In Matheson’s legendary tale, family man Scott Carey finds himself shrinking, slowly, day-by-day, inch-by-inch. While on vacation, he gets exposed to a radioactive cloud, the cause of this bizarre event. Scott once had an everyday existence as a husband and father, but now his shrinking shows no end in sight. He becomes a national spectacle, something worthy of newspaper headlines. As Carey … shrinks smaller and smaller, his family become more and more unreachable giants, and the family cat becomes a predatory menace. In this world of disproportion, which grows more and more perilous with each passing day, Scott struggles to survive. He is pushed to the very limits of fear and existence.
As the story continues, Carey meets up with some circus performers and attempts to rebuild some semblance of a life. But since his shrinking never stops, all ideas of normal fade, and the threats never stop growing.
In 1958, The Shrinking Man won the Hugo award for that year’s best science fiction or fantasy dramatic presentation. It was also adapted into the film The Incredible Shrinking Man.
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Like most of Matheson’s books, this is a a well crafted tale of speculative fiction, with just enough realism to truly dig in deep. I was in the midst of a hard breakup when I read this, and it overwhelmed me with loss and a sense of hopeless desperation, which, if it’s strong enough to strike a cord like that, testifies to the strength of the writing. Not my favorite work of his, but that’s more a subjective matter of tone and circumstance than a mark against this well constructed collection of a novella followed by several stories entailed here.