The Shrinking Man (S.F. MASTERWORKS) [Paperback]

‘The Shrinking Man’ can be seen superficially as the very basic tale of a man who shrinks one seventh of an inch a day, with all 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 and social implications which first make themselves felt when Scott realises that his wife is taller 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 and the outside world.
Matheson cleverly exploits symbolically and metaphorically issues central to male pride and the integrity of one’s masculinity. His wife unconsciously begins treating him as a child, and even driving a car (another benchmark of American masculinity) becomes difficult. Scott’s physical impotence in these situations is paralleled 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 call it such, comes in the intervening ‘final week’ sections, in which Scott, having been accidentally locked out of the house and fallen into a cellar from which he cannot escape, is forced to find ways to survive with minimal food and 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, and it was America, so any explanation regarding radioactivity was guaranteed to add an additional frisson of paranoia.
It is undoubtedly a minor classic and deserves to be re-filmed by a director who can concentrate on the issues that Matheson was actually writing about.

A few years ago I read Matheson's 'I Am Legend' and loved it. Recently I was looking in a charity shop for a book to read whilst waiting for the train and 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 and 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 practically. The main characters are almost hyperbolically masculine, and 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 incidentally I haven't seen), the main character survives so many injuries and such hardships that it is hard to believe really, and 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 and 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 and the times in the recent past as he became gradually 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 really the most intriguing chapters, as I found myself with a morbid curiosity to see how his life would change as his position became more and more absurd. The psychological effects of Scott's transformation are given throughout: "Poets and philosophers could talk all 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 - and said it to his belt buckle?" The story is really two stories in one with chapters alternating, though with everything focussed around the main subject, and 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 and intelligently written, and quite poignant. A nice work, probably on a par with I Am Legend.

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 and usually end up being terrible (a la 'Damnation Alley') though ocasionally 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 actually try to be faithful to the book, which usually 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 and 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 and thrusting sort you get in Jackie Collins and 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 and 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 and so is far more realistic.

As I've said, the book is more than the horror story of Shrinking-Man-fights-Giant-Spider and suchlike that the film is. It's an examination of a man who is, literally, diminishing and becoming lesser as each day goes past. It can serve as an analogy for people with terminal illnesses and 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.