Richard Bachman's Thinner

[BONUS Letter.] A tale from the burb...

Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman. Thinner: A Novel. Pocket Books, 2025 [1984]. 423 pp.

There’s plenty of sunshine this high noon in Brooklyn but very little of it can get into this cafe on the shady side of the block, and I’m sitting in the back typing this under an amber ceiling light, and in this letter I must talk about a Richard Bachman novel that your host found to be stinky, though I did read the whole thing, but that’s why we’re off to an iffy start.

We mentioned in the previous bonus letter on Bachman that King began the penname to keep his manuscripts coming to market each year, but there was another, more experimental reason: why did King ever break out as a fiction writer in the first place? He arranged to have Bachmann titles published with minimal marketing: their performance might indicate if the success of King’s early canon — which we’ve been reading and playfully ranking these past few months — can be mainly chalked up to talent or luck.

But the experiment didn’t run long enough. Thinner was the fifth and last Bachman book (a pseudonym taken from the Winnipeg rock band BTO) before King was outed by a bookstore clerk who followed up a hunch by checking the LOC publishing records of both King and Bachman titles. The book had already been on the shelves—and then its sales increased tenfold when the jig was up. [We should note that we have yet to cover Long Walk and Running Man: The Bachman Ambulatory Duology — Ed.]

One shouldn’t argue by counterfactuals, but it’s not hard to imagine folks suspecting King’s authorship with this novel’s material. It’s not the purely down-to-earth, small-time crime feel of Roadwork. This story is pitched at an E. C. Comics level of trash, like an extra-tasteless segment of Creepshow: Billy Halleck is a complacent rich Connecticut lawyer and family man who likes to eat, but when he commits vehicular manslaughter, he uses his connections in town to get off easy, but the deceased woman’s father takes his own revenge.

And heaven help us, he is an “old Gypsy man with a rotting nose” who whispers “Thinner” to Billy, and the corpulent lawyer starts losing weight fast. Soon enough he’ll be emaciated to the point of getting heart arrhythmia just from his body trying to stay alive. This narrative still has the propulsion of a Bachman book (the chapters are often headed by Halleck’s ever-decreasing poundage: 227, 221, 217…) but it’s pitched at a low pulp level to the very end.