THE CENTURY'S BEST HORROR FICTION #50: A review of "Born of Man and Woman" by Richard Matheson

Here we have the only other living writer in volume one of this anthology, and he’s just as much of a powerhouse as Bradbury. [EDIT:  As a reminder, this was written a few weeks ago, back when Bradbury was still alive.]  Matheson has had such an incredible impact on our culture, and very few people outside the genre know this. Yet they’ve all seen something he’s done, guaranteed.



This is one of his better known stories, and like Lovecraft’s “The Outsider,” it is told from a very unusual perspective. It seems that the narrator is some kind of ugly kid, forced to live chained up in the basement, hidden from the world. Since he doesn’t grow up like regular people do, he has a very interesting way of looking at the world. Matheson gets downright poetic with the way the unnamed narrator describes things. Rain is “water falling from upstairs,” and the ground doesn’t just soak it up, “it drank too much and it got sick and runny brown.”


But the narrator is pretty adventurous. He manages to slip his chain several times, and he wanders upstairs while his parents throw a party. His mother catches him, though, and his father resets the chain. In another instance, someone who clearly is his sister (she is described as a little mother; all normal looking people are mothers and fathers). She brings her cat with, and when the cat sees the narrator, it flips out. The narrator gets scared and, in a very OF MICE AND MEN kind of way, mashes up the cat in his bare hands.


But Matheson has an ace up his sleeve. The end of this story kind of creeps up on you and strikes when you’re not looking. SPOILER ALERT: the narrator isn’t merely an ugly kid, as we’re lead to believe; he actually is a monster. He can apparently walk on walls, he has many legs, and he drips green slime. It sounds like he’s a giant spider-man, and not in the cool Peter Parker way.


And now that his father has beaten him for his insolence, he has decided that he won’t take any more guff from his family. If they try to hurt him again, he will have to hurt them back. This is his final, chilling promise at the very end. END OF SPOILERS.


Here we are at the end of volume one, and it seems that, after 50 years, we have finally moved away from polite horror. The chains are off, and writers are starting to change the course of the genre. They’re starting to delve into darker territory. How fitting that we end this one with Matheson, whose work always seems cutting edge, even when he’s old and should be past his prime.


50 years to go.

[This story first appeared in THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION (which, by the way, is still going strong today) and can be read here.]