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Author name: Richard Matheson

: The Incredible Shrinking Man
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Type of bind: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780765361165
ISBN number: 0765361167
Label: Tor Books
Manufacturer: Tor Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: April 29, 2008
Publishing house: Tor Books
Sale Popularity Level: 676211
Studio: Tor Books



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Product Description:
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.




Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Matheson's Classic Sci-Fi Novel Is Really a Story About Sexual Perversion
On the surface Richard Matheson's "The Incredible Shrinking Man" is about an average man who shrinks one inch every week - and the horrors and challenges he faces as he gets smaller. There are encounters with house cats and spiders, confrontations with angry boys, and the difficulties of feeding and clothing yourself when you're less than two inches tall.

But the "shrinking" is a veneer. The reality is that the 1956 novel is a chilling tale of unleashed male anger and the chronicle of a man's descent into sexual perversion. The protagonist, Scott Carey, already an embittered personality before his misfortune, transforms into a raging sexual predator as he gets smaller. The premise is simple: men get their power from their size and without it they are weak and cowardly. This is a radical novel from start to finish.

Matheson's genius is that he's able to use the pretense of shrinking to explore issues that would have been taboo in any other format. There are two stories in the book - an adventure story about Carey's struggles surviving in his basement at less than one inch tall and the back story of his psychological breakdown as he fails to cope with his situation.

The adventure story has the reader rooting for Carey has he battles a grey widow spider with a sewing pin and scales the side of a refrigerator to forage for a few soggy cracker crumbs. Many readers become blinded by Carey's struggle to live that they don't realize the magnitude of his selfishness and perverse character.

Carey views his relationship with his wife, Louise, as purely sexual - mourning the not the loss of intimacy with his wife as he shrinks, but the loss of his ability to sexually dominate her. At times "The Incredible Shrinking Man" is shocking in its portrayal of Carey, one of the most finely crafted anti-heroes in science fiction literature.

This passage takes place when Carey is about two-feet tall and hiding in his basement:

"He stared at the window. Why'd it have to rain? he thought. Oh, why'd it? Why couldn't it be sunny so the pretty girl could lie outside in her bathing suit and he could stare a her and lust in secret, sick vicariousness."

After a mist coats his body during a boat trip and he begins to shrink, Carey doesn't courageously vow to fight through his condition. He lapses into a vicious state of self-pity - a state he never leaves throughout the entire book (until, perhaps, the last few pages).

By all accounts, Carey's wife is devoted and loving. During his ordeal he lashes out at Louise on several occasions with barbed insults and prolonged sulking. In fact, there are no tender moments between the couple in the novel. Every word from her becomes an imagined wrong. When Carey shrinks to the size of a child, his wife simply becomes an unattainable sexual conquest. He lusts after her, but projects his own disgust at his height onto her, and therefore can't be intimate with her. This, of course, makes him even more furious.

When Louise is forced to work in order to support the family, she has to hire a 16-year-old babysitter. Carey refuses to look after his 5-year-old daughter because of his size. He believes that his authority comes from his height so instead he hides in the basement during the day while the babysitter minds his daughter. It says a lot about Carey's character that he wants to spend his remaining days hiding in a cellar rather than interacting with his own child.
[...]

Some of the scenes are quite grotesque as Carey becomes more of a sexual deviant and his obsession becomes savage.

"Almost every afternoon at two o'clock, after having sat in shaking excitement for an hour or more, he would crawl out into the yard and walk secretively around the house, climbing up and peering over the sills of every window, looking for Catherine. [...]. If she was, as was most often the case, dressed and engaged in some dull occupation, he would return angrily to the cellar to sulk out the afternoon and snap at Louise all evening."

Make no mistakes: Scott Carey is a sick, depraved man. Later in the story, he meets a female sideshow midget at a carnival. He is so overcome with sexual desire that he abandons his loyal wife after begging her to allow him to spend the night with the woman. Louise runs off in tears and Carey has his night of carnal pleasures. Yet, he never returns to the woman midget - abandoning her as well once he has had his conquest.

"The Incredible Shrinking Man" is loaded with sex (its no coincidence that the spider Carey fights is a grey widow - a female spider known for eating her sexual partners). Because that's what the story is really about.

Matheson has hidden his story of sexual deviation in plain sight - and yet few reviewers or readers ever pick up on it. He has expertly masked the real story with the ... Read More


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Great Value!
There's nothing more I can say about the book and the author that hasn't already been said in countless reviews. I'll just say it's a great story by a great writer. But I do want to praise the fantastic value of this special, $4.99 edition paperback by Tor. Especially since it contains not only the title novel but also nine short stories: "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," "The Test," "The Holiday Man," "Mantage," "The Distributor," "By Appointment Only," "Button, Button," "Duel," and "Shoofly."

Also, be sure to check out the other titles in this series of special editions, such as his little-known novel The Beardless Warriors.


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