This is ridiculous but so entertaining. A lot of the dialogue is funny. The actually storyline is scary, a barber killing people and a cook selling them in her pies. It’s worth the time.

If this book were broken into two books I would’ve given I Am Legend 4 stars and Other Stories 2. So average 3.

I Am Legend was an interesting story, though extremely mopey at times, particularly in the first half. I liked the slow reveal of the world and Neville’s back-story; the element of mystery was very captivating to me.

The other stories left much to be desired for me, though full disclosure, I listened to the audiobook version of this and the second narrator’s nasally voice was very annoying to me, thus probably detracted from my enjoyment.

I would say read I Am Legend and skip the rest.

Die, Snow White! Die, Damn You! is a retelling of the Snow White story, with elements from a few other stories, such as “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and even “Aladdin.” I really enjoyed Yuri Rasovsky's Sweeney Todd and the String of Pearls, and so I was looking forward to listening to this. Unfortunately, it didn't work for me at all.

This was a full-cast production, almost like a play, but with very little in the way of sound effects. The voice acting was fairly good, probably one of the best things about this audiobook. I'd likely have enjoyed it even more if Rasovsky had either refrained from including German words and phrases or if more of the cast had been able to pronounce those words and phrases without mangling them. Despite using the English version of Snow White's name in the title of the audiobook, Rasovsky named her Schneewittchen in the production. Everyone pronounced it as Shnee (rhymes with knee) vitshen, even the people who could pronounce the other German words just fine (maybe they were aiming for production-wide consistency?). It grated on my nerves a little.

The way the various story elements were blended together was pretty nice (although the Goldilocks reference was completely unnecessary), and the production even made use of some of the less popular aspects of the Snow White story, such as the stepmother eating the huntsman's evidence that he killed Snow White.

However, the humor almost never worked for me. It was generally very sexual. The new duchess is going to have to have her virginity inspected by a bunch of old guys! Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, I wonder how they're going to do that? The first monster Schneewittchen encounters in the forest tells her he won't eat her because he only eats good wives (and so he's always starving, haha), but then chooses to attack her in another way...by raping her. I guess? She was so bored by the experience that I didn't even realize at first what had happened.

During one of her attempts to kill Schneewittchen, the evil stepmother pretended to be a lamp seller and used a gratingly awful Chinese accent. Then there was the ending. I actually gasped when I realized what the big twist was going to be that would allow everyone to have their “happy ending.” A great big spoiler warning here:

Rumpelstiltskin arranges things so it looks like the evil stepmother has finally managed to kill Schneewittchen. Previously, he hid Schneewittchen at the gingerbread house, where she began to gobble up everything in sight. When the stepmother asked the mirror who the fairest of them all was, it told her that she was...because Schneewittchen had eaten herself into a 200-lb. weight gain. But not to worry, Schneewittchen still got the sex she wanted, because fat is beautiful in the Ottoman Empire. Rumpelstiltskin just arranged to have her marry someone there.

(spoiler show)

So this was mostly a disappointment.

 

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

 

Finally, someone whose German pronunciation isn't terrible! I'm not saying mine is all that great either (I'm so rusty), but I can still recognize when someone else is mangling it. Schneewittchen is repeatedly being pronounced as shnee (rhymes with knee) vitshen.

It's kind of nice when the title of a book is also a perfect, if brief, description of the plot. The shrinking man of the title is Scott, who is shrinking exactly 1/7 of an inch every day. We're watching him during his last week before vanishing entirely, trapped in a basement with little food or water and stalked by an enormous (to him) black widow. Exactly how he got to be this size is shown through a series of flashbacks.

In a way, it's almost like two books. One is a tediously, almost painfully detailed survival novel. If the book were entirely like the "present day" sections, I wouldn't have liked it all that much. But the flashbacks are far better, and give a much more detailed idea of what the shrinking process must have been like for him. These are the best written parts of the book, and I found myself tuning out during the present day sections. I think Matheson put a good deal of thought into exactly how shrinking like this would affect a person, and others' perspective of them.

But it really would have been helpful if Scott were sympathetic. I get that he's under a lot of stress and has some traumatizing experiences while shrinking, but he brings most of that on himself. This is where "product of its time" comes into play. The book was first published in 1956, and it frames a crisis of masculinity in a very 50s, white, suburban, middle class sort of way. A modern man, by way of contrast, wouldn't wait until the family was in dire financial straits before "allowing" his wife to work at all. He might also be able to see his wife in terms broader than merely her sexual availability to him, and have more than a passing interest in his own daughter. It is, admittedly, the sort of attitude that I'm not surprised to see in a character written in the 50s, but it was this, as well as his thoughtless, needless risk taking, that made him almost entirely unsympathetic to me. Perfect example, from the end of the book. Scott is now small enough that he lives inside a dollhouse. He's alone in the room and notices that the outside door is ajar. So he decides to shut it on his own. Disaster ensues, naturally, but I was astonished at his complete inability to even guess that it might be a bad idea.