The Shrinking Man [Hardcover]

Richard Matheson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1993

Hardcover; issued without dust jacket. Photographic reprint of the original Gold Medal paperback for 1956. Adapted into the classic 1957 film THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Lightyear Pr; 1st THUS edition (February 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0899683525
• ISBN-13: 978-0899683522
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,078,623 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Richard Matheson was born in 1926. He began publishing SF with his short story 'Born of Man and Woman' in 1950. I Am Legend was published in 1954 and subsequently filmed as The Omega Man (in 1971), starring Charlton Heston, and I Am Legend (in 2007), starring Will Smith. Matheson wrote the script for the film The Incredible Shrinking Man, an adaptation of his second SF novel The Shrinking Man. The film won a Hugo award in 1958. He wrote many screenplays as well as episodes of The Twilight Zone. He continued to write short stories and novels, some of which formed the basis for film scripts, including Duel, directed by Steven Spielberg in 1971. A film of his novel What Dreams May Come was released in 1998, starring Robin Williams. Stephen King has cited Richard Matheson as a creative influence on his work.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic sci-fi adventure, May 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Shrinking Man (Hardcover)

What can I say. This is one of the great science fiction books of all time. Not only that, it's scarier than anything Stephen King ever wrote and as exciting an adventure story as anything by Patrick O'Brien. You might remember the movie from your childhood days, but the book is far more inventive and thought provoking.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Science Fiction Misunderstood, May 30, 2002

By 

C. Halloran "Searcher" (Chapel Hill, NC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Shrinking Man (Hardcover)

People have often not noticed the significance of the time this was written. This is science fiction, but more importantly it is a social commentary. The shrinking of the protagonist literally is allegorical for the shrinking of the man in the emerging post-War World II corporate climate where men were treated as statistics by their inaccessible superiors rather than as valued producers in the company. The role of man was changing cause a generation of men to feel less than the culture's definition of "a man." Hence, the shrinking.

Understanding this brings a new dimension to Matheson's work. (Matheson, by the way, was a WWII vet experiencing a similar role crisis working for McDonnell Douglas in a job where he felt he actually did nothing, having no contact with the finished product. He was one of the aerospace industry's thousands of new white-collared workers.)

1 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Weak horror, weak science fiction, hardly a classic., October 16, 1999

By 

Kyle Jones (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Shrinking Man (Hardcover)

Isaac Asimov's Fantastic Voyage II is a much better treatment of the miniaturization theme, for hard science fiction content and characterization. This story spent too much time inside the main character's dumb, empty head, with his descent into self-pity being far worse than the stress and perils of growing ever smaller. The other characters were flat and uninteresting. Once you tire of the protagonist bemoaning his fate (and you will tire of it) there is little to make you keep reading, except hope for an interesting resolution. Well, forget it, there isn't one. The ending does not follow logically from the rest of the story and provides no resolution.

The story fails as science fiction and mostly fails as horror fiction. Pared down, it would have made a good script for a comic book. It also probably would work as a juvenile book club selection.