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 Throughout the land, houses of worship have been replaced by the health clubs of the Crossed Triceps.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