Books: Thinner By Richard Bachman (1984)

“Billy Halleck, good husband, loving father, lives in Connecticut and practices law in New York City. He is both beneficiary and victim of the American Good Life: he has an expensive home, a nice family, and a rewarding job…but he is also fifty pounds overweight, and, as his doctor keeps reminding him, he is thirty-six years old-edging into heart attack country. Then Billy Halleck sideswipes an old Gypsy woman as she is crossing the street in their quiet little southern Connecticut town of Fairview, and everything in his pleasant, upwardly mobile life changes. He is exonerated in the local court by a friendly judge and sheriff…but a blacker, far worse judgment has been passed on him, nevertheless. Billy Halleck begins losing weight. He is pleased at first, then worried, and finally terrified. He can't stop it. He eats and eats but the weight flies off.”

After four books Stephen King had written under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman between 1977 and 1982 (none of which I’ve yet read, but am working on changing that), this 1984 novel was the one that outed him (but it wasn’t him who did it, it was, of all people, a bookseller at a B. Dalton’s). As the story goes, “the general view among publishers was that an author was limited to one book per year, since publishing more would be unacceptable to the public. King therefore wanted to write under another name in order to increase his publication without over-saturating the market for the King ‘brand’. He convinced his publisher, Signet Books, to print these novels under a pen name. King has stated using the Bachman name was a purposeful “attempt to make sense out of his career and try to answer the question of whether his success was due to talent or luck. He says he deliberately released the Bachman novels with as little marketing presence as possible and did his best to ‘load the dice against’ Bachman.” King concluded he never found the answer to that particular question, whether it was talent or luck that made him successful.

“King dedicated Bachman's early books—Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981), and The Running Man (1982)—to people close to him. The link between King and his shadow writer was exposed in early 1985 after Stephen P. Brown, a bookstore clerk in Washington, D.C., noted similarities between the writing styles of King and Bachman. Brown was an avid King fan who had also read all of Bachman's books. After reading an advance reading copy of Thinner, which came to his store a few months before its publication, he was "eighty percent convinced" that Bachman was King; he noted that their style was only differentiated by the downbeat endings of Bachman's books, which runs counter to King's general philosophy of ending his books in an uplifting manner (with Pet Sematary and Cujo being exceptions). Brown located publisher's records at the Library of Congress which included a document naming King as the author of one of Bachman's novels. Brown wrote to King's publishers with a copy of the documents he had uncovered, and asked them what to do. Two weeks later, King telephoned Brown personally and suggested he write an article about how he discovered the truth, allowing himself to be interviewed. At the time of the announcement in 1985, King was working on Misery, which he had planned to release as a Bachman book.”  

For the book itself, I can see why Brown felt this book was written by King. There are a lot similar styles to writing, including a few catch phrases King has used for decades. As an example, released just before King’s epic novel IT, there is a line about and evil clown with a balloon. Then there is part where Billy and his Dr. Houston are talking about his weight loss, and Houston says, “You were starting to sound a little like a Stephen King novel for a while there.” And then Billy adds, while talking about two other people who’ve been cursed, “..it starts to sound a little like a Stephen King again, wouldn’t you say?”

Over all, the book does feel padded –I was struck how much of this could’ve been a novella instead of 300+ page novel. It’s pretty creepy, though, and it does make you think about all the mistakes we make in life, including the price you have to pay (“It's a cash and carry world. Sometimes you pay a little. Mostly it's a lot. Sometimes, it's everything you have,” as Mike Anderson would discover in the 1999 King written TV movie Storm of the Century). There is some gore, some decent suspense, so it does have the King stamp on it; and it’s  fun.