THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON: A POP-UP BOOK based on the novel by Stephen King; text adaptation by Peter Abrahams; illustrations by Alan Dingman; paper engineering by Kees Moerbeck; Little Simon/Simon & Schuster, New York, 2004; $24.95.

The weird energy Stephen King drives through his books can’t be taught. But it can be adapted.

“The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A Pop-Up Book,” based on the three million-plus-selling novel of 1999 that was aimed at, well, everyone, but especially younger fans, now targets the story at an even more youthful crowd, say about the age of 8. Briefly, it’s the tale of 9-year-old Trisha McFarland, who gets lost during a hiking trip in the north woods with only a small lunch and her Walkman radio to sustain her. The radio is especially important because even though she’s deep in the forest, she can still listen to her beloved Red Sox’s games for comfort at night, and she gains special spiritual strength from her imagined – and hallucinated – bonds with the Sox’s great relief pitcher of the late 1990s, Tom Gordon.

Like everything verbal Stephen King touches, the original novel was, as we say in the world of book reviews, spellbinding, and Peter Abrahams’ adaptation of the text for children catches the same energy. The story is of course massively compacted, but the text (apart from one chronic, and really unfortunate, carryover misspelling of the word “midge”) is very cleanly written, and scenes and details neatly selected, so the pace of the reading is, as in all King books, dead-on magnetic.

The illustrations are not stunning, but they’re competent, and the pop-up mechanisms are predictably complex. We turn pages pasted within pages, and the 3-D components show Trisha and her gear, woods, streams and hallucinatory images that kids older than 8 will have fun figuring out. It’s possible simple flat illustrations would have been as effective as the pop-ups, but such a strategy might have dodged some of the volume’s intents.

Normally pop-up books are aimed toward very small children – people too young to connect with Trisha’s story. And so while conventional illustrations would effectively pique the minds of 8-, 9- and even 10-year-olds, the pop-up seems intended to generate still younger fans. As a Simon & Schuster publicist said to me, the book is intended “for all ages.” This may simply be code for “sell more books.” A special limited edition, which differs from the bookshelf version with its cloth binding, extra pop-up on the cover, slipcase, and the author’s signature, goes for $1,000 a copy. There are 125 copies.

But certainly another intent is to experiment with the art form, an activity apparently natural to Stephen King, who has seemed game for such undertakings since his collaboration with George Romero on “Creepshow” in 1982 and his online serialization of “The Plant” starting in 2000. He was directly involved in the creation of the pop-up book, and while the book’s appeal for the usual pop-up audience remains to be seen, it preserves so much of the story’s original energy that one 13-year-old was spurred to pick up the novel.

If you’d like to introduce your younger kids to the world of Stephen King and also invest in a collectors item, your most economical course of action may be to go to the Briar Patch bookshop in downtown Bangor this Saturday, purchase a copy, and get the author to sign it there. The $24.95 book will be as good a read as the limited edition, and your own profit margin will probably improve.

King and other authors will be signing books 12:30-2:30 p.m. at the bookshop located at 27 Central St. Reservations are required. All books to be signed must be purchased from The Briar Patch. For more information, call 941-0255.

Dana Wilde can be reached at dana.wilde@umit.maine.edu.