Thinner Than Thou - Softcover

Reed, Kit

Softcover

ISBN 10: 076531195X ISBN 13: 9780765311955

Publisher: Tor Books, 2005

Synopsis

In the tomorrow of Thinner Than Thou, the cult of the body has become the one true religion. The Dedicated Sisters are a religious order sworn to help anorexic, bulimic, and morbidly obese youth. Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps. And through hypnotically powerful evangelical infomercials, the Reverend Earl preaches the heaven of the Afterfat, where you will look like a Greek god and can eat anything you want. Just sign over your life savings and come to Sylphania, the most luxurious weight-loss spa in the world, where the Reverend himself will personally supervise your attainment of physical perfection.
But the glory of youth and thinness that America worships conceals a hidden world where teens train for the competitive eating circuit, where fat porn and obese strippers feed people's dark desires, and where an underground railroad of rebellious religions remember when people worshipped God instead of the Afterfat.
As Annie, an anorexic, and her friend Kelly, who is so massive she can barely walk, find out, the tender promises of the Dedicated Sisters are fulfilled by forced feedings and enforced starvation in hidden prisons.
As middle-aged Jeremy discovers, Sylphania is a concentration camp where failure to lose weight and tone up leads to brutal punishment.
The Rev. Earl's public sympathy for the overweight conceals a private contempt . . . and, beneath that, a terrible longing known only to a select few.
The inevitable decay of old age is the only thing keeping mankind from reaching perfection. Luckily, Reverend Earl has a plan that will take care of that . . . .

About this title

From the Author:

Given the obscene concentration on body image, it's clear the country's in a fanatical fit of self-improvement of the most superficial kind, and doomed you are if you don't match the national Barbie/Ken template of beauty and fitness. In a "PW talks with Kit Reed" Publishers Weekly asks:

PW: Reverend Earl's "Solutions" agenda sounds like Hitler's Final Solution.

KR: Yes. Clearly what Hitler was doing was much more sophisticated and far more heinous, but the analogy isn't so far off. We may not be trying to create a master race, but we certainly are encouraging a cute one.

Should we worry? Oooh, yes. Do we think we're a little too thin/too fat/too wrinkled to pass muster? Probably.

About the Author:

Kit Reed has received a Guggenheim fellowship and an Aspen Institute Rockefeller Fellowship. Her books include Weird Women, Wired Women; Seven for the Apocalypse; Magic Time. Her short fiction has been published everywhere from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to The Yale Review.
Reed has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and collections of her short fiction have been finalists for the James W. Tiptree Award. Kit Reed lives in Middletown, CT and teaches at Wesleyan University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 076531195X
• ISBN 13: 9780765311955
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336