Evil Thoughts of a High Toned Son of a Bitch (Thinner, 1984)

Thinner (1984)

"But who has such control over the mind? If the self really is just an illusion to make sense of reality, it didn’t create the dark thought, nor can it prevent it. The shadow self has no master."--Jena E. Pincott, "Wicked Thoughts," Psychology Today, September 1, 2015

Screenshot of the paperback edition I once owned.
Looks like someone got hungry while reading this one.

In the numb weeks following my mother's death, I floated from one bloated sugar snack of entertainment glob to the next: movies, tv series, and three Stephen King audiobooks back to back. There are whole movies and series I have no useful memory of watching, which I suppose is understandable enough, but it gives me a scare when I think on it for too long. It is unsettling to feel so untethered from the physical, linear world. Loss of time was common enough for everyone during the quarantine, but genuinely struggling to remember what month of what year I'm lost within while trying to transact business with the DMV is a whole other level. After the grim events of any given day, making phone calls, sending emails, telling yet another person that my mother had died, all I wanted to do was play Donkey Kong 64 on a loop while listening to the familiar hum of a well worn story. As mentioned in the previous post, I finished The Eyes of the Dragon sometime in mid-January, then dutifully moved on to the next book in the chronology, King's novel under the Richard Bachman pseudonym, Thinner. 

With every audiobook, I make sure to listen to the sample before committing to the purchase. The next title in the chronology, The Talisman (co-written with Peter Straub), is an excellent example of why one must always check before buying. The audio sample was absolutely dreadful. Shamefully terrible. What's worse is that the voice actor is a celebrated veteran audiobook narrator. It's confounding. I don't know...perhaps this particular audiobook narrator is simply the spicy cilantro to my soap-adverse tastes. Since I could not bear to listen to a massacre of one of my favorite King works, and because I wanted nothing more than to continue the soft drone of the audiobook experience, I skipped ahead in the chronology to the book I've been wanting to read since the Covid-19 quarantines began a year ago: Under the Dome. I will have plenty to say about that one in terms of content, but I am happy to say little of it will be grousing about the voice actor. In the case of Under the Dome, the storytelling job was just fine. Not a Bronson Pinchot knock out sensation, but a perfectly nice job nonetheless.

I wish I could say the same for the narration of Thinner. While I did listen to the sample beforehand, it wasn't quite enough to set off any alarm bells, and there was one dominating factor in my decision to make the purchase regardless. I've been an unrepentant Criminal Minds fan* since I stumbled across it on Netflix God knows when ago. I loved the first two Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin) seasons, and grew to like the replacement "old school" BSU agent David Rossi as well as I liked any of the rest of the Criminal Minds crew. My memory of Joe Mantegna is otherwise blank--to me, he is only David Rossi, and it took a google search to remind myself that he was, indeed, a whole cast of other characters before David Rossi on Criminal Minds. Because of my fanatic status, I am very familiar with the tone and cadences of Mantegna's voice, so believed Thinner would be a nice soft blanket to drown in.

Hoo boy. I'm not an audiobook expert, nor have I read Audiobook Weekly or the Audiobook Report (which should exist, c'mon), but it seems a cornerstone issue that should be studied, discussed, and rectified once and for all is the use of falsetto to delineate the voices of women and children. I have crabbed about this topic before, but here my foot must land, hard. What's the deal? Are the producers of these works just..."fine" with it? If so, for all that is holy, WHY. Does the ridiculous falsetto sound right to the veteran audiobook listener's ear? Does it not grate against their brain like some rust-encrusted cheese grater? Do I stand...Alone?

The high star rating is inexplicable. 

Per my broken little psyche, I am fully prepared to blame myself for some shortcoming in taste or sensibility. After all, I am familiar with Joe Mantegna's voice, so perhaps it just hit me triply wrong to hear him start speaking in that high, lilting tone, having never heard David Rossi speak in that manner before. Even so, I must ask: Why do it at all? I could see changing the tone of voice slightly--ever so slightly--but a full-on falsetto? Are we, the listeners, so collectively stupid that an extreme pitch difference must be employed? 

Perhaps the falsetto, for me, harkens back to the divide between old-timey and modern movies. Classic movies, even the best of them (in my opinion, All About Eve reigns supreme), are populated with people who talk like they're being watched on a stage, delivering each line with crisp precision and annunciation, even when slogging through some put-on accent. Most sound mildly British and entirely inauthentic, each performance scrubbed shiny clean and bereft of dirt, quirk, or character. Sure, little sparks flash through (Bette Davis eats that screen, tears its flesh to bloody shreds), but so much of old cinema feels weirdly sanitized, as if a perfectly square, boxed product has been presented for mass consumption and easy digestion.

If you have not guessed already, I am not a fan of old movies or television. Fake, fake, fake. I know it is already fake, but I want my food to taste like something. I am not a buff, not an expert, and would never pretend to be, but there's a line drawn I'm guessing somewhere along that cultural divide of the 1960s, when natural performances started breaking through and breaking down the old facades. Good and dirty, smirky, mean, smelly, snotty, real performances. When the people being portrayed started looking, acting, and sounding like actual people. Not celluloid interpretations. The falsetto feels like a hangover from the old guard, "this is how we portray a woman" type bullshit that is, quite frankly, idiotic as it is unnecessary. In the wealth of all performance pedagogy, there isn't one critically useful alternative to making every woman character portrayed by a male voice actor sound like Tiny Tim tip-toeing through the godforsaken tulips? Not one? 

Needless to say, I did not enjoy the audiobook experience of Thinner. Mantegna does an otherwise good job of narrating King's story, but is then inexplicably (and unforgivably) sabotaged by the producers by one of the most misguided, bat-shit insane additions to the audiobook product I have thus far experienced (and hope to never suffer through again). The producers--in the infinite chasm of their group derangement--added transition "music" to indicate chapter/part breaks. Not just any "music," either. Oh no. They went all out on the crazy. You can actually hear a transition in the audio clip provided by Audible. The clanging racket not only punches the listener out of the narrative, it overlays the narration itself, as though it fancies itself television music, effectively ferrying the audience from one point of view to the next, but in this case with a cacophonous, tittering dipshittery that is both comical and lethally rude as it drowns out Joe Mantegna's voice work. Instead of a measured, competent collaboration, the Thinner audiobook disaster comes off as a wasted opportunity where people with too much power managed to score a big name talent to read the book, then decided to add the producer's college sophomore half brother's interpretive, industrialist "muzescapes" to torque it up, bra. Of the audiobooks I've listed through so far, Thinner is the first I've considered genuinely embarrassing and unprofessional. And despite the questionable falsettos utilized by Mantegna, he deserved much better than that. As did King.

But it isn't really King, is it? I've spoken about King's Bachman pseudonym before, but I've never delved all that deeply into how the pseudonym is also a whole other persona, as well. If you've read The Dark Half, you know that King has given a great deal of thought to the whole pseudonym phenomena, how it is more than just masking a known face to cavort amongst the citizenry anonymously while carrying none of the baggage one drags along through life: personality, good and bad acts, labels. In The Dark Half, the troubled but generally "good" half, the living, established, "serious" writer, Thad Beaumont,  creates the alter ego, very wicked, pulp crime novelist George Stark, from what he believes to be his own imagination. The true origin of Stark turns out to be something else entirely, of course, but the older I get, the more I understand how easily King wound up there, considering the strange alchemy of the pseudonym, and how it is so much more than a name.

In a session with my last therapist, I was Having a Day, as was often the case since she was what I chose as an alternative to attending AA or any other type of group gatherings to deal with the fallout from my alcoholism and shaky, often terrifying, recovery. Recovery is, above all else, a goddamned miracle. It is beautiful, blissful, and soul-shaking joyous. I wouldn't trade it for anything. But it is also pitch dark and hot adrenaline, gasping awake throughout the night, sweating, heart banging a welt in your bones. It is an awakening in every critical way, the good, the bad, the mind-warpingly ugly. It was rare that I walked into my therapist's soothing presence feeling stable, rested, and chill. On this particular day, I was feeling dark and stormy about harboring bad thoughts about others--acquaintances, family, strangers, anyone--and declared myself certifiably Evil. This was not the first time I'd made such a claim. It was a common refrain in my 8th grade songs, poems, and journal entries. I would slouch over my Mead spiral notebooks, scribbling furiously with my trusty blue Bic, sorting out the indisputable facts that made me the terrible demon that I clearly was...ungrateful daughter, grandpa calls me "dragon lady," grandma always mad at me, nobody likes me, my friends pretend to like me, abandoned, unwanted, ugly, boys only want to hurt me, bad at school, lazy, mean-spirited, thoughtless, pretentious, listens to Pink Floyd's The Wall on repeat, borrowed a Satan bible from a friend and touched the pages though it was too boring to actually read and was more about nature and shit but still I touched it, loves Stevie Nicks who may or may not be some sort of witch and therefore Satan-affliliate, and worst of all, I was obsessed with Stephen King...all evidence that I carried the mark of the devil, likely branded on my very soul. My theory at the time was that if I ever accomplished anything it would be to birth the antichrist. So, yeah, I was definitely, criminally thirteen.

On this particular day, some three decades later, my obsession had turned specifically to those dark, impulsive, unkind thoughts I secretly harbored for others. People have made whole careers out of insulting the populace with panache, razor wit, eviscerating takes and devastating burns. They were somehow exempt from my assessment. I would see a person on the subway, a couple on the street, and for no rhyme nor reason the ugliest, meanest thought would burble up from the recesses of my dark brainlayers--gassy, rank, and hateful. Instead of considering that I was not the only person who experienced "evil thoughts," that it might be something that everyone does from time to time, I decided it was yet another example of why I am Evil and must be destroyed. 

You know, it's kind of amazing that therapists don't sigh more during sessions. They must have a whole section on that in school. Also, How Not to Roll Your Eyes, and How to Keep a Straight Face. 

My therapist recommended a book to me, the name of which is lost in time (and a google search has equally failed), which first addressed the fact that my mean, flittering, momentary thoughts were in fact a completely common side effect of the human condition. Everyone has them. According to Jena E. Pencott's 2016 article from Psychology Today ("Wicked Thoughts"), we all experience a myriad of evil thoughts about ourselves and others, and what is most important is how we deal with them. Instead of obsessing over the the thoughts themselves, my mistake was granting far too much influence and power to the fact that I had them at all. Decades of development behind me and I was still pulling out that old hat of self-incrimination and sabotage. It should surprise you not at all that addicts are hardwired for self sabotage. If we are failing, stupid, and yes, even Evil, then there's really no reason not to pop the cork and die in a river of wine. 

While I was listening to Thinner, gritting my teeth through the falsetto and jangle-bangle hell-music, I had time to ruminate about the origins of Richard Bachman, King's later homage to the experience in story of The Dark Half, and desire we all have to expel the demons within us, whether they are real, worrisome threats, or the the passing mean thought about a neighbor. Whether it was by accident or purpose, the Bachman books are different from the King books. And, using King's own The Dark Half as an example, the correlation of King to Beaumont and Bachman to Stark rings strangely true. You'd imagine King would be the Stark, being the bad ol' horrorbook writer, but this is not the case. King's work, for all it's suffering, terror, and gore, also contains a great deal of heart and soul. No book on God's green earth has made me cry harder--to my very mean, evil little core--than the conclusion of It. The first time I made it through It, I balled as if someone had died. I was heartbroken, inconsolable...and awed. Stephen King made a world from nothing, spun people from nothing, and they were as real to me as anyone I'd ever known in real life. 

King's work is also quirky, full of depth, and often laugh out loud hilarious. Heart, heart, heart! He makes real humans that live and breathe and leave a mark. And the reader circles round back again because it is an all-encompassing experience, beauty and horror, screams of fear and laughter. But Bachman is different. If I had to describe the Bachman works in a word, I'd say they were meaner. Just...meaner. There's something missing from them. The worlds within are still real, still full, but the humor, if it exists at all, is hard, and the realities are harsher. It is as though that darker part of King, the shadow self referenced in "Wicked Thoughts," came to life, set Berol Black Beauty pencil to paper, and started writing grim "what if" tales that only ever ended in gutting darkness. Is Richard Bachman as bad as murderous George Stark? No doubt. Given the right circumstances.

Thinner falls in line with the rest of the Bachman penned works. It is a troubling story with few sympathetic characters and a knock-out, shocker of an ending that is about as unhappy as they come. While Thinner was never a favorite, I've still read it several times, mostly for that twist ending, just to watch the wizard work the spell. The first time I saw the film Drag Me to Hell, the correlations were obvious--wrongdoing against the traveler, a curse against the White Devil, the accelerating stress and precariousness of attempting to reverse it, that cruel, uppercut twist at the end. So, so good.

There are plenty of differences between Bachman's Thinner and Sam Raimi's film, but a marked outlier is the humor, the unrepentant balls-to-the-wall clowntoonery of Drag Me to Hell, from the puking-grotesquery of bugs and bodily functions, to the FUCKING GOAT that I swear lays me OUT every damn time ("You tricked me, you black-hearted w-w-w-whore. You Bi-i-itch!"). And while the central character, White Devil in each work does questionable to downright immoral things to get off the hook, and while the outcome for each is ultimately the same, I still felt a hell of a lot more for Drag Me to Hell's Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) than I ever have for Thinner's Billy Halleck. The novel hasn't aged well, for one, with enough bigotry and sexism to choke a possessed goat, but it's the Bachman factor, too. That dark half of Stephen King that sent these particular works down the Bachman path instead of the King path for ultimate publication. They are virulently hopeless and passively unkind. 

This leaves the Thinner experience, book or audio, a punishing one not to be set upon lightly. 

Grade: C
Scary? (0-nope to 10-you will die): 2. The story itself is not particularly scary unless you are a true believer in curses. The audiobook is scary in that you will forever be anticipating the weird transition music that grates your nerves and scrambles your brain.
Warnings: Lots and lots of bigoted language! Jingle jangle, first circle of hell music! Falsetto! 
Artifact: 

* I was well into my third or fourth view through of the entire Criminal Minds series when I moved to Kansas to live with my mother. Being a Criminal Minds fan herself, it was one of the few primetime network shows we could agree to watch together, but she was less pleased with my impulsive sing-along to the intro song, which goes, in a high, piercing tone, something like, "deedle dee DEE!!! deedle dee DEE!!!" to match the urgent trill of the piano riff. Annoying? Obviously. Deal breaker? She endured. More evil than, say, an entirely gratuitous falsetto? Not even close.