Thinner

Thinner is a horror novel by the American writer Stephen King, published in 1984 by NAL under his pseudonym Richard Bachman. It centres on Billy Halleck, a morbidly obese lawyer who kills a Romani woman while driving carelessly and is not punished for it.

The woman's father and his community hold their own court, and what they give Billy instead of a trial is a curse: a word and a touch on the cheek, after which he begins to lose weight and cannot stop. The novel follows his attempts to reverse the change and the increasing lengths he goes to as the effect becomes visible and then dangerous.

King wrote the book after a period of weight loss of his own, and it is one of the Bachman novels he has acknowledged, shorter and more direct than the books published under his own name. Its horror is the ordinary fear of a body changing without permission, and it was one of the Bachman titles that became widely known once the pseudonym was made public.