Like Andi, I held off on reading ahead as long as I could, but as things got worse and worse for Trisha - the wasps, the endless mud, the haunting presence of "the thing" - I just couldn't put the book down.

It is an amazingly fast-paced book, especially given that there's only one main character to follow, and relatively little action. The intensity of Trisha's inner thoughts and hallucinations, along with her real-life tumbles, were more than enough at times to keep my eyes wide and my heart pounding. The book is so eerily quiet, perfectly reflecting Trisha's experience alone in the woods, that when there was even the slightest noise - the crack of a branch, or the rustle of leaves - I think I jumped as much as she did.

At first, when I read about the remains of the deer, I assumed it was a hallucination, that her fears of the creature were growing so real that she was starting to see "evidence." I expected her to say that she blinked, or looked away and back again, and that it was gone. But she didn't. And that's when I began to think that maybe there actually was something lurking in the woods. With King's description of the claw marks on the trees, and the way the animal was ripped apart, I suddenly believed that Trisha really did have something to fear.

The glimpses at what was happening with Trisha's family, and with the rescue efforts, intensified the story even more. It was heartbreaking to read that while they were reducing their search area, she was thirty miles outside the line and headed across the state border. And it was frustrating to see the police focusing their efforts on that anonymous tip, one that seemed so clearly motivated by revenge, especially since we as readers knew that Trisha hadn't encountered any such man (not yet, anyway).

It was around this time that I first began to consider the very real possibility that Trisha might never be rescued... at that moment, I wasn't even thinking about the creature, but all the other things that she was up against - illness, injuries, and the terrible, consuming fear of dying alone in the woods, or being lost forever. Did anyone else have the same thought, that even after all the hints of the supernatural, the story might actually have a very realistic - though still tragic - ending?

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