Koko
World Fantasy Award winner: the novel that fused horror with the literary war novel and crime fiction, founding the Blue Rose trilogy and the psychological-thriller wing of modern horror.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is The Shrinking Man about?
A drift of radioactive spray, an insecticide chaser, and Scott Carey begins losing a seventh of an inch a day — through trouser sizes, through his marriage's mechanics, through employability, fame and a doll's house, toward the cellar where the book's celebrated second front opens: the duel with the black widow spider, fought with pins and dread across a landscape of paint cans. Matheson interleaves the cellar present with the shrinking past, making the SF premise a study of masculinity stripped of every prop. The ending — Scott passing below zero and discovering that to nature there is no zero — is the era's great transcendent last page.
Why it matters
The basis of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), whose closing monologue Matheson wrote and which remains 1950s SF cinema's philosophical peak; the novel established the 'domestic catastrophe' mode he made his own.
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