by Kit Reed
From the apron of the giant stage, the evangelist leaps to his special pedestal, and to make certain that the camera knows where the action is, he pulls a chair up with him and as they watch, he makes that last, balletic jump up to the seat of the chair. Now he is standing high above them, poised on the narrow seat. Spreading his arms, the Reverend Earl Sharpnack addresses friends and enemies and the faithful alike, preaching from the highest point on the stage.
“So they know, do they?” he shouts, grabbing the mike and flipping a switch to enhance the volume. “Do you think anybody out there gives a fuck what I do? Do you think anything I do is going to make any difference to the business at hand? If you believe that my sins make any difference, you’re pathetic. Pathetic!”
There is a rustle as if of tumbleweed in a high wind, but nobody moves and nobody speaks.
“I have what people want! I know what you want, all you out there, all you who have betrayed me and all you who have turned against me.”
His voice is huge now, . it is bigger than anything unfolding up there on the screen. As his craven image writhes on TV, the Reverend Earl brings them the truth. “I know what you want, you sad and greedy people, and I can give it to you.
“Now.
“I can make you thinner. Thinner!” the Reverend Earl repeats, louder, as the old people standing behind him waver uncertainly and on the giant monitor the grimmest details of his encounters with poor Betty continue to unfold.
“Don’t you get it? Half of you know the truth about me already and the ones that don’t know, now that you do, what difference does it make? Does it really make any difference to you? It isn’t what I do that makes the difference,” he trumpets in the voice of an angel. This is how he controls multitudes. “It’s what I have to sell.”
There is a disturbance in the air: the shudder of breath in a giant, communal sigh.
“The truth about me doesn’t mean shit compared to the truth about you. You want the wonderful food I sell and you want to gorge on it and stay thin or get fat, for as long as you can pretend you’re doing something about it in my expensive gyms. You want what I tell you when the whole truth is it won’t make any difference what you do. Any of you.”
He repeats, for effect. “Any of you. You are all born hungry, so you need me now and you will always need me because, face it, you will want every day for the rest of your lives, and admit it, I give you what you want.”
“God,” Devlin mutters. “This is terrible.”
“No,” Zoe says. “It’s the truth.”
“Shh.” Betty raises her massive arm at an angle that echoes Ahmed Shah’s. “Wait.”
“People don’t care what you do,” the Reverend Earl finishes, screaming, “as long as you give them what they want.”
Now?
Ahmed’s arm drops. “Now!”
Betty’s arm drops. Now.
The silent army is on the move. Big as they are, these people are a lot more delicate of touch and a lot more sensitive to other people’s feelings than ordinary people like you. They have suffered! They know what it’s like.
Stately, single-minded, and firm of purpose, the marchers advance on the ruined evangelist, parting like water to flow around Ahmed and Gloria and the Abercrombies and Annie’s best friend Kelly and Betz’s new boyfriend Dave who, as the ocean of people surges out of the shadows, filling the circle of light, moves in to take her hand, which the girl acknowledges with a little shiver of delight.
Miraculously, the big people reach the lip of the stage without jostling a single living person and then, carefully, so as not to hurt the senior citizens with their brave little placards, they begin to rock the flatbed truck until like an overripe peach falling from the highest branch, the doomed Earl Sharpnack loses his balance and topples from the seat of the chair, ricochets off the glittering pedestal and plunges off the stage and into their midst. Helpless before the people he has hurt most, the ruined evangelist drops, screaming, into their hands.
Like an ocean sucked out to sea by a tremendous windstorm, the quiet, patient army recedes. For a few seconds, the others can hear the Reverend Earl Sharpnack screaming.
It is the last anybody will see or hear of him.
In a world ordered according to love and reason, this would be the end of it. In a movie, there would be the fire and the explosion, Sylphania destroyed as the survivors flee, but in the world of human endeavors and failures and heartfelt pledges to try again, nothing ever really ends.
As the survivors collect themselves and start planning the rest of their lives, the next thing is about to unfold.
For every vacuum, there is a new force gathered to rush in. Now a harsh, unfamiliar voice booms into the desert enclave, with the words of the speaker picked up by the onstage microphone and his image recorded by the cameras, magnified and relayed to astonished viewers everywhere.
“This is how I have saved you,” the new evangelist shouts as he takes up the torch, and what he says is picked up and projected for everybody present and all the bereaved faithful out there in the dark waiting, as it turns out, for something just like this.
“No,” Jerry Devlin says. Too much, he thinks.
“I am the true one.” The voice rises. “Me.”
“No!” This is too damn much. Devlin shouts, “Shut up.”
“Face it, everybody wants to keep eating,” Betty says.
“Down with the charlatans,” the contender goes on in, a voice much stronger and more assured than the only guy here who knows and hates him would expect. Exalted by the attention, the newcomer lifts his head and shouts like an archangel instead of an angel-in-training, which is what he is. Was, until today.
Devlin shouts, “Somebody, stop him!”
But nobody does.
“I have saved you from Earl Sharpnack and now I’m here to save you from yourselves,” the new, stronger, primed-to-cash-in-on-this Nigel Peters says.
It is a risky move. The future of the enterprise hangs in the balance. As for the people present, they’re done with this. Like the huge, silent army, they’ve had a bellyful. The Abercrombies and Kelly and Ahmed and Betty, Devlin and Zoe, whom he intends to marry, Betty—with Noah!—and the others are packing it in here and getting ready to go home. And Nigel’s power play? What will become of it? Of Sylphania and the Dedicated Sisters? Truth?
It’s up to you.
TITLES BY KIT REED FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
@expectations
Thinner Than Thou
PRAISE FOR THINNER THAN THOU
“This satire on the Obese Society, the slimming industry, and materialistic religion is Reed at her mordant best.”
—Michael Moorcock
“Darkly humorous and unsettling, this is an important book that warns us where society’s pressure to be young, thin, and beautiful could lead.”
—Romantic Times
“My first reaction after reading the book was to think, ‘How horrifying!’ My second thought, almost immediately following the first, was, ‘That future is not very far-off.’”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Serves up its hard truths and caustic commentary with large helpings of humor and intelligence. Thinner Than Thou is highly recommended to all, including readers with eating disorders—but then, is there anyone in this culture who doesn’t have issues with food?”
—Pamela Sargent on Scifi.com
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. Houses of worship have been replaced by health clubs. 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 this worship of glory of youth and thinness conceals a hidden wo
rld 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 worshiped God.
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 Reverend 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 … .
This is a work of fiction All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously
THINNER THAN THOU
Copyright © 2004 by Kit Reed
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Book design by Mary A Wirth
eISBN 9781466827233
First eBook Edition : August 2012
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging-in -Publication Data
Reed, Kit
Thinner than thou / Kit Reed
p cm
“A Tom Doherty Associates book”
ISBN 0-765-31195-X
EAN 978-0-765-31195-5
1. Body, Human—Religious aspects—Fiction 2 Weight loss—Religious aspects—Fiction 3. Physical fitness centers—Fiction 4 Overweight persons—Fiction I Title
PS3568 E367T49 2004
813’ 54—dc22
2003071146
First Hardcover Edition June 2004
