I've had a few things on the go at once, so it took a while for me to finish The Shrinking Man, by Richard Matheson. It is of course, a SF classic, so it's not surprising that I enjoyed it and thought it was pretty good. It's as much a nice metaphor for losing control and dignity from disease and the effects on personal relationships of catastrophe, as it is a simple SF adventure romp. It is quite exciting however, and it's an engaging and fast read. Matheson writes well and is good with his characterisation. Told from the perspective of the shrinking man Scott Carey, in close third person, it shuttles back and forth between two time periods: (i) from when he first notices his height diminishing to when he gets stuck in the cellar (roughly from 6 feet until he's under 1 foot), and (ii) his times in the cellar as a very small figure (under one inch). This way of jumping back and forth in time, each time period progressing and showing the effect of his shrinking is very effective. He spends a lot of his time in the cellar waging a long-drawn out war with a black-widow spider. From a scientific perspective, it's all rather silly of course, with the cause of the shrinking stemming from a sudden dose of 'handwavium', and many simple physical effects at a minute level are ignored (such as surface tension). But the positives are strong, and one doesn't read books like these in expectation they will 100% concur with physics text books. That said, the very end, in the sense of what happens to Scott when he reaches zero inches, didn't especially work for me. A solid recommendation, overall, however.
