Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

It is impossible to see The Shrinking Man separated from its background of A-bomb tests, ICBMs, the "missile gap," and strontium-go in the milk. If we look at it this way, Matheson's novel (his second published book, according to John Brosnan and John Clute, who collaborated on Matheson's entry in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia , citing Matheson's I Am Legend as the first; I believe they may have overlooked an earlier Richard Matheson novel, a war story titled The Beardless Warriors ) is no more science fiction than such Big Bug movies as The Deadly Mantis or Beginning of the End . But Matheson is doing more in The Shrinking Man than having radioactive nightmares; the title of Matheson's novel alone suggests bad dreams of a more Freudian nature. Concerning The Body Snatchers , we'll remember Richard Gid Powers saying that Miles Bennell's victory over the pods is a direct result of Miles's resistance against depersonalization, his fierce individualism, and his defense of more traditional American values. These same things can be said about the Matheson novel, * with one important variation. It seems to me that while Powers is right in suggesting that The Body Snatchers is in large part about the depersonalization, even the annihilation of the free personality in our society, The Shrinking Man is a story about the free personality's loss of power and growing impotency in a world increasingly controlled by machines, red tape, and a balance of terror where future wars are planned with one eye always cocked toward an "acceptable kill ratio." In Scott Carey we see one of the most inspired and original symbols of this modern devaluation of human currency ever created. Carey muses at one point that he is not shrinking at all; that instead, the world is growing larger. But seen either way-devaluation of the individual or inflation of the environment-the result is the same: as Scott shrinks, he retains his essential individuality but gradually loses more and more control over his world anyway. Also like Finney, Matheson sees his work as "just a story," and one he is not even particularly in touch with anymore. His comments: "I started working on the book in 1955. It was the only book I ever wrote back east-if you exclude a novel I wrote when I was sixteen and living in Brooklyn. Things had been going badly out here [in California] and I though it might be a good idea to be back east and close to editors for the sake of my career; I had given up on the idea of getting into movies. Actually, there was nothing rational in the move. I was just fed up out here on the coast and talked myself into going back east. My family was there.