Like John Travolta, Madonna, or any number of modern-day cultural institutions, Stephen King's respectability tends to wax and wane. Drawing some critical acclaim early in his career, King has stuck around long enough to be in and out of fashion more than a few times, selling enough books along the way that it probably doesn't matter to him all that much. But it's hard to argue that King doesn't have something going for him to have endured for so long. While the same could be said of Danielle Steel or Tom Clancy, cookie-cutter stories of romance and intrigue have always had an audience; King's considerably more varied body of work, largely but hardly exclusively in the horror genre, doesn't have the same kind of precedent. Dorothy Allison has called King an unrecognized working-class realist, which is fair enough. When he's at his best—and, writing with the frequency he does, he's not always at the top of his game—King's stories work in part because they have foundations in the grit of the everyday. That's certainly true in the case of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Slim by King's standards, Tom Gordon follows a 9-year-old girl, a child of divorced parents who is lost in the woods of New England after straying from a nature walk along the Appalachian trail. With meager supplies and a limited knowledge of survival, she struggles to find her way back to civilization against the forces of the natural world, growing increasingly out of touch with reality and relying on her visions of ace Boston Red Sox relief pitcher Tom Gordon to guide her. Economically written and excitingly paced, Tom Gordon also incorporates a fair number of religious issues. King has largely limited himself to his protagonist's limited means of understanding the world, and does a fine job, most of the time, of staying within those limitations. In the end, he creates a fine tale of adventure, a touching look at youthful faith, and a good novel, regardless of fashion.