I Don't Want To Be That Thin! (Thinner - Stephen King)

Member Name: CheekyCharlie08

Product:	Thinner - Stephen King
Date:	22/09/09 (46 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: A boring book from cover to cover

I've never heard of such a stupid plot for a book but something about the writing on the back of Thinner made me want to read it, I'm not mad keen on Stephen King because his books aren't as scary or thrilling as HE thinks they are but I thought I'd try this one because it's quite a short book and I thought if I got bored I wouldn't have to wait long until I finished the book.

Billy is a professional man who has a wife he loves and a daughter they both adore. One day he runs over and kills an old gypsy woman and her husband puts a curse on him, just by touching his face and whispering "Thinner" the gypsy turns Billy's life upside down. Billy is a typical American man (no offence!) in that he eats too much and has got overweight but after the curse his weight drops scarily by sometimes 2 or 3 lbs a day.

Eventually he looks like a walking skeleton and then sets out to find the gypsy to ask him to lift the curse.

Sounds boring, huh? Yeah, it is. Proper boring. Billy wallows big time in self pity and the whole book is concentrated too much on him and that means that Stephen King has 300 pages to fill based on this one blokes thoughts. These thoughts are repeated over and over again and I noticed as I was reading that they are just written different so that the reader thinks they are getting original things on each page but it's just a retelling of stuff we already know.

I liked Billy's wife and would have liked to know how she dealt with it but she's not hardly mentioned apart from when Billy decides in his head that he's going to put the blame on her for what happened. It does turn out that she was in the wrong as well but because of how the accident happened (i can't tell you that though because it's a bit of a bombshell as your reading) but then Billy stops taking any of the blame for himself and what his wife did wasn't without encouragement from him at the time.

His daughter doesn't come into the book that much and I think she's only in to get some sympathy for Billy.

It's just a stupid book from page one and I don't know how I managed to get through it to the end. One thing that proper bugged me was how quick Billy lost his weight and the fact that every now and again Stephen King would throw in a comment about how people were looking at him in disgust because he was so skeletal but there are very thin people all round us and we don't point and stare like that. I also reckon it would be impossible for such a fat man as Billy to get so thin so quick because I want to know where all his flabby stretched skin went.

I know it's a work of fiction but the weight loss thing didn't make sense to me and I think the book should have been set over a longer period instead of making out that it was such a quick thing. There was no suspense in it and I didn't think it was a thriller either, it was just a very boring book that I couldn't wait to finish so I could start reading something better.

It's available on DVD as well and I can't imagine how boring and stupid that film would look based on what I read in this book and other rubbish Stephen King films.

Summary: The Worst Stephen King Book Ever I Reckon, And None Of Them Are That Good I Don't Think