No Small Matter

The Shrinking Man, which I finished earlier today, has a few particularly powerful scenes in it, at least three of which are very much in a Stephen King vein. I'm thinking of the two sequences in which the protagonist encounters distinctly unsettlingly menacing individuals when he is as small and vulnerable as any child, in the shape of the probably paedophilic guy who gives him a lift and the three neighbourhood bullies into whose hands he temporarily falls; and then there's the final, epic showdown with the spider that's been menacing him in the cellar throughout the novel, when he's just one-seventh of an inch tall.

But the most powerful sequence of all, for this reader, has no real equivalent in horror fiction and raises the novel beyond the confines of the genre. This is Scott's encounter with poor Clarice, the circus midget and the only character who understands his feelings. The instant rapport between the two is entirely believable and indicates a powerful imaginative sympathy on Matheson's part. Indeed, these pages are a worthy reminder of those poor souls who have to negotiate a forbiddingly large world due to an accident of birth.

As I mentioned the other day, it seems to me a bit of a stretch to classify Matheson's work as science fiction per se, but I have no hesitation in classifying it as a fine novel. Great ending, by the way, very much in the tradition of those surprise endings frequent in The Twilight Zone - for which Matheson wrote a number of episodes, if I'm not mistaken.

Must say, I wouldn't mind watching The Incredible Shrinking Man again, if I ever really did watch it back in the 60s. Before reading the novel I assumed I did once see it, on tv that is, but now I'm not so sure. It's such an iconic sort of movie that I might well have seen an excerpt or two and later in life assumed I'd once watched it. I say this because I thought the movie involved a straightforward chronology of the hero shrinking, and was startled at the clever 'double' time scheme of the novel which begins in the cellar with Scott already down to less than an inch and then amplifies on how he got there through a series of flash-backs. Does the film do the same?