Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Easton Press (1990), Edition: Reprint Ed., 188 pages
Description
While on a boating holiday, Scott Carey is exposed to a cloud of radioactive spray. A few weeks later, following a series of medical examinations, he can no longer deny the extraordinary truth. Not only is he losing weight, he is also shorter than he was. Scott Carey has begun to shrink. Richard Matheson's novel follows through its premise with remorseless logic, with Carey first attempting to continue some kind of normal life and later having left human contact behind, having to survive in a world where insects and spiders are giant adversaries. And even that is only a stage on his journey into the unknown.
User reviews
LibraryThing member ChrisRiesbeck
If you liked the movie, you'll like the book. Matheson wrote the novel first then the screenplay. While there are changes in structure -- the focus is on survival in the basement, with everything else told in flashback -- a more faithful visualization would be hard to imagine. Though people mostly
Recommended.
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remember the adventures -- fleeing the pet cat, battling the spider for a crust of bread -- what both versions are mostly about the character's increasing estrangement, demasculinization, and sexual frustration. Size matters. Sexual frustration occupies quite a bit of time in the book, though even in print the mores of 1950s prevented any mention of the main character taking things into his own hand. As a reading experience, the book is pretty downbeat. The hero is in constant pain and peril except in the flashbacks.Recommended.
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LibraryThing member baswood
Sex and science fiction were uncomfortable bed fellows in the 1950's, and I was surprised to find sexual issues addressed with some sympathy in Matheson's story of Scott Carey; The Shrinking Man. Shrinking an inch a week even after 6 months is likely to cause problems in many marital situations and
In I Am Legend: Matheson first successful novel there was an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia along with an increasingly desperate battle against impossible odds. This formula is largely repeated here: when we meet Scott Carey he is an inch high and is running across a desert, being pursued by a spider. As the book unfolds we learn through flashbacks that Scott has been trapped in the cellar for the last two and a half months and that his world has shrunk with his size. He is an inch tall and is resigned to shrinking one seventh of an inch per 24 hours and so by the end of the week he will cease to exist. We learn that a toxic mixture of radiation and insecticide has caused his condition and despite many weeks of treatment no cure has been found. He has remained at home being supported by his wife and his young daughter to the best of their abilities, but after he loses his job then the family face an increasingly difficult financial situation. The flash backs are interspersed with Scotts battle to stay alive in an increasingly hostile environment for the last seven days of his life. Finding water and food sets him off on climbing expeditions that test his physical abilities to their limit as well as extreme problem solving. These sections of the story are an adventure wonderland, but the interspersions of the back story are no less intriguing. They are mostly skilfully done and reveal aspects of Scotts character as well as an increasing alienation from a world that has grown too big for him.
One of the most poignant episodes is before eventually being trapped in the cellar, he is banished there by his wife who has to employ a child minder while she goes out to work. Scott has dealt badly with the publicity caused by his condition and does not wish to expose himself any further hence he must hide in the cellar. He fantasises about a beautiful 17 year old female child minder and when he finally catches sight of her he sees a dumpy teenager, but he still cannot control his desire and risks his life for glimpses of her from the high cellar window. This exploration of an inner life, conscious and unconscious puts this book firmly in the category of a novel, albeit a fantasy novel. Matheson has created a fantasy world that is full of realism and although the science is pure gobbledygook, his world is one of wonder. The Shrinking Man was published in 1956 and is now part of the science fiction masterwork series. The book has of course been made into a successful film "The Incredible Shrinking Man" scripted partly by Matheson.
This is a fantasy novel, although a dark and brooding one with gothic elements that might appeal to a crossover readership, Matheson has also made a name for himself in the horror genre and as a genre novel I rate it as a five star read.
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after a year with no sign of a halt to the shrinking then relationships sexual and otherwise would have to be rethought. Scott Carey is a proud individualist and fights for survival until the very end; this does not usually sit with a more sensitive soul and after all this is a science fiction novel written in the 1950's when male chauvinistic men of mettle were the norm. Now I do not read science fiction from over 60 years ago for its exploration of sexual mores, but I do "sit up" when personal sexual difficulties are not only discussed, but are integral to the story line. Scott Carey in the prime of life does not lose his sexual appetite with his shrinking, but of course finds it difficult to talk about it to his wife.In I Am Legend: Matheson first successful novel there was an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia along with an increasingly desperate battle against impossible odds. This formula is largely repeated here: when we meet Scott Carey he is an inch high and is running across a desert, being pursued by a spider. As the book unfolds we learn through flashbacks that Scott has been trapped in the cellar for the last two and a half months and that his world has shrunk with his size. He is an inch tall and is resigned to shrinking one seventh of an inch per 24 hours and so by the end of the week he will cease to exist. We learn that a toxic mixture of radiation and insecticide has caused his condition and despite many weeks of treatment no cure has been found. He has remained at home being supported by his wife and his young daughter to the best of their abilities, but after he loses his job then the family face an increasingly difficult financial situation. The flash backs are interspersed with Scotts battle to stay alive in an increasingly hostile environment for the last seven days of his life. Finding water and food sets him off on climbing expeditions that test his physical abilities to their limit as well as extreme problem solving. These sections of the story are an adventure wonderland, but the interspersions of the back story are no less intriguing. They are mostly skilfully done and reveal aspects of Scotts character as well as an increasing alienation from a world that has grown too big for him.
One of the most poignant episodes is before eventually being trapped in the cellar, he is banished there by his wife who has to employ a child minder while she goes out to work. Scott has dealt badly with the publicity caused by his condition and does not wish to expose himself any further hence he must hide in the cellar. He fantasises about a beautiful 17 year old female child minder and when he finally catches sight of her he sees a dumpy teenager, but he still cannot control his desire and risks his life for glimpses of her from the high cellar window. This exploration of an inner life, conscious and unconscious puts this book firmly in the category of a novel, albeit a fantasy novel. Matheson has created a fantasy world that is full of realism and although the science is pure gobbledygook, his world is one of wonder. The Shrinking Man was published in 1956 and is now part of the science fiction masterwork series. The book has of course been made into a successful film "The Incredible Shrinking Man" scripted partly by Matheson.
This is a fantasy novel, although a dark and brooding one with gothic elements that might appeal to a crossover readership, Matheson has also made a name for himself in the horror genre and as a genre novel I rate it as a five star read.
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LibraryThing member Stbalbach
I thought this was a good story, better than the movie, it has a literary dimension that rewards in the end. The way Matheson slowly reveals the story through flashbacks is also stylistically very effective.
There are a number of ways to approach The Shrinking Man's popular success. Foremost are
There are a number of ways to approach The Shrinking Man's popular success. Foremost are
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its literary antecedents in Robinson Crusoe and Metamorphosis, but that sort of academic history wouldn't explain why it's popular [mainly in movie form], it is more than a 'Kafkaesque Robinsonade'. Notice that Matheson created a 'shrinking' man (in process of shrinking), and not a 'shrunken' (already shrunk) man, and also not a woman. As he shrinks, changes occur both internally and externally. Those changes largely have to do with his notions of masculinity in the ridged world of middle-class 1950s America. He is confronted with his ideas of what it means to be a man: providing for his family, sexual performance, domination over women and children, being the initiator of desire, and not the object of desire (media attention). In the end he accepts a new normality and overcomes his demons such as as spiders (women), and being trapped in the basement (traditional masculine roles). We never know what actually happens to him, but it doesn't matter, rather he has escaped alive, symbolically accepting a new normality. In the world of 1950s post-war America, escape from the confines of ones roles and responsibilities was a fantasy many could get behind (also the theme of Catcher in the Rye, The Graduate and other outsider literature of the period). Show Less
LibraryThing member sturlington
While on holiday, Scott Carey is exposed to a cloud of radioactive spray shortly after he accidentally ingests insecticide; the radioactivity acts as a catalyst for the bug spray, causing his body to shrink at a rate of approximately 1/7 of an inch per day.
This premise may seem silly, but the book
Read because I like the author (late 1990s).
This premise may seem silly, but the book
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is more than it seems. I particularly remember when Scott shrinks to the sub-molecular level and discovers an alternative universe there. It made me think a lot about how our perceptions shape our reality.Read because I like the author (late 1990s).
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LibraryThing member bnewcomer
A relatively fun, quick read. Matheson pays attention to details you wouldn't expect, and asks questions you might not. The result is a story that's surprisingly compelling, once you buy into the shrinking.
LibraryThing member ptdilloway
As with "I Am Legend" Matheson does a great job of showing a terrifying scenario in very human terms and dealing with the loneliness inherent to the situation. Only instead of a man facing a horde of vampire zombies, it's a man who shrinks 1/7 of an inch every day until he's practically
That is all.
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microscopic. The book switches between Scott's shrinking and his current existence as less than an inch tall in the cellar of his house, where he fights for survival against a fearsome black widow spider. Matheson brings it to live so fully that you'll want to start checking a ruler every morning to make sure it's not happening to you.That is all.
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LibraryThing member unclebob53703
Much more so than the excellent movie, the book gets inside the guy's head, and conveys the horrors of his situation in almost unbearable, naked detail. The ending that seemed abrupt in the film seems inevitable here.
LibraryThing member uvula_fr_b4
The Shrinking Man (1956), filmed in 1957 as The Incredible Shrinking Man and adapted for
the screen by the novel's author, Richard Matheson, is less a gee-whiz adventure story than an existential novel with strong horror and fantasy overtones and a patina of science fiction: it's not so much an
Even more than that, though, The Shrinking Man is a fantastical tale of the plight which everybody must face as they grow older: one's faculties shrink, one's place in the world shrinks, one's capacity for action and independence shrinks, and one must learn to be content with one's diminished circumstances, and find new vistas within them, or die embittered and unfulfilled, as many of us in fact do.
Scott Carey's story is told in cross-cuts: as the novel opens, he is under an inch in height, and continues to shrink a seventh of an inch a day, every day, like clockwork, ever since he passed through the radioactive cloud that altered the insecticide that he is later inadvertently exposed to into a horrible shrinking agent. The narrative continually jumps backwards to when he first discovered his condition, and then to various points in his strange life. The novel is quite a bit more adult than the movie version, and nearly explicit in its treatment of Carey's sexual frustration as he diminishes to a size well beneath his 5',8" wife's desire, and eventually becomes a midget peeping tom spying on the obnoxious teenaged babysitter his wife has hired to watch their daughter while she works as a cashier at a local grocery store. Carey's life becomes a daily struggle long before he drops to under an inch in height, but much of the book's action concerns his efforts to survive in a world made for him Brobdignagian.
Stephen King discussed The Shrinking Man at some length in his Danse Macabre, and reported his disgusted disdain of a woman on a discussion panel that he was on who saw Scott Carey's struggle with the seven-legged black widow as the eternal struggle of patriarchal vs. matriarchal forces, of the usually mundane attempts of men to subjugate women; now that I've read The Shrinking Man, I'm not so sure that this view can be entirely dismissed. I don't necessarily buy her view as summarized by King, but you'd have to be willfully ignorant or just flat-out stone-stupid to not see the novel as an extended metaphor, to insist that Carey's more fantastical midge-sized adventures are only literally true in the context of a fantasy yarn. Though Matheson is pretty explicit about how Carey's wife Lou comes to view him as a boy to be comforted rather than as a husband or lover to be desired (much moreso than King's descriptions led me to believe), this episode still has deep roots sunk into the land of the subconscious, if not the unconscious; and Matheson's narrator admits that Carey himself sees the black widow in the basement as more than a life-threatening predator: "It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form." (p. 148) Spiders' association with women, in the realm of myths and dreams, is of ancient provenance; black widows are particularly fraught, and the term has come to denote a type of femme fatale who murders her lovers in spirit if not in actuality. It would be incredible if, at some unconscious level, Carey didn't see the black widow as an embodiment of what women, even midget women, even his own daughter, had become to him: gigantic, monstrous, unfathomable beings whose indifference to his existence remained nearly as dangerous as their active hatred (or desire for a meal).
the screen by the novel's author, Richard Matheson, is less a gee-whiz adventure story than an existential novel with strong horror and fantasy overtones and a patina of science fiction: it's not so much an
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"anti-science fiction" work (or, more precisely, an anti-science work, as the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World -- adapted from John W. Campbell, Jr.'s 1938 novella Who Goes There? -- can be seen as) as it is a meditation on the plight of the average man in the modern world: man's sense of worth, of purpose, his ability to act, are continually downsized in the face of the banalities of everyday, mundane life, until they come to loom over him like sinister colossi, until the best that one can hope for even in the so-called "quiet life" is mere survival.Even more than that, though, The Shrinking Man is a fantastical tale of the plight which everybody must face as they grow older: one's faculties shrink, one's place in the world shrinks, one's capacity for action and independence shrinks, and one must learn to be content with one's diminished circumstances, and find new vistas within them, or die embittered and unfulfilled, as many of us in fact do.
Scott Carey's story is told in cross-cuts: as the novel opens, he is under an inch in height, and continues to shrink a seventh of an inch a day, every day, like clockwork, ever since he passed through the radioactive cloud that altered the insecticide that he is later inadvertently exposed to into a horrible shrinking agent. The narrative continually jumps backwards to when he first discovered his condition, and then to various points in his strange life. The novel is quite a bit more adult than the movie version, and nearly explicit in its treatment of Carey's sexual frustration as he diminishes to a size well beneath his 5',8" wife's desire, and eventually becomes a midget peeping tom spying on the obnoxious teenaged babysitter his wife has hired to watch their daughter while she works as a cashier at a local grocery store. Carey's life becomes a daily struggle long before he drops to under an inch in height, but much of the book's action concerns his efforts to survive in a world made for him Brobdignagian.
Stephen King discussed The Shrinking Man at some length in his Danse Macabre, and reported his disgusted disdain of a woman on a discussion panel that he was on who saw Scott Carey's struggle with the seven-legged black widow as the eternal struggle of patriarchal vs. matriarchal forces, of the usually mundane attempts of men to subjugate women; now that I've read The Shrinking Man, I'm not so sure that this view can be entirely dismissed. I don't necessarily buy her view as summarized by King, but you'd have to be willfully ignorant or just flat-out stone-stupid to not see the novel as an extended metaphor, to insist that Carey's more fantastical midge-sized adventures are only literally true in the context of a fantasy yarn. Though Matheson is pretty explicit about how Carey's wife Lou comes to view him as a boy to be comforted rather than as a husband or lover to be desired (much moreso than King's descriptions led me to believe), this episode still has deep roots sunk into the land of the subconscious, if not the unconscious; and Matheson's narrator admits that Carey himself sees the black widow in the basement as more than a life-threatening predator: "It was more than a spider. It was every unknown terror in the world fused into wriggling, poison-jawed horror. It was every anxiety, insecurity, and fear in his life given a hideous, night-black form." (p. 148) Spiders' association with women, in the realm of myths and dreams, is of ancient provenance; black widows are particularly fraught, and the term has come to denote a type of femme fatale who murders her lovers in spirit if not in actuality. It would be incredible if, at some unconscious level, Carey didn't see the black widow as an embodiment of what women, even midget women, even his own daughter, had become to him: gigantic, monstrous, unfathomable beings whose indifference to his existence remained nearly as dangerous as their active hatred (or desire for a meal).
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LibraryThing member andyray
The storty is fascinating, but it is told in jerky rhythms not conducive to enjoyment. I would have liked RM to begin his protagonist's shrinking where he eventually ended his story. Now THAT takes imagination and, if i should live long enogh, my take a senile, LSD-laden mind to do.
LibraryThing member othersam
If you like I Am Legend then a lot of the rest of Matheson’s work is well worth checking out too. His prolific output has sometimes been a little uneven in quality (Hell House, for example, didn’t work for me). The Shrinking Man, however, is brilliant. Matheson takes a campy premise – a man
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who finds himself unstoppably, helplessly getting smaller and smaller – and turns it into a nightmare that would give Franz Kafka the shivers. Show Less
LibraryThing member grammarchick
The title story was terrible. I am only giving this book 3 stars because it included excellent short stories like The Holiday Man and The Distributor.
LibraryThing member sometimeunderwater
Amazing concept, badly written, mostly fun. That about sums it up. Lots of pointless text describing movement (the journey up the chair leg should have been one page, not ten) and quite repetitious. The protagonist is irritatingly self-pitying, and the author doesn't join up the philosophical dots
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as he could. But it's a story about a shrinking man, and that gets you a fair way by itself. Show Less
LibraryThing member cathyskye
One of my favorite movies of all time is The Incredible Shrinking Man, and one of my favorite writers-- when I was a tween and a teen-- was Richard Matheson. Matheson wrote Rod Serling's introduction to The Twilight Zone (as well as a few episodes) and many other short stories and books that were
The novel The Shrinking Man is the basis for the movie I mentioned above, and I wanted to see how they compared. If you're talking to a book lover, you will normally hear that the book is always better than the movie. But that's not true. In this case, the film is superior to the book, and it's got everything to do with the main character, Scott Carey.
While out on a boat, Carey is covered in a mysterious, glittering mist that he later finds out is part radiation, part insecticide. He begins to shrink. Steadily. Until he lives in fear of the family cat. But he continues to shrink, until-- trapped in the cellar of their house-- he finds himself continually fighting off a very determined spider.
This book can be very interesting to read. How can a man who's literally shrinking away to nothing be able to provide for his wife and his daughter? How are his wife and daughter going to be able to cope with this situation? There's a lot of good food for thought within the book's pages. Unfortunately, one thing almost completely ruined The Shrinking Man for me-- Scott Carey.
Now, don't get me wrong. I tried to cut Carey as much slack as I possibly could. After all, how on earth would I know how I'd react if the same thing happened to me? But it was a very difficult thing to do. Scott Carey is one of the most juvenile, thoughtless, self-centered, violent-tempered, unlikable, whiny characters I've come across in years. It got to the point where I was rooting for the spider to win but feeling guilty about it because the spider probably would've suffered from horrible heartburn.
So just remember. The book isn't always better than the movie. The Shrinking Man is a case in point.
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turned into film. I grew up liking what the man could do with my imagination.The novel The Shrinking Man is the basis for the movie I mentioned above, and I wanted to see how they compared. If you're talking to a book lover, you will normally hear that the book is always better than the movie. But that's not true. In this case, the film is superior to the book, and it's got everything to do with the main character, Scott Carey.
While out on a boat, Carey is covered in a mysterious, glittering mist that he later finds out is part radiation, part insecticide. He begins to shrink. Steadily. Until he lives in fear of the family cat. But he continues to shrink, until-- trapped in the cellar of their house-- he finds himself continually fighting off a very determined spider.
This book can be very interesting to read. How can a man who's literally shrinking away to nothing be able to provide for his wife and his daughter? How are his wife and daughter going to be able to cope with this situation? There's a lot of good food for thought within the book's pages. Unfortunately, one thing almost completely ruined The Shrinking Man for me-- Scott Carey.
Now, don't get me wrong. I tried to cut Carey as much slack as I possibly could. After all, how on earth would I know how I'd react if the same thing happened to me? But it was a very difficult thing to do. Scott Carey is one of the most juvenile, thoughtless, self-centered, violent-tempered, unlikable, whiny characters I've come across in years. It got to the point where I was rooting for the spider to win but feeling guilty about it because the spider probably would've suffered from horrible heartburn.
So just remember. The book isn't always better than the movie. The Shrinking Man is a case in point.
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LibraryThing member jigarpatel
Family man Carey is exposed to insecticide followed by radiation, a combination which causes him to shrink a seventh of an inch each day. The novel is a mixture of Carey's struggle to escape a cellar, flashbacks from his past, and a retelling of how his condition increasingly impacted his life.
More fantasy, with a psychological slant, than science fiction.
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First comes the inability to work, then losing his self-confidence, followed by his inability to look after his wife or young daughter. His present day troubles are dominated by the search for food and water while tormented by a black widow spider.More fantasy, with a psychological slant, than science fiction.
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LibraryThing member write-review
It’s a Small World ...
Most probably know this novel in its film form, which author Richard Matheson helped adapt to the screen. However, it is worth reading the original novel version because some aspects of the it never made it to the screen or were changed (such as the child molestation scene
Reading the novel provides you with a deeper understanding of the conflict shrinking, that is, becoming less a man, arouses in Scott Carey. His self-image, you might argue, is very 1950s and dated. While this may be true for a portion of the population, expectations change slowly for many people, and so Scott’s increasing feelings of inadequacy, his loss of his manly privileges, his sense of personal failure in not being able to provide for his family or make love to his wife, and his compensation strategies, particularly that of being primal male living by his wits (most strongly reflected in overcoming his spider fear and then dispatching his bane, the black widow, in the cellar). Ultimately, after much shrinkage and even more self-self-flagellation over his plight, Scott comes to terms with himself and looks forward to exploring new worlds, down to the subatomic.
The novel’s also interesting for the way Matheson has structured it. He divides the story between Scott as a seventh-inch man trapped in the basement of a house scavenging for food and water while fending off his personal imagined fears and the real fear of the black widow, and the process of Scott’s shrinking. In each scene of Scott reducing, we learn more about the indignities he has suffered and the concerns he has endured. With each scene, we grasp a bit more about his plight and how he finally ended up in the basement, forever separated from his family. (The film version is traditional linear storytelling.)
While classified in the science fiction genre, The Shrinking Man is as much, or perhaps more, a psychological thriller and a primer on the social structure and male exceptions of the 1950s. All in all, worthy of being included in the Library of America editions, and of your time.
Most probably know this novel in its film form, which author Richard Matheson helped adapt to the screen. However, it is worth reading the original novel version because some aspects of the it never made it to the screen or were changed (such as the child molestation scene
Show More
or his infidelity with Clarice). Reading the novel provides you with a deeper understanding of the conflict shrinking, that is, becoming less a man, arouses in Scott Carey. His self-image, you might argue, is very 1950s and dated. While this may be true for a portion of the population, expectations change slowly for many people, and so Scott’s increasing feelings of inadequacy, his loss of his manly privileges, his sense of personal failure in not being able to provide for his family or make love to his wife, and his compensation strategies, particularly that of being primal male living by his wits (most strongly reflected in overcoming his spider fear and then dispatching his bane, the black widow, in the cellar). Ultimately, after much shrinkage and even more self-self-flagellation over his plight, Scott comes to terms with himself and looks forward to exploring new worlds, down to the subatomic.
The novel’s also interesting for the way Matheson has structured it. He divides the story between Scott as a seventh-inch man trapped in the basement of a house scavenging for food and water while fending off his personal imagined fears and the real fear of the black widow, and the process of Scott’s shrinking. In each scene of Scott reducing, we learn more about the indignities he has suffered and the concerns he has endured. With each scene, we grasp a bit more about his plight and how he finally ended up in the basement, forever separated from his family. (The film version is traditional linear storytelling.)
While classified in the science fiction genre, The Shrinking Man is as much, or perhaps more, a psychological thriller and a primer on the social structure and male exceptions of the 1950s. All in all, worthy of being included in the Library of America editions, and of your time.
Show Less
LibraryThing member write-review
It’s a Small World ...
Most probably know this novel in its film form, which author Richard Matheson helped adapt to the screen. However, it is worth reading the original novel version because some aspects of the it never made it to the screen or were changed (such as the child molestation scene
Reading the novel provides you with a deeper understanding of the conflict shrinking, that is, becoming less a man, arouses in Scott Carey. His self-image, you might argue, is very 1950s and dated. While this may be true for a portion of the population, expectations change slowly for many people, and so Scott’s increasing feelings of inadequacy, his loss of his manly privileges, his sense of personal failure in not being able to provide for his family or make love to his wife, and his compensation strategies, particularly that of being primal male living by his wits (most strongly reflected in overcoming his spider fear and then dispatching his bane, the black widow, in the cellar). Ultimately, after much shrinkage and even more self-self-flagellation over his plight, Scott comes to terms with himself and looks forward to exploring new worlds, down to the subatomic.
The novel’s also interesting for the way Matheson has structured it. He divides the story between Scott as a seventh-inch man trapped in the basement of a house scavenging for food and water while fending off his personal imagined fears and the real fear of the black widow, and the process of Scott’s shrinking. In each scene of Scott reducing, we learn more about the indignities he has suffered and the concerns he has endured. With each scene, we grasp a bit more about his plight and how he finally ended up in the basement, forever separated from his family. (The film version is traditional linear storytelling.)
While classified in the science fiction genre, The Shrinking Man is as much, or perhaps more, a psychological thriller and a primer on the social structure and male exceptions of the 1950s. All in all, worthy of being included in the Library of America editions, and of your time.
Most probably know this novel in its film form, which author Richard Matheson helped adapt to the screen. However, it is worth reading the original novel version because some aspects of the it never made it to the screen or were changed (such as the child molestation scene
Show More
or his infidelity with Clarice). Reading the novel provides you with a deeper understanding of the conflict shrinking, that is, becoming less a man, arouses in Scott Carey. His self-image, you might argue, is very 1950s and dated. While this may be true for a portion of the population, expectations change slowly for many people, and so Scott’s increasing feelings of inadequacy, his loss of his manly privileges, his sense of personal failure in not being able to provide for his family or make love to his wife, and his compensation strategies, particularly that of being primal male living by his wits (most strongly reflected in overcoming his spider fear and then dispatching his bane, the black widow, in the cellar). Ultimately, after much shrinkage and even more self-self-flagellation over his plight, Scott comes to terms with himself and looks forward to exploring new worlds, down to the subatomic.
The novel’s also interesting for the way Matheson has structured it. He divides the story between Scott as a seventh-inch man trapped in the basement of a house scavenging for food and water while fending off his personal imagined fears and the real fear of the black widow, and the process of Scott’s shrinking. In each scene of Scott reducing, we learn more about the indignities he has suffered and the concerns he has endured. With each scene, we grasp a bit more about his plight and how he finally ended up in the basement, forever separated from his family. (The film version is traditional linear storytelling.)
While classified in the science fiction genre, The Shrinking Man is as much, or perhaps more, a psychological thriller and a primer on the social structure and male exceptions of the 1950s. All in all, worthy of being included in the Library of America editions, and of your time.
Show Less
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Awards
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Original publication date
1956-05