what felt like a survival thriller?

2 comments

2 Comments

simoncarr4d agoProlific Poster

You're way off base here. The ending being quiet and surreal is actually the whole point of the book. King spent the whole story building up this idea that the girl was using her imagination and faith in Tom Gordon to keep herself going through a nightmare. That bear wasn't some monster, it was the final test of her willpower and her way of confronting the fear that had been stalking her the entire time. Having her dad show up right then instead of some big dramatic rescue makes perfect sense because it shows how the real threat was never the woods or the animals, it was the loneliness and the giving up. The ending is strange because the whole book was really about the inside of her head, not some survival thriller.

lisa82019h ago

Wait wait wait hold on. You're telling me you actually think that bear was just a test of her willpower and not a literal monster? That's insane. I've read that book three times and I still have no idea if the bear was real or some kind of supernatural thing following her, but calling it just a "test" is like saying the Overlook Hotel was just a bad dream. King literally describes it as having almost human eyes and following her for miles, not like any bear I've ever heard of. And her dad showing up right then felt more like a cop out than some deep statement about loneliness. I mean, he's been dead the whole book and then poof, there he is? That's not surreal, that's just confusing and kind of cheap honestly. You're giving King way too much credit for what might just be a messy ending he couldn't figure out how to land.