The Incredible Shrinking Man [Mass Market Paperback]

Richard Matheson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 29, 2008

Inch by inch, day by day, Scott Carey is getting smaller. Once an unremarkable husband and father, Scott finds himself shrinking with no end in sight. His wife and family turn into unreachable giants, the family cat becomes a predatory menace, and Scott must struggle to survive in a world that seems to be growing ever larger and more perilous--until he faces the ultimate limits of fear and existence.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The author who influenced me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson."--Stephen King

 

"One of the most important writers of the twentieth century."--Ray Bradbury

 

"Matheson is one of the great names in American terror fiction."—The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Matheson inspires, it's as simple as that."—Brian Lumley

 

About the Author

Richard Matheson is The New York Times bestselling author of I Am Legend, Hell House, Other Kingdoms, Somewhere in Time, A Stir of Echoes, The Beardless Warriors, The Path, Seven Steps to Midnight, Now You See It…, and What Dreams May Come, among others. He was named a Grand Master of Horror by the World Horror Convention, and received the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. He has also won the Edgar, the Spur, and the Writer's Guild awards. In 2010, he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. In addition to his novels, Matheson wrote screenplays, and he wrote for several Twilight Zone episodes, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” based on his short story. He was born in New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, and fought in the infantry in World War II. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. He lives in Calabasas, California.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; Reprint edition (April 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765361167
• ISBN-13: 978-0765361165
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (49 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #492,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Reduction Of The Self, April 21, 2003

By 

Edward M. Erdelac (Valley Village, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Incredible Shrinking Man (Paperback)

Scott Carey is exposed to a one in a million chemical reaction (brought about by a mysterious sea-spray and being drenched in pesticides) and finds himself shrinking 1/7th of an inch every morning. While the Scientific explanation is a little bit of a throwaway, and left me going `huh?' (like Bruce Banner getting the gamma rays or Peter Parker getting bit by a nuked spider), the end result is certainly not.

What plays out as a relentlessly depressing view of mortality and the loneliness in which man faces that mortality (much like Matheson's I AM LEGEND), ends with a surprisingly optimistic conclusion which puts this story into the realm of a zen-line allegory.

As he shrinks, the protagonist's social struggles grow. He is often mistaken for a child (by bullying teenagers and in one scene, a drunken pedophile) and begins falling into the `little man's complex,' raging at seemingly insignifigant things and growing increasingly more neurotic as a result of his inability to be taken seriously. His manhood is challenged as he becomes too miniscule to relate physically to his wife (in the pit of his self-loathing he contemplates the rape of a sixteen year old girl), and in a final display of his ineffectiveness, his young daughter treats him like a doll. After being locked and lost in the cellar of his own house, his neuroses become manifest in the body of a black widow spider who torments him endlessly (amusingly, its the same spider he wounds with a stone while in a larger state).

Carey's biggest problem is his fear. He fears his innate impulses and desires, he fears his financial instability with his brother, he fears the way his wife and daughter see him and his own concept of masculinity. The shrinking seems almost Heaven sent - a gift to teach the guy the importance of life and how to shed his petty concerns. In that it is very much like a zen parable. Carey is effectively being reduced physically and emotionally. It is his notion of `self' which is dwindling. Yet, when in the last pages he accepts his fate and performs a ritualistic sort of purging of worry by engaging the spider, things begin to fall into place both physically and emotionally for him. He comes to understand that he cannot (and doesn't need to) `escape.' From a Taoist perspective, he is rewarded for this, being in the end able to percieve the worlds within worlds (possibly a spiritual metaphor?) and gaining new hope.

Probably I AM LEGEND is more suspenceful and better written, but SHRINKING MAN is a much more thought provoking, nearly mystical read. In both novels Matheson spends a lot of time with internal thoughts, but I don't know many other writers that can make a one-man show this compelling. This isn't the adventures of the Human Atom, but the realistic study of a man. Well-deserving of the handle `classic.'

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Shrinking Man" is Still an Incredible Reader Pleaser., July 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Incredible Shrinking Man (Tor Horror) (Mass Market Paperback)

"The Shrinking Man" by Richard Matheson ("incredible" was added to the title for this release so readers unfamiliar with the book but who'd seen the movie would have a better chance of catching it on the shelves.) is among the very best sci-fi adventures, if not simply the best novels, ever written. Robert Scott Carey, the unlucky main character of this story, finds himself shrinking at a rate of 1/7th of an inch a day after exposure to a cloud of radioactive mist. Sure, it sounds silly, but trust me, this is one of the most fantastic reads around. Events that were not part of the classic film add moments of psychological horror that top even a Stephen King freak-fest. Carey's rapidly changing relationship with his wife and daughter (a character not in the film) is explored as well as several incidents with strong themes that serve to highlight the personal Hell Carey's world has become as it steadily outgrows him. Like the movie, the novel ends with one of the greatest climaxes in imaginitive literature as Carey learns the ultimate truth of his existance and provides the story with it's final, underlying moral.... Read it, Experience it, if not for the first time, then again... and again...

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Early Matheson and one of his best!, May 31, 2001

By 

Bill W. Dalton (Santa Ana, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Incredible Shrinking Man (Paperback)

This was the first novel by Matheson that I ever read, in a paperback edition, back in the mid-50s. He was already well-known for his short stories in the sci-fi/fantasy pulp magazines of the day, and even in the "slicks" like Playboy, and I had read some of them. This was the first work of his to be made into a movie in 1957, The Incredible Shrinking Man (I guess they thought the original title, The Shrinking Man, was too credible?) directed by the late, great Jack Arnold (It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Tarantula, et al.) but it wasn't the last. Most of his novels and some of his short stories have made it to the big screen (The Omega Man) or to TV (The Night Stalker). He was the Stephen King of the `50s and `60s!

I read this novel before I saw the movie, and although the movie was great, with stand-out special effects, a very good cast, and tight direction, it of course had to leave out quite a lot. The character Scott Carey certainly had some interesting and unusual problems, and his fate is finally to enter the microscopic world, where the unknown waits. The Shrinking Man is a great read, and I recommend it to all sci-fi/horror fans, and certainly all Matheson fans.