"Born of Man and Woman" (1950)

This very short story with its swaggering biblical title basically launched the career of Richard Matheson in auspicious style. It was his first publication at the age of 22, appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). It is a monster story of some kind, widely held as open to interpretation. As far as I can tell, the most conventional take is that the child in this story, who is keeping a diary, is deformed, born with congenital disabilities, and an innocent, and it is the parents who are hateful, abusive monsters. See Wikipedia, for example. Others (like me) read it as that thing in the basement is the monster. It oozes a green sticky substance and crawls across the walls and ceiling with multiple arms or legs. It sounds like a big freaking spider, though the clues are admittedly scant. I will grant there is something wrong with these parents. It would be bad enough if they had a monster kid and tried to hide it from the world, which I believe has happened at least in fiction, chaining and beating them and so forth. That's toxic but proceeds logically enough from shame. But these parents are giving cocktail parties and their idea of responsibility seems to be telling the thing in the basement to stay out of sight and don't make a sound. It's really messed up. Matheson is working a fine and ambiguous point of balance through misdirection and these vague but evocative (but vague) clues. This story packs quite a punch, done artfully enough to stand up to repeated reading. It's a kind of bridge piece from Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis looking forward to Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life." The diary structure and child's voice also look forward to Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

I will say, yes, upon reflection, a certain smug cleverness is apparent in the specific points where Matheson draws back from revealing more. But in a way that indulgence is earned too, as the story hits like someone suddenly lighting up the organ in a dark church at night with chords you can feel rumble through your body. It has a 19th-century quality in its certainty that all it has to do is tell you such things exist, "born of man and woman." And it might also be influential in another way, opening up the routes to trauma-sourced horror that comes of of parental, school, bully, police, and other societal abuses, a theme wending through Algernon and bubbling under in horror circles until emerging again with more force in midcentury. As with many stories, "Born of Man and Woman" gets away with excesses and plot holes by a combination of brevity and chutzpah. It's just crazy enough to shock and by the time you're asking questions (hey, why don't the authorities seem to know anything about this cocktail party crack house?) it's all over. I remember Matheson well from my forays into horror when I was a kid in the '60s. His very name made me nervous to see in the books I picked up. I didn't necessarily like his stories. There was always something brutal and viscerally disturbing about his stuff. That is seen here already, in his first published story, in the large amount of time spent on the beatings this creature is taking from the parents. Matheson is using it as a way to set readers on edge and gain sympathy for the monster/narrator. We're still not entirely sure what the thing telling the story is, but it appears to have real consciousness and character and we instinctively recoil at the chains and beatings—even more so when we learn it is for the sake of a cocktail party. But the monster also kills a cat, out of a fear we can understand, but still there is the death of a cat in this story, as Matheson once again balances his elements toward ambiguity. We have enough sympathy for the monster, who after all is communicating with us, that we loathe their parents for them. Still, we have seen this thing kill, and at the end of the story it's starting to lose its temper.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Read story online.