Thinner Than Thou
In the tomorrow of Thinner Than Thou, the cult of the body has become a true religion. Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps. In the cloisters of the Dedicated Sisters, anorexic, bulimic, and morbidly obese young people are led gently to salvation – translation: the perfect body. Through his evangelical infomercials, the Reverend Earl preaches the heaven of the Afterfat, where you will look like a Greek god and be able to eat anything you want.
But like so many religions, the cult of the body is filled with false promises. As teenagers Annie, an anorexic, and Kelly, who is so massive she can barely walk, find out, the Dedicated Sisters specialize in forced feedings and enforced starvation. As middle-aged Jeremy discovers, the Reverend Earl's luxury resort for the overweight is a concentration camp where failure to drop pounds and tone up leads to brutal punishment. Earl's public sympathy for the overweight conceals a private contempt... and, beneath that, a terrible longing known only to a select few.
Determined to find their sister, Annie's twin siblings set out on an odyssey across an America very like our own and find that our longing for food has not vanished, merely gone underground. And that something terrible looms on the horizon.
Kit Reed
Kit Reed (1932-2017) was an American author of both speculative fiction and literary fiction, as well as psychological thrillers under the pseudonym Kit Craig.
Reed was born on June 7, 1932 in San Diego, California. Her first short story, "The Wait" (1958), was published by Anthony Boucher in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of a five-year grant literary from the Abraham Woursell Foundation.
The New York Times Book Review said about her short fiction in 2006: "Reed has a prose style that's pure dry ice, displayed in dystopian stories that specialize in bitterness and dislocation." The Wall Street Journal said: "The title of Kit Reed's [2013] selection of her own short stories, The Story Until Now (Wesleyan), reminds us that although she has been writing award-winning fiction for some 50 years, she's still accelerating. The scope of these 35 stories is immense, their variety unmatched."