Rereading Stephen King, chapter 19: Thinner
The
last time Richard Bachman and Stephen King were thought to be different
writers, and King's signature is becoming ever clearer in its story
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Baking the Stephen King way ... you'll want to check this pie's ingredients. Photograph: Martin Lee / Rex Features
Richard Bachman
could only have lived so long, I suppose. His voice – rich in language,
nasty in tone – was never going to be a bestseller, really, but King's
was. By 1984, everything that King wrote was selling by the truckload.
He couldn't put a foot wrong: bestseller begat bestseller. But he was
writing faster than publishers could cope with. We're on entry 19 now in
this rereading experiment, and yet only 10 years into King's career.
So, the pseudonym had been necessary to stop King looking suspiciously
prolific. But all things have to come to an end, and soon after Thinner
was released, that end arrived. But before it: a novel that summed up
the rest of King's Bachman-attributed output, while adding in just
enough evidence of its real author to raise suspicions.
Until
this point, Bachman wrote human stories. The four Bachman books were
about broken, trapped men, desperately clinging to humanity while the
world they inhabited pushed them further away from it. Rage, Running
Man, The Long Walk, Roadwork: while they might trip into SF territory,
they all exist by focusing on the human side of their protagonists,
backing them into corners and making them fight their way out . King's
work at this point utilised more traditional horror
tropes – the haunted or possessed whatevers that drove the stories
along. That line dividing King from Bachman collapsed with Thinner,
which throws its hat firmly into the supernatural ring almost from the
first. This was the first Bachman book I read with King's name on the
cover, not Bachman's; I didn't even know it was a Bachman until later
on, and I didn't question the narrative voice for a second.
Billy
Halleck is a complete asshole of a protagonist. He's a lawyer, morbidly
obese, who runs over a gypsy when not watching the road because his wife
is giving him a hand-job. When he gets the court case and charges
dismissed, thanks to knowing the right people, the gypsy's father (whose
predominant physical feature is his "rotting nose") seeks Halleck out
outside the courthouse. He touches his face and says a single word:
Thinner.
From that point onwards, Halleck finds that the weight he
was previously carrying – he starts the novel at a pretty hefty 249lb –
starts to drop off him. No matter what he does, off it comes. It's slow
at first, but then speeds up, and after discovering that the people who
have helped him evade justice are similarly tainted (with strange scaly
skin and acne, no less), Halleck realises that this is a gypsy curse.
However, because he's an asshole who sees no reason to accept blame for
what happened he doesn'tworry about atoning. Instead, he decides to use
his old ex-mafia friend Richie to help him track down and then pay back
the gypsies, before…
Well, spoilers. So, the gypsy man bakes a
pie (using some of Halleck's blood) which will pass on the curse to
whoever eats it. Now, Halleck is – as already established – an asshole.
He should, the gypsy suggests, eat the pie himself, and just accept his
fate. That would be taking responsibility for his actions. The curse
can't be lifted outright; and only a complete asshole would pass it.
But, as we've established…
What maybe can't be seen coming is that
Halleck thinks that his wife is to blame for his situation, because she
was the onedistracting him from the road. He thinks about giving her
the pie, knowing it will harm, hurt and kill her. But he doesn't. He
sleeps on it. While he's asleep, his wife and young daughter eat the
pie, damning them both. And then, in the novel's final moments, Halleck
cuts himself a slice: a gesture that isn't as selfless as it maybe
appears. It's a way of meaning that he doesn't have to deal with the
guilt of his family dying. Penance through self-destruction.
Before
this point, King had done a good job playing with notions of unlikeable
protagonists (Carrie; Jack Torrance, certainly; I'd argue that Louis Creed's
selfish actions put him on the wrong side of Nice Guy), but Halleck
takes things a step further. I don't think there's anything redeemable
about him, which actually makes reading the novel relatively tough. You
want something to latch onto, and it's not there. When he's terrified, I
didn't care. I wanted him to suffer, frankly. And he does, so it's
satisfying from that point of view. But then that ending comes along…
I
remember loving the ending when I was younger. It made the novel for
me, frankly, because it was so dark and cold. Such a brutal way of
ending a book: no hope, no going back. Even the innocent in the tale
(his daughter) is punished because of his selfish actions. But maybe I'm
going soft, because now I wonder whether there wasn't a way of
redeeming him. Maybe he could have turned Halleck around. One thing's
for sure: the ending being as bleak as it is makes the book feel more
distinctly Bachman: the pseudonym's books have a way with endings that
stare into the darkness.
So, it's a Bachman book: dark ending; man
cut off and struggling to overcome something that is ruining his life;
even structurally, the countdown motif that was used in The Long Walk
and The Running Man is present here, as each chapter starts with
Halleck's current (and constantly deteriorating) weight. But – and it's a
big but – this novel is firmly supernatural. It's a supernatural horror
story, the first that Bachman had apparently written, but a very
familiar move for King. One reviewer at the time ironically remarked
that it was "what Stephen King
would write if Stephen King could write". In the text of the novel
itself, Halleck refers to his experience as being like "something out of
a Stephen King novel" – not just a moment of metafictional
interjection, but a direct hint, if you're looking for it. So it's maybe
not a surprise that King was found out. And while King was apparently
disappointed that his secret was out, there's a case to be made for him
maybe tripping up on purpose. How did he pick the Bachman books? What
made a book Bachman rather than King? Was erring closer to King's usual
output here some deep-level subconscious version of self-sabotage? Of
wanting to be found out? Of wanting to be able to claim these books as
his own again?
The next Bachman novel was meant to be Misery. It's
a story for another day, of course; but that's a novel that ties in
thematically with all of the previous Bachman books, while being
probably the most perfect distillation of King's voice that he would
write. It's a book that I think might be his finest, and there's a part
of me that wonders if he didn't know that it would be as well. And who
would want their finest work attributed to somebody else? Thinner might
have just been a get-out clause: a fine horror novel that was never
going to set the world alight if published under King's name outright,
but that definitely worked to bridge the gap between King and his
pseudonym.
Next time: King's second short story collection, Skeleton Crew
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