"The Sure Thing: The Making and Unmaking of Michelle Wie" by Eric Adelson

You know the feeling you get when you are watching a horror movie, and you just know that something bad is going to happen to the nice, cute, clueless girl as soon as she wanders away from the group?

Well, as I was reading the opening chapters of “The Sure Thing” (ESPN/Ballentine, $25), that was the feeling that settled like an expanding ball of unbaked dough in the pit of my empathetic gut.

Adelson was the first national reporter to write about Wie, and traces the arc of her early career with a keenly observant eye. Camp Wie is not exactly the most forthcoming with the media, but Adelson does well, I think, in cleaving close to the verifiable bone, without too much speculation.

The book is full of interesting facts about Wie, whether or not you are a fan, including a point that is often missed in comments on past blogs by our own writers: She HAS won a lot of tournaments, including a USGA event, the 2003 Women’s Amateur Public Links Championship.

While reading the book, I was constantly struck by how obviously bad the bad decisions were that Michelle’s father B.J. and mother Bo made, along with Michelle’s coaches and tutors associated with the David Leadbetter Golf Academy.

Again, it was like watching a slasher flick, where the soon-to-be-dismembered characters say things like, “Let’s split up!” and “Who wants to go spend the night at the abandoned insane asylum?”

On the bright side, for the reader and for Michelle Wie, she will turn just 20 years old this year, and has nearly as much time remaining in her career as she still has potential.

You just hope she gets a clue sooner rather than later, and decides to get the hell out of the graveyard before any more blood-sucking freaks show up.