Home

Books
Richard Bachman
Movies
Television
Quotes
Biography
Posters
Links
About This Site

A nine year old girl gets lost while hiking with her mom and brother.

	Buy It! at Amazon.com
	Paperback
	Hardcover
	Audiobook CD

Synopsis

Trisha is a 9-year-old who has to relieve herself one June morning while setting off on a six-mile hike along the trail from an unincorporated township in western Maine to North Conway, N.H. She can't get the attention of her mother and older brother up ahead, who are so involved in bickering with each other that it's "like some sick kind of making out."

So at a fork in the trail she seeks privacy by going a little way along the path they're not traveling and stepping into the woods. Then, when she's finished, she figures she can catch up by simply walking across the gap in the Y and rejoining the main trail. "Piece of cake," she thinks. "There was no chance of getting lost, because she could hear the voices of the other hikers so clearly." Mistake. Big mistake.

Now, what you might expect King to do at this point is to summon up at the very least a homicidal pedophile on the loose or a rabid werewolf running amok to terrorize poor Trisha, who while a gritty young thing and tall for her age is even afraid of the dark.

All she's got going for her is her minimal knowledge of the woods, a backpack with her lunch in it and her Walkman radio, on which she can listen to her beloved Boston Red Sox, in particular her special hero, the relief pitcher Tom Gordon, whom she admires for having "icewater in his veins" and whom she considers one of the handsomest men in the world.

But surprisingly in this story that seems almost to have written itself, King leaves his heavy-breathing monsters mostly out of it and relies on the simple things about being lost in the deep woods that would upset most of us, like insects, snakes, hunger, thirst, cliffs, swamps, thick foliage with thorns, disease, extreme weather, noises in the dark and our own overheated imaginations. Oh, and something that seems to be stalking Trisha. Something very large. Something that grunts. Something capable of ripping the head of a deer from its body. Something that we know Trisha is going to have to deal with directly before she gets out of the woods.
-- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

Quotes from the Book

The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted. She knew that now. She was only 9, but she knew it, and she thought she could accept it.