Product Description

When an old Gypsy man curses Billy Halleck for sideswiping his daughter, six weeks later he's 93 pounds lighter. Now Billy is terrified. And desperate enough for one last gamble...that will lead him to a nightmare showdown with the forces of evil melting his flesh away.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58586 in Books
• Published on: 1985-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
'An incredibly gifted writer, whose writing, like Truman Capote's, is so fluid that you often forget that you're reading' -- Guardian 'Astonishingly good...honourable, deeply felt and almost wonderful' -- Independent on HEARTS IN ATLANTIS

About the Author
Stephen King is the bestselling author of more than thirty books of which the most recent are THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON and HEARTS IN ATLANTIS. He lives with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King, in Bangor, Maine.

From AudioFile
A fatal accident leads to a gypsy curse and Billy Halleck's efforts to remove it. It's a great plot, but Joe Mantegna disappoints the listener with his clumsy pacing and uneven characterizations. Mantegna's New York crime king, his old gypsy and Halleck characters, while skillfully done, cannot overcome his poor job with the several females in the book. Neither does he capture the nuances of French-Canadian dialect in Old Orchard Beach nor the subtleties of the upper-crust Connecticut accent. Not surprisingly, he also commits the dreaded "Banger" pronunciation of the author's home city. The poor narration of this volume cannot be saved by the startling and appropriate musical accents sprinkled throughout the story. What a disappointing performance of a top-notch thriller! R.P.L. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

The Most Disturbing Ending of any Stephen King Book
I liked this book. A lot. Stephen King is good at writing lengthy novels that don't really scare, but make you think "Hey, that was pretty damn cool". This book isn't very long; but that seems to be of little importance. The fact is that of all the books Stephen King has written, this is the one with the scariest ending. Gypsy curses and the overall moral message of the book "You Are Responsible For Your Actions!" all come to a nice crescendo. An actual feeling of horror (ok, maybe not horror but a feeling of unease) sticks with you after you read the book. There is actual impact in retrospect of this book. It will bother you (provided you possess a soul). By the way, DO NOT SEE THE MOVIE FIRST!!!! It will ruin the book. Read the book first, then watch the horrible movie. If not for anything other than the small part the author plays.

What America needs: A book to convince us not to lose weight
Of the five books that Stephen King published under the pen name of Richard Bachman, three of them involved making the numbers of the chapters part of the story. In "The Running Man" there was a countdown as the game progressed while in "The Long Walk" the miles added up. In "Thinner" each chapter gives us the weight of the protagnoist, Billy Halleck, as it plummets relentlessly down. As with his classic short story about smoking, "Quitters, Inc.," King took an American obsession and turned it into a nightmare come true. The cataylst for Billy's weight loss is that old chesnut, the gypsy curse. While driving one night Billy is, uh, distracted by his wife and runs down the elderly daughter of Tadzu Lempke, the leader of a band of gypsies who have invaded the town. Billy is a lawyer and his friends, the judge and police chief, make sure the woman's death is ruled an accident. But before Billy can celebrate, Tadzu touches him and utters the one word curse: "Thinner."

What makes "Thinner" the best of the Bachman books is that King works a whole bunch of other elements into the story. Unlike his earlier Bachman efforts with tended to be one note (e.g., walk till you drop), "Thinner" pours on the fun. Billy's family and doctors are overjoyed by his weight loss at first, but then it continues at an alarming rate, even as Billy spends all of his time eating everyting in site. They insist it is a psychological problem, or perhaps physiological, but a gypsy curse is beyond their ability to believe. Not so for Richie Ginelli, a mobster who is one of Billy's most grateful clients. Ginelli is old school and his mother knows about gypsy curses, so Richie is more than willing to fight fire with fire. Tadzu curses Billy. In an act of desperation Billy proclaims the Curse of the White Man from Town. Richie does everything he can to make that curse come true in an effort to force the old man to "take it off."

That campaign is what elevates "Thinner" above the rest of the Bachman books. In the world of Stephen King fighting back is always the most difficult part of the equation and I like the fact that this time around the effort is grounded in the real world. The gypsies have curses but Richie has automatic weaponry and a cunning honed in the underworld. The end result is that as you read "Thinner" you become open to the possibility that Billy might get out of this one alive, if only they can stop Tadzu's granddaughter Gina with her slingshot and ball bearings. There are other complications in Billy's life that add to the fun of the denoument, such as whatever is going on between Billy's wife and his doctor, so that once King gets the ball rolling it keeps picking up speed as it goes down that hill. We are not talking great fiction here, just a story that gives you second thoughts over every trying another diet.

A fun read, even if there were some warts
I just finished listening to this audiobook, and I really don't know where AudioFile gets off slamming Joe Mantegna's performance. He did a wonderful job with the different character's voices, especially the old gypsy and mobster. His performance certainly kept me entertained while commuting to and from work.

Stephen King also did an admirable job, and I enjoyed the book a lot. It has its warts, but overall it was a clever parable about revenge and indulgence. There was really only one scene that gave me an, "Oh, come on!" reaction, and that was when the main character conveniently encounters the retiree in the bar who tells him the anecdote about the gypsies. What were the chances that in such a crazily crowded resort town that Billy would run into this guy? Kind of thin, I would say. The ending of the story was also a bit predictable, and I think King relied way too heavily on dream sequences as a plotting device.

But still, it was a pretty good book. I particularly admired King's invention of the Italian mobster character as a way to escalate the story's conflict without exacting a price against our sympathy for the main character. If it had been Billy Halleck committing all those deeds--poisoning dogs, shooting cars full of holes, and threatening to kill pretty young women--then we would've liked him a lot less. But by assigning those actions to a secondary character who reacts to these events with shock and abhorrence, the story could advance and leave our sympathy for the main character intact.

Even then, those clever mechanisms of characterization weren't enough for me to completely like Billy Halleck. From the beginning, he was a repellant character: an overweight lawyer who, through his town's good ole boy network, escaped a vehicular manslaughter conviction. That's a tall deck to stack against your own protagonist at the beginning of a story and still hope to generate reader sympathy. And yet King still managed to make me like Billy, somewhat, through most of the book.

The only other thing I have to say is that I wish the character of the young, pretty gypsy girl hadn't just dropped off the map towards the end of the story. Yes, she served her purpose well, but there was such a great setup about her that I wish she could have taken a more meaningful role towards the end.