Thinner

Blaze is at 3.77.

The Long Walk is at 3.98. Thinner, 3.78. And these are real good data points.

Road Work is at 3.5 and Rage is at 3.69.

Huh.

Okay.

So what is happening to this guy is that every day when he weighs himself, he weighs less.

Now you might think, "Oh, this sounds like Thinner," which is a book we've already read, but it's not the same as Thinner.

Because even though he weighs less every single day, he's not visually, physically losing weight.

Right.

Sitting at number 10 on the list is Thinner from 1984.

A classic.

And at number nine is The Running Man from 1982.

Both written under the Richard Bachman name.

Exactly, his infamous alter ego.

I want to start by looking at the mechanics of Thinner.

Let's do it.

I went through, I think like a lot of horror writers, I went through a Stephen King phase as a teenager, even a preteen.

I think this book really came out of a love of the book Thinner, one of Stephen King's earlier novels, which is a weight loss, like a dramatic weight loss horror.

And I had, you know, I've always loved things that are dark and things that are a little bit macabre.

I think from a More aesthetic standpoint, I just am drawn towards the darkness a little bit.

And I think that that's such a key point in this book.

I think the honesty of the book is noteworthy and i wonder do you have such a clear vision on what it's like to live with weight and such a clear um fully fleshed out character in emmet why is this story important why was it important to tell this story honestly and why now uh we talked a little bit about it but i'm curious if you have a statement on why now and why it's important

Yeah, I've been wanting to tell a story like this for a long, long time, really since I read Thinner.

I loved

Right.

What happens when the thing trying to kill you is your own body and your own bad habits? We are moving into an era of King's life that was incredibly chaotic to discuss Thinner.

Another Richard Bachman book.

And one that absolutely requires us to frame the era it was written in.

The Langberg article is very upfront about this.

Uh, we have to be, too.

So the plot of Thinner follows an overweight lawyer who accidentally hits and kills a traveler with his car, uses his legal connections to avoid consequences, and then is cursed by the victim's family member with a single word.

Thinner.

Right.

It wasn't confirmed they were the same person until years later when Thinner was published, which makes me wonder, if he wrote this as someone else, did he give himself permission to write a bleaker ending than the Stephen King brand was allowed to?

That's a great theory, because Bachman, as a brand, was known for a fundamentally different, much more cynical worldview.

If The Dead Zone is about the agony of total agency, The Long Walk strips all agency away.