While lurking in the r/StephenKing subreddit (as many Constant Readers do), an interesting post caught my eye, asking if anyone had read the novel Small World by King’s wife, Tabitha.
Intrigued, I looked further and found that the book was apparently a pulpy and entertaining entry in the ‘body horror’ genre, with a focus on miniaturization. Fun!
What follows is a messy, poorly characterized novel based on an intriguing premise and not much else. What if, somehow, the technology of miniaturization not only existed, but was discovered by an basement-dwelling incel?
Enter Roger Tinker (yes, the man that tinkers with contraptions is named Tinker. Bask in the creativity). He lives in his overbearing mother’s basement and had some weird contract with the USA government/military to explore the realm of miniaturization. Though his contract ended, his research didn’t, and he privately perfected a device that will reduce whatever it zaps to a tiny size. In the beginning of this book, they made him out to be quite the psychopath. It sounded like he’d tested the product on a series of unfortunate neighborhood animals and had relished in their torture. Yet this characterization amounts to nothing, as he soon partners with the insufferable Dolly, a dollhouse maker, and has a personality transplant that that point. (You read that right. Dolly the Dollhouse Maker joins up with Tinker the Tinkerer. Uuuuuuugh.)
Dolly lives the high life, as she was daughter of a past president (and somehow that means she’s independently wealthy…?). She’s honed her obsessive craft to be a world-renounced dollhouse maker, and has created all of 3 dollhouses. Wow. How ever does she do it? Dolly and Tinker team up to populate her dollhouses with first, art and knickknacks, and then tiny people. Together, they zap and imprison a miniaturized movie star in Dolly’s replica White House. The tiny lady goes slowly mad while Dolly teases and tortures her fractured mind. Tinker, conveniently, chooses to go home to visit his mother soon after successfully zapping the actress, which made no sense as it was quickly established that he was obsessed with his tiny creation.
The story meanders around here for a while and nothing much happens. Highly improbable aspects of the realities of this situation are glossed over like – how does this tiny White House have functioning plumbing? How did they manage to get the scale of the tiny women perfect for the White House dollhouse and its contents? Why did the tiny movie star never once look up and notice that there isn’t a sky above her? How did Dolly heat up the food that Tinker pre-miniaturized before leaving to visit his mother? I realise this may seem like nit picking, but I challenge you to read this story and NOT be bothered by these and a million other small (heh) questions. If you’re going to structure a novel around making someone tiny, you gotta go all-in on the various tedious details that you choose to include in the ‘story’.
When the movie star experiment eventually fails with tragic results, the story seems to get completely lost. There’s a love story, a helicopter to an island, a famous painter. It’s all so… random. None of these characters exist in anything even remotely resembling the real world. Their immense wealth is never satisfactorily explained, no one has a job… It just feels lazy.
I could suspend my disbelief around the technology of the miniaturizer just fine, but that’s no excuse not to take time to colour in the rest of the story carefully.
Overall, I’ll give this 1 tiny bedpan out of 5. Don’t be sucked in by the intriguing cover art – the story’s plot is even more diminutive than it’s characters.
