If Scott Carey fashioning a sewing-needle spear, hunting crumbs, and battling the black widow in the basement had you white-knuckled, you’ll love the deadly ingenuity in Micro. A team of researchers is miniaturized and must improvise tools, outwit ants and spiders, and navigate blades of grass like forests. That same visceral, inch-by-inch struggle you felt when Scott stalked food cans and dodged the cat plays out here with relentless thrills and clever problem-solving.

In The Shrinking Man, a house cat becomes a predator and a suburban basement turns into a wilderness. Cujo delivers that same everyday-turned-lethal intensity: a mother and child trapped in a sweltering car, besieged by a rabid dog. If Scott’s crawl across the basement floor toward a distant morsel had your heart racing, Donna Trenton’s inch-by-inch efforts to protect her son will hit those same nerve-scraping survival beats.

Matheson let you live inside Scott Carey’s head—the fear, the resourcefulness, the way his shrinking reframed his identity—especially during his solitary war with the spider and that final, awe-tinged epiphany. In Annihilation, the Biologist’s voice similarly draws you inward as Area X warps perception and self. If you admired Scott’s introspection amid peril, this eerie expedition’s journals and mounting dread will scratch that same deeply internal, survival-minded itch.

Scott Carey’s shrinking doesn’t just endanger him; it reorders his marriage, his place at home, and his sense of manhood—even before the basement battles, he’s shrinking in status. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s sudden transformation isolates him within his own family and strips away social identity. If Scott’s journey resonated as more than creature-feature peril—an allegory of diminishment and estrangement—Kafka’s classic will feel like the haunting, literary counterpart.

Much of The Shrinking Man works because you ride solely with Scott—his calculations about water droplets, his improvisations with thread and pins, his step-by-step plans to reach that elusive food can. The Martian gives you that same intensely personal perspective as Mark Watney logs his fixes, counts calories, and hacks tools to stay alive on Mars. If Scott’s solo ingenuity captivated you, Watney’s voice-and-vitals survival will be catnip.