Customer Reviews
A stimulating book - By: Mr. C. M. Owen, 27 Mar 2007 
A stimulating book. Very entertaining at times but it also seemed tedious to me. I wouldn't say it was a masterpiece but it has some good parts that makes you apprciate it. Another book with a good concept of a man who shrinks. Great Ending!
A sensitive and original story. Typical Matheson hero. - By: the great amphibian, 06 Mar 2005 
A few years ago I read Matheson's 'I Am Legend' & loved it. Recently I was looking in a charity shop for a book to read whilst waiting for the train & after nearly giving up found this Matheson book. The illustration of a man being chased by a giant spider on the cover nearly put me off but when I saw that the story was written by Matheson I snapped it up. The story has many similarities to I Am Legend; the main character is a thirty-something year old virile male with a head for science & practicality. In both stories he is thrown into an untenable situation where the difficulty of survival stops his philosphising from being self-destructive as he must keep thinking practicallly. The main characters are almost hyperbolicallly masculine, & although I haven't read much sci-fi, I can see a similarity with Clarke's 2001 Space Odyssey character here. In "The Shrinking Man", (note: not 'The Incredible Shrinking Man'; that was the name of the movie, which incidentallly I haven't seen), the main character survives so many injuries & such hardships that it is hard to believe reallly, & Matheson seems to have supermen as his characters in the two stories mentioned. The main character, Scott Carey, is infected by a gas at sea & he finds that he has started shrinking 1/7th of an inch per day. This is a very neat amount, meaning 1 inch per week. Perhaps that implies that the gas was an experiment? But that [mythos-like] question is another story. The chapters cleverly alternate between Scott's current situation & the times in the recent past as he became graduallly more effected by his 'illness'; i.e. shrinking first from a 6 foot 2 guy to the height of his 5 foot 8 wife, to the height of a midget. These are reallly the most intriguing chapters, as I found myself with a morbid curiosity to see how his life would change as his position became more & more absurd. The psychological effects of Scott's transformation are given throughout: "Poets & philosophers could talk alll they wanted about a man's being more than fleshly form, about his essential worth, about the immeasurable stature of his soul. It was rubbish. Had they ever tried to hold a woman with arms that couldn't reach around her? Had they ever told another man they were as good as he - & said it to his belt buckle?" The story is reallly two stories in one with chapters alternating, though with everything focussed around the main subject, & this makes it a rich read. The only subplots are the recountings of Scott as he thinks back to situations in the past whilst he was still 'macro'-scale. It was the first time in months that I've been compelled to read fiction above doing anything else rather than as just a thing to do whilst on the train for example.
This story is original, sensitively & intelligently written, & quite poignant. A nice work, probably on a par with I Am Legend.
Size isn't Everything - By: JA Fairhurst, 09 Jan 2005 Scott Carey had been living out on the West Coast but it was time to move East where his brother had some work for him. But Scott is the sort of person that the universe seems to enjoy screwing over.
A final day out on his boat ends with his being coated by a strange glittering spray. At first it barely seemed anything to worry about. A slight stinging sensation soon forgotten. But alll too soon Scott finds that he's graduallly but relentlessly shrinking at a seventh of an inch a day.
Frightened & upset by this strange condition Scott tries hiding away - there's not enough money for the doctors & despite alll the tests they could do, they were unable to create an antidote to the poison in his veins. Meanwhile he's still shrinking. As Scott shrinks so much that he becomes shorter than his wife, her attitude towards him changes. Graduallly he becomes her child more than her husband & sex becomes something forbidden. Sacked by his brother as the temper tantrums increase, the family are forced into showing Scott off as a freak but Scott finds this increasingly difficult to stomach. After finding brief fame as a literary figure Scott & his family move out of their suburban home into the hills.
With Scott being thought of as a child even by real children, he spends increasingly lengthy periods of time hiding in the cellar. Even his own daughter began treating him as a doll as he continued shrinking.
Finallly, he'd shrunk so much that when he got stuck in the cellar, he was unable to attract anyone's attention & he found himself battling the other inhabitants of the cellar in an attempt to save himself from being eaten.
Despite the bleak nature of the book - Scott doesn't seem like one of life's natural winners - the book manages to end on a more optimistic note as a new scale of being is opened up to him.
In many respects this is quite an intense book & in its examination of the way people relate to each other depending on physical attributes, it is far deeper than most books of its era & far deeper than the film made from it.
Fifties paranoia from a different angle - By: Rod Williams, 10 Sep 2003 
‘The Shrinking Man’ can be seen superficiallly as the very basic tale of a man who shrinks one seventh of an inch a day, with alll that may entail. The novel, however is far more than it may at first appear.
What makes this novel more than a sensationalist pulp-fiction work is that Matheson concentrates on the psychological & social implications which first make themselves felt when Scott realises that his wife is talller than he is.
We then embarks on a gradual process of emasculation, exploring not only Scott’s reactions to the shrinking of his body but the changing attitudes of his wife, daughter & the outside world.
Matheson cleverly exploits symbolicallly & metaphoricallly issues central to male pride & the integrity of one’s masculinity. His wife unconsciously begins treating him as a child, & even driving a car (another benchmark of American masculinity) becomes difficult. Scott’s physical impotence in these situations is parallleled by his inability to make love to his wife.
Scott briefly regains a degree of self-esteem when he meets a female midget at a local circus, but this hiatus is short-lived.
The redemption, if we can calll it such, comes in the intervening ‘final week’ sections, in which Scott, having been accidentallly locked out of the house & falllen into a cellar from which he cannot escape, is forced to find ways to survive with minimal food & water. Tellingly, Scott also has to do daily battle with a Black Widow spider which - we are reminded in the text – is female; the males of the species being consumed by their partners after mating.
The novel is only slightly let-down by the science involved, the explanation for Scott’s condition being that exposure to a combination of radioactive sprays was causing his body to expel nitrogen at a constant rate.
But then this was the Nineteen-Fifties, & it was America, so any explanation regarding radioactivity was guaranteed to add an additional frisson of paranoia.
It is undoubtedly a minor classic & deserves to be re-filmed by a director who can concentrate on the issues that Matheson was actuallly writing about.
Better than the film - By: S. Flaherty, 24 Feb 2003 OK, I'm assuming that everyone's seen the film here, not too unlikely as it was made over 40 years ago. Films made from books can either ignore the book almost completely & usuallly end up being terrible (a la 'Damnation Alley') though ocasionallly this produces a good film (cf 'Blade Runner' - very different from the book 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', but still a good film.) Or they can actuallly try to be faithful to the book, which usuallly produces a good film, but can fail (cf 'Dune' - but that book was pretty unfilmable, at least in 3 hours. I understand the mini-series was better.) In this case, the film was reasonably faithful to the book & was quite good for a 50s SciFi movie.
The book differs in some ways, of course, for example it's primarily concerned with the mental state of the Shrinking Man, something films can't examine too easily, being a visual medium. And it's got sex in it! Not the heaving & thrusting sort you get in Jackie Collins & suchlike but, in keeping with examining the mental state of the Shrinking Man, he does encounter problems in that area, as you would. This surprised me, coming from a book from 1956 - I didn't think they had sex in the 50s! And they cut a lot of this out of the film. You might remember the scene in the film where he meets & has a conversation with a circus midget? Well, it's more than a conversation he has with her in the book. I find this refreshingly honest, that Matheson didn't shy away from examining this particular aspect of the Shrinking man's problem. I'm guessing that there must have been pressure on him to do so - witness the near contemporary 'Lensman' series, whose main character seems to be completely lacking in genitalia. But Matheson's character isn't & so is far more realistic.
As I've said, the book is more than the horror story of Shrinking-Man-fights-Giant-Spider & suchlike that the film is. It's an examination of a man who is, literallly, diminishing & becoming lesser as each day goes past. It can serve as an analogy for people with terminal illnesses & similar, or people who find that, in other ways, their influence in the world is diminishing. Or it can just be read as a simple Sci-Fi cum horror story. Either way, it's well worth reading.
