Elevation, a novel[la]

Copyright © 2018 by Stephen King Illustrations © Mark Edward Geyer Scribner

Readers will be irresistibly reminded of Thinner, a 1984 novel by Richard Bachman, in which the central character begins mysteriously losing weight. Bachman, of course, was the nom de slumming of Stephen King, and Thinner was a not-bad effort, one of the best under the Bachman brand.

In Thinner, the main character is Billy Halleck, a fat lawyer who runs over and kills an old Gypsy woman while getting a blow job from his wife. This is a leading cause of vehicular manslaughter among fat lawyers, of course, because they all have wives with heads so skinny they can fit between between the lawyer’s belly and the steering wheel. Politicians could make a campaign issue of this, but they are all fat lawyers.

Halleck lost weight, becoming a walking skeleton. Scott Carey, the considerably more likable protagonist of Elevation, is losing weight, but not mass. His muscles are intact, he isn’t any smaller, but he’s losing a steady pound-and-a-half to two pounds every day. Even more mysteriously, if the scale says he weighs 150 pounds, he can grab a twenty-five pound weight in each hand, step back on the scale, and it will still say 150 pounds. Anything or anyone he is in contact with loses mass too—apparently all of its mass. This is particularly hard on his pet, Bill D. Cat, who, like most felines, doesn’t handle sudden transitions to zero gravity particularly well.

He didn’t run over any old gypsy women, and at his worst, presents his neighbor with photographic evidence that yes, her dogs are crapping on his lawn, and would she please walk them to the park. This doesn’t rise to the level of a crime against humanity, and it’s not a spoiler to say the neighbor did not curse him. Not in the sense of a Gypsy curse, anyway.

A friend of mine remarked that King could knock off a novella in a single day, and given how prolific the man is, I have no reason to doubt it.

But there’s nothing about Elevation what feels hurried, or dashed off. It’s a calm, reflective story, told slowly and warmly, something you might expect from Garrison Keillor, or Stuart McLean. King devotes little to the mystery of the phenomenon, preferring instead to dwell on the increasingly human and humane response to Carey’s predicament, a horror story told with love and humor.