Thinner Than Thou

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 Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps.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