Thinner Than Thou (Alex Awards (Awards)) - Hardcover

Reed, Kit

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765307626 ISBN 13: 9780765307620

Verlag: Tor Books, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

TV says it. Magazines say it. American society commands it. You must be thin. You must be young. Fad diets. Fat-purging pills. Fitness clubs. Liposuction. Breast implants. Steroids.

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 Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps.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 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 . . . .

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kit Reed has been a Guggenheim fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow at The Aspen Institute Her novel, Little Sisters of the Apocalypse, and a short story collection, Weird Women, Wired Women, were finalists for the James W. Tiptree Award. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award for short fiction. A novel, The Ballad of T. Rantula, was named to the American Library Association list of Best Books for Young Adults. Reed's short fiction has been published in The Yale Review, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, and The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature.

One of the most critically-acclaimed feminist science fiction writers, Kit Reed has been profiled in American Women Writers, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Who's Who In America. She works with fiction writers at Wesleyan University and lives in Connecticut.

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Thinner Than Thou

By Kit Reed

Tor Books

Copyright © 2004 Kit Reed
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780765307620

THINNER THAN THOU

1

When you're alone in your mind you may think you're special, but you're only ever another dumb person driving around inside that stupid body. It's no better than a car dealer's loaner, you know? Forget what the Reverend Earl preaches. The body you are using is no temple, it's a trap for the contents of your head. You want to think about who you are and what to do about it but instead you obsess over the parts that people see. Keep it clean and keep it polished or they'll come for you. Perfect hair, you need. Perfect outfits. Perfect abs and pecs! Image is everything. You grow up with this and in case you don't happen to know, they teach it in all your classes.

The Abercrombie twins are roving the landscape looking for their big sister Annie. Betz Abercrombie and her twin brother Danny are bombing along U.S. State Road Whatever in Dave Berman's Saturnbecause Dave is the one with the car. Plus he has an interest. Dave is kind of in love with Annie and Betz is kind of in love with Dave. Betz Abercrombie loves Dave Berman but she can't do anything about it until they find Annie and spring her from this terrible place. Then she can get Annie to sign off on Dave so she can kiss him and the rest of her life can start. And Danny? He loves their big sister every bit as much as Betz does, but he is also in love with a dream. Until they find her, all their dreams are on hold.

Annie, um, Got in Trouble so the folks sent her away. They did it because of her condition. Annie tried like crazy to keep it a secret but they pounced as soon as she started to show. Mom and Dad were all, "Think of the disgrace!" Now Annie is trapped in this kind of a convent, at a secret location as yet to be identified. She's in this, well, it's one of those institutions for girls who live outside the limits, like, if Annie kept on going the way she was she might just fall off the edge of the civilized world like a medieval vessel sailing straight off the map. The day after they did it Dad was all, "It's for her own good," but Mom was crying when they took her away.

The Dedicated Sisters have her, and the twins are going to break her out.

The Dedicated Sisters are not exactly nuns but they dress up like nuns. To get your attention, the twins suppose. They think what they're doing is more important than religion. Unless it is a religion. It's hard to know. The Deds go around in brown nun outfits that scare the crap out of you, every school Health Ed textbook has the photo. In the books the Dedicated Sisters are lined up like an army of Godzillas marching in to straighten you out. That isn't the worst. Big, tough Dedicated Sisters glare out at you from cautionary posters in every fast-food place and coffee shop where kids hang out. Just in case you forget yourself and start to have fun. There are Ded posters on the pillars in every arcade and every movie house in every mall where kids like the Abercrombies go. The dreaded Deds are posed in front of this Gothic heap, and even that is ominous; it crouches like a monster's castle on ahigh peak and above the convent, black birds soar and you don't know if they're vultures or what.

In case you still don't get it, the legend reads: YOUR BODY IS A TEMPLE. IF YOU CAN'T KEEP IT SACRED, WE WILL.

Nobody knows what the Dedicated Sisters do to you in those places, but everybody knows you come back changed. The twins have heard tales. First they take away your cell phone and sweep your hard drive, every single megabyte down to the last K. They stick you in these little rooms with no Internet connection and no TV, and they rip off your earrings and pull out all your studs and laser off every one of your tattoos. Between them they take away every bit and piece that tells the world you're really you. You can't go out! Their sacred, holy aim is to shape you up and put you in your place. These humongous women patrol the halls in their not-exactly habits with the dread calipers swinging from the fearsome tape measure knotted around the waist and then, God help you. Nobody knows what goes on, exactly, but everybody knows it is the Fate Worse than Death.

Poor Annie is in one of these places, she's been gone for a whole week and the hell of it is that the twins didn't find out where she was until today.

In all their worst imaginings they never thought good old Mom and Dad would ... but they did.

 

 

Annie Got in Trouble and their folks shipped her off in the middle of the night. She didn't even get to say good-bye. It happened like that! One day the twins were sitting on the plaid sofa in the family room watching TV with good old Annie in her big shaggy sweater: One Size Hides All, and the next morning she was gone. Betz and Annie shared the pink bedroom with Mom's flowered chintz curtains and the mirrored wall from the beginning, so Betz pretty much knows what's going on with her big sister even though the 'rents don't talk about it and when they do, they never look you in the face. Betz knows but until shetold him, Danny didn't have a clue. With this kind of thing guys are always the last to know. The minute the 'rents tumbled to Annie's condition they dialed the 900 number. A black van came and took her away in the middle of the night.

The next morning Betz woke up to megasilence in the pink bedroom. Something in the night, she thought, half-asleep. Something happened in the night. She sat up. "Annie?"

Annie wasn't anywhere. The other twin bed hadn't been slept in and all her stuff was gone. The only thing she'd left behind was her phone. The swift, jealous part of Betz's heart rushed ahead to Dave Berman; had Annie run away with him? Shaking, she hit Dave's name on Annie's speed dial--she left her phone!--and when he answered, she held her breath. Not there. Don't ask how, she already knew. Annie was not there. Over his muttered, "Talk fast, it's your dollar," she heard Dave's mom whingeing in the background and Saturday-morning cartoons coming in on Dave's pocket TV. "Hello?" Dave said at the other end. "Hello?"

She tried all of Annie's friends. Janet. Laurie. Nell. She went to Danny's room. "Get up. It's Annie."

"Go away, it's Saturday."

"Danny, she's missing!"

"That's crazy."

"She's gone, Danny. All her stuff is gone."

His body snapped together like a closing jackknife. He sat up. "No way!"

"Way, Danny. She's totally gone."

"She's gotta be somewhere." Sleepy guy, knuckling his scalp.

"I don't think so. I called everybody on her speed dial and nobody knows."

"She left her phone?"

"Totally. Look."

"That's terrible!"

"I'm scared."

"She could be hiding, right?"

"I hope so. Come on!"

They wasted good time looking in dumb places, trying to kid themselves that it was some kind of stupid joke, but it was no joke. She wasn't hidden behind a door or in a closet and she wasn't in the attic, either. Annie was totally missing and when they checked the dressers and the cedar chest in the attic all her stuff was gone. When they came boiling downstairs and into the kitchen, shouting, the 'rents smiled into their breakfast cereal like it was any other morning in the world.

"Mom, Dad, Annie's gone!"

"Kidnapped, maybe. Mom!"

"Mom, Dad, call 911!"

Mom smiled and shook her head, like:...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tor Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765307626
• ISBN 13: 9780765307620
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 336
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: PILOT CORPORATION OF EUROPE; https://www.pilotpen.de/; ; PAE DE LA CAILLE; ALLONZIER LA CAILLE; Frankreich