Author: Stephen King (Richard Bachman)
Book: Thinner
Year: 1984
Pages: 320
Part of Series: Solo
Reading Time: July of 2022 (6 days)
Rating: 7
Year: 1984
Pages: 320
Part of Series: Solo
Reading Time: July of 2022 (6 days)
Rating: 7
I enjoy reading this novel as I've enjoy almost all Richard Bachman novels. I do believe Stephen King stories are more straight to the point in his Bachman than his ow novels. He must write Bachman inbetween his own novels to have a break.
We've got Billy Halleck our main protagonist which is a overweight and after an incident which left a gypsy woman dead he is cursed. A single word changes his world forever. - THINNER.
From that moment on he starts to lose weight. In the beginning it's a good change of weight, even her wife is getting more sexual motivated - but every couple of days he loses of couple of kilos. Is it cancer? it is other kind of disease? We don't know... As the story progresses he tries to understand either medically and mentally.
What's interesting is that this is straightforward novel with a lot of introspect of our main character. The situation that led to the death of that woman is not completely as we presented in the beginning.
I am going into spoilers due to the ending left me wonder on why this one was one of my favourites of him. The ending is great. I read here people complaining about the ending but it's perfect. Like a Greek tragedy. Yes, his wife was doing a handjob and so his reflections were bad therefore he go over a woman (which to be honest was also not in the walkway). So, who is guilty?
He as the story progresses starts blaming the wife; the gypsy blame the man because he run over his daughter, and his wife is just not worry about it. So it was cool the all pie situation. Again spoilers ahead, basically the only way of him to no die is to give the pie the gypsy gave him and give to someone else. That person would die instead of him. Since he hates his wife he tries to give her pie BUT unfortunately his daughter also ate. Therefore in the end he just ends up eating the third slice. If this is not a greek tragedy I don't know what is.
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