Losing Weight...the Gypsy Way

I have a hockey related piece to write about, but since I finished a book a few hours before that bit of news broke, the book review has to come first.  With that in mind, there was a time when Stephen King used a pen name, that being Richard Bachman. One of the books he wrote under this name was Thinner, in which the main character Billy Halleck starts losing weight at an alarmingly rapid pace.  Why does this happen, you ask?  One evening, Halleck drives distracted (read: his wife was giving him a hand job) and before he could react, he hits and kills an old woman.  One court case later, and Halleck is off the hook...except that the old woman he killed was the daughter of an even older Gypsy man.  This man curses Halleck with a dramatic weight loss plan that soon causes Halleck to try and find ways to break this curse.  Meanwhile, his wife and just about everyone associated with him begin to worry about him going insane.  The turn of events, combined with two of Halleck's closest associates being cursed (one turned into a lizard and one received an extreme case of acne), forces Halleck to seek out the Gypsy and when that doesn't work out the way he planned, he turns to an old friend from New York to help him out.  Can Halleck end the curse before he gets reduced to nothingness?

Thinner is one of the better books that doesn't rely heavily on violence to get its point across.  All of the loose ends within the novel (e.g. Halleck's incresingly deteriorating relationship with his wife) are tied up fairly well and one of the things that allows for the novel to succeed is creating hypothetical ideas of a curse being either psychological or an unseen child growing up.  It's not exceedingly long as Christine, but the results are similar in that both are good reads.