Incredible Shrinking Man (Mass Market Paperback)

The book cover says it all: after a freak encounter with radiation, Scott Carey begins to shrink. Scott has been surviving in the basement, a hostile, Dali-esque environment where the only neighbour is a menacing black widow spider. Like all people troubled by the miseries of the present, Scott's mind frequently turns back to the past. These flashbacks chart the course of Scott's diminishing height, beginning with the anger and humiliation of total dependence, the loneliness of being a national spectacle, and the inexorable retreat into a nightmare world.

"The Shrinking Man" has much in common with "I Am Legend". We have the lone protagonist, an outcast, cut off and isolated from everything that was once safe and familiar. Both characters are trapped in their respective predicaments, virtual prisoners with no hope of reprieve. Like Robert Neville, Scott Carey also had a wife and daughter. While Robert's family succumbed to a plague of vampirism, Scott's family seemed to be turning into "giants". Robert Neville was armed with a wooden stake, hoping to kill his tormentor Ben Cortman - Scott is armed with a sewing pin, hoping to dispatch the persistent spider.

Scott's dimunition is constant. He is literally going where no man has gone before. Eventually he'll be able to see germs without a microscope, and perhaps see what atoms really look like. Maybe he'll even be able to see the miniature solar systems inside them. Didn't William Blake say something about the universe being a grain of sand?

In the film adaptation of "A Stir of Echoes" the babysitter reads a copy of "The Shrinking Man" - a little in-joke on the script writer's part. It's easy to see how Stephen King was influenced by Matheson's work, particularly in books like "Salem's Lot" or "Thinner". There really is no such thing as originality. Everything comes from something else. It's just a matter of good story-telling.

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.'