The Incredible Shrinking Man

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The Incredible Shrinking Man

By: Richard Matheson

Narrated by: Yuri Rasovsky

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About this listen

This is the terrifying novel that inspired the classic motion picture.

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.

Horror

Scary

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Critic reviews

"A horror story if ever there was one....A great adventure story, it is certainly one of that select handful that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading." (Stephen King)
"A classic of suspense as poignant as it is frightening, a mix that only Richard Matheson could pull off." (Dean Koontz)

Most relevant

Where does The Incredible Shrinking Man rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
A little above the middle. It's a reasonably interesting science fiction novel from the mid 20th century.
It's a book that everybody knows the film version of, and I'm often intrigued to know what originally happened in these cases. The film is actually pretty faithful to the book, aside from the structure and the chronology. Whereas the film tends to focus on the physical dangers of becoming ever smaller, the book explores the psychological and emotional aspects more. It's good to get both, but on balance the film is more inventive, and its straightforward linear narrative works better than the jumping-between-two-timelines approach in the book.
The science is complete horses' hooves - the square-cube issues are ignored, and the biological explanation for shrinking probably wouldn't convince a biologist - but that's okay because it's the "what if?" of the story.

What other book might you compare The Incredible Shrinking Man to, and why?
I'm being perversely literal here, but I'm going for Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and even more so the Magazine song it inspired (see headline).
The song's chorus goes, "This is a song from under the floorboards/This is a song from where the wall is cracked/My force of habit I am an insect/I have to confess I'm proud as hell of that fact." When I listened to it I used to picture the man in the cellar, lonely and tiny and preoccupied with not being eaten by a spider.
The opening of the Dostoevsky novel has a similar vibe. Its ending is more reminiscent of another Magazine song, Permafrost... but I digress.

Did Yuri Rasovsky do a good job differentiating each of the characters? How?
Suffice to say it was generally clear who was speaking.
I wasn't overkeen on his reading. For about half the book he sounded as if he was talking angrily through clenched teeth. Later I realised he was trying to reflect the protagonist's mood in his voice, which didn't really work.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Not really - possibly because the reader was overdoing the emotion. If we see that somebody has undergone a tragedy, we tend to be much more sympathetic towards them if they are stoic about it, no matter how much they might be entitled to whinge.
There are some emotional moment nonetheless, notably Scott's meeting with a woman who is temporarily like himself, and the sheer unconsciousness of his wife's changing attitude towards him is convincing and distressing.

Any additional comments?
The book was originally called The Shrinking Man - no extra adjective. I don't think it needed to be retitled to reflect the film - it's not like the leap from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep to Bladerunner, is it?

A Song From Under The Floorboards