Born of Man & Woman

by Richard Matheson

Contents:

Born of Man and Woman
Third from the Sun
SRL Ad
Shipshape Home
Dear Diary
Dress of White Silk
F---
Mad House
Return
Through Channels
To Fit the Crime
Witch War
Lover, When You're Near Me

Genres: Horror, Short Stories, Science Fiction, Classics, Fiction, Fantasy, Audiobook

164 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1954

About the author

Born in Allendale, New Jersey to Norwegian immigrant parents, Matheson was raised in Brooklyn and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1943. He then entered the military and spent World War II as an infantry soldier. In 1949 he earned his bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and moved to California in 1951. He married in 1952 and has four children, three of whom (Chris, Richard Christian, and Ali Matheson) are writers of fiction and screenplays.

His first short story, "Born of Man and Woman," appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1950. The tale of a monstrous child chained in its parents' cellar, it was told in the first person as the creature's diary (in poignantly non-idiomatic English) and immediately made Matheson famous. Between 1950 and 1971, Matheson produced dozens of stories, frequently blending elements of the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres.

Several of his stories, like "Third from the Sun" (1950), "Deadline" (1959) and "Button, Button" (1970) are simple sketches with twist endings; others, like "Trespass" (1953), "Being" (1954) and "Mute" (1962) explore their characters' dilemmas over twenty or thirty pages. Some tales, such as "The Funeral" (1955) and "The Doll that Does Everything" (1954) incorporate zany satirical humour at the expense of genre clichés, and are written in an hysterically overblown prose very different from Matheson's usual pared-down style. Others, like "The Test" (1954) and "Steel" (1956), portray the moral and physical struggles of ordinary people, rather than the then nearly ubiquitous scientists and superheroes, in situations which are at once futuristic and everyday. Still others, such as "Mad House" (1953), "The Curious Child" (1954) and perhaps most famously, "Duel" (1971) are tales of paranoia, in which the everyday environment of the present day becomes inexplicably alien or threatening.

He wrote a number of episodes for the American TV series The Twilight Zone, including "Steel," mentioned above and the famous "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"; adapted the works of Edgar Allan Poe for Roger Corman and Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out for Hammer Films; and scripted Steven Spielberg's first feature, the TV movie Duel, from his own short story. He also contributed a number of scripts to the Warner Brothers western series "The Lawman" between 1958 and 1962. In 1973, Matheson earned an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his teleplay for The Night Stalker, one of two TV movies written by Matheson that preceded the series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Matheson also wrote the screenplay for Fanatic (US title: Die! Die! My Darling!) starring Talullah Bankhead and Stefanie Powers.

Novels include The Shrinking Man (filmed as The Incredible Shrinking Man, again from Matheson's own screenplay), and a science fiction vampire novel, I Am Legend, which has been filmed three times under the titles The Omega Man and The Last Man on Earth and once under the original title. Other Matheson novels turned into notable films include What Dreams May Come, Stir of Echoes, Bid Time Return (as Somewhere in Time), and Hell House (as The Legend of Hell House) and the aforementioned Duel, the last three adapted and scripted by Matheson himself. Three of his short stories were filmed together as Trilogy of Terror, including "Prey" with its famous Zuni warrior doll.

In 1960, Matheson published The Beardless Warriors, a nonfantastic, autobiographical novel about teenage American soldiers in World War II.

He died at his home on June 23, 2013, at the age of 87

http://us.macmillan.com/author/richar...

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fine collection of stories! The highlight was the absolutely disturbing title story. What an unnerving setting. What is chained up in the house. Is it a monster or what? Why do the parents react in such a cold manner? This story will haunt you, promised. Recommended!

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

These terse cartoony pulpacious short stories from the early 50s jitterbug madly on the borderline where science fiction meets horror and come at you like one of those notorious comics which got adults in such a tiswas back then, this kind of thing



or



We’re in a different world here, where wives toss their pretty blonde curls, where secretaries sharpen pencils, where young men pound typewriters and where the sexual innuendo is laid on with a trowel. In one of the longer stories, “Lover When You’re Near Me”, our astronaut is stationed on a distant planet for six months of technical duties. He’s given an all-mod-cons house to live in, complete with female alien housekeeper. Everyone fears these assignments. Why? Because the female aliens are telepathic, they all have the hots for tall hunky Earthmen, and they’re all phenomenally ugly! Could Richard Matheson be more blatantly talking about the grisly race relations of 1950s America? Also please note – there is no suggestion anywhere that our astronaut-technician could, like, make his own meals and clean his own house, and dispense with this horribly fascinating live-in housekeeper. Oh no, the very idea that a man would do that.

There’s one terrific four-page deformed-kid-in-the-basement story (“and I will drip green blood on them”) and one excellent time travel piece and the rest are for historians of the no longer acceptable.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this very short story today. In fact I read it a few times in about half an hour, like I said it was a very short story. The thing that brought it to my attention was that my son wrote an essay on it for a college course he is taking. I read his essay last night, and the story this morning.

The first time I read it I was just creeped out, and annoyed with these parents. Almost the entire story takes place in a cellar. These supposedly "normal" parents keep their child chained in the cellar, hidden from everyone. Now I need to know a few things, first is of course why is this child locked in the cellar? And second,is the child a boy or a girl? Answer to both: beats me. There are clues of course, the first line tells us that the child's mother calls the child a retch. The father tells the child that mother is pretty, that all the people in a movie magazine the child sees are pretty, then goes on to say "look at you" and didn't have a nice face when he said it. The father pulls away when the child touches his arm.

So is the child deformed? Is the child so ugly they can't stand to look at it? Well that's a pretty awful reason to keep your child locked in a cellar. In fact there are no possible reasons to keep a child locked in a cellar at all. I can never think of a cellar without thinking of the basement of my parent's house. It could have been in an episode of "Fear Factor", dirt floor, stone walls that were always damp, very dim lighting that never touched parts of the basement, and a low, low ceiling. I went in the basement as little as possible.

There are lines in the story that seem a little odd to me, could they mean more than they say? At one point the father becomes angry and hits the child,

"The anger came in his eyes. He hit me. I spilled some of the drip on the floor from one arm. It was not nice. It made ugly green on the floor.

Now I thought on first reading this part the ugly green stuff that was "spilled" was just disgusting slime from the cellar, but could it have been something else?

Then later when the child is angry with being hit and is telling us what will happen the next time the child says:

" I will screech and laugh loud. I will run on the walls. Last I will hang head down by all my legs and laugh and drip green all over until they are sorry they didn't be nice to me."

Here's the green stuff again and the child will run on the walls and "hang by all my legs". Run on walls and hang by all its legs? How many legs could the child have? Now I'm wondering if it is a child at all. I guess I'll never know unless one of you reads the story and fills me in.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am confining myself to the story that gives this collection its title, and has found itself in "best of" anthologies again, and again, and again. Why? You have to read it to appreciate the nuances. It's one of the creepiest pieces that I have read, and I'm sure, once you have read it, you would never ever be able to forget it.
I have no idea about the rest of the collection. But I'm quite sure that overall rating of something from Matheson would warrant no less than four stars.

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another short story, another "I read it but I'm not HAPPY about it" moment...

Full body shudder at the end of this, and I can't stop thinking about it. I do feel unclean though.

[Shaun Meyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Born of Man and Woman is a horror/science fiction short story written by Richard Matheson. It was first published in the 1950 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was also his first professional sale, written when he was just 22 years old. It also because the title story in Matheson’s first short story collection in 1954. The story was also a finalist for the Retro-Hugo Award for Best Short Story for 1954 in 2001.

Born of Man and Woman is written in broken English from the perspective of a horrifically deformed child. It’s written in the form of a diary kept by the child and details their daily life. The life of this child is far from a happy one. Their parents beat them frequently and they’re chained to the wall in the basement. In one scene the child leaves the basement after hearing laughter upstairs and it’s revealed that they’re covered in a thick, sticky, slime. In the end, the child gets tired of being beaten by his family members and becomes violent and the child’s true, monstrous, features are revealed in a final diary entry.

This story felt incredibly familiar when I was listening to it before this review. I’m quite sure it’s been referenced in numerous forms of media and in TV shows but I can’t remember where exactly the image in my mind is from.

I also can’t really tell if this story wants you to fear the child or the family, because I feel more sympathy for the monster than the people that frequently beat them and keep them locked in a basement. I also feel the father deserved to get his butt kicked by the monster. So, my conclusion: humans are the real monsters in this story.

Overall, this story was certainly unique and the person they got to read the audiobook did an amazing job. I give the story a 4 out of 5 stars.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what a wonderfully unnerving short story!

It's told from the point of view of an abused child, who is kept chained in the basement by its parents. It is written with odd grammar, bad spelling, and strange phrasings to reflect a complete unfamiliarity with normal human speech, writing, or the world outside the basement. The child is curious about the laughter it hears from Upstairs--and the glimpses it gets through a window of children playing outside-- and is punished by beating when it goes to look. A few violent things happen towards the end, including a promise of even greater violence to come.

This is all pretty terrible, but what makes the story truly creepy are the vague hints that this child is literally not human-- and that may be some sort of giant insect, alien, or a monster. It describes itself as bleeding green, for instance. And it talks about crawling on the walls with all its legs. That said, it's still not fully clear whether this is true. Given the narrator's ignorance of so many basic things (it doesn't recognize a cat for instance), does it actually know the difference between green and red? Or walls from the floor-- or legs from arms? The reader is left to wonder. At the same time, the possibility of the child being truly, literally a monster leaves the reader to wonder whether the parents' actions-- though certainly cruel-- may somehow be at least understandable, which is possibly even creepier.

Overall, it vaguely evokes hints of Frankenstein and John Gardner's "Grendel" (which retells Beowulf from the monster's point of view). And all this in just 3-4 pages. Brilliant, IMHO.

[Kelly Furniss · Rating 3 out of 5]

The creature is a freak by birth/malformed who is kept chained in the basement by his Mother and Father and 'little girl' his sister and how there interact with him.. He refers to a big machine which I guessed as a car, the water-rain, the goldness- sun and the green gloop his blood?.
It's a very short freaky story but just the right length and the mystery is it is totally open to interpretation. I read it with my Sci-Fi & Fantasy facebook group and enjoyed hearing how others deciphered it.

[Red Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disturbing classic.

[Scott Doherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This reads like a creepypasta all at once spooky and sorrowful. A short story about a creature chained to the wall of a basement by its “parents”. By the end of this very short little story you will have gone through all the emotions of love abandonment shame guilt envy and hatred. The characters though few still feel fully developed and realised. Give this a go if you like your short tales with feeling and creepy revenge. -- Born of Man and Woman - Richard Matheson

[Debra]

Stephen King recommended book and authoras noted in Chapter 9 of Berkley's 1983 paperback edition of Danse Macabre.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Matheson's first short story collection, which hasn't been reprinted since the 50s, is back in a new fine press edition. Having read Penguin's The Best of Richard Matheson last year, he quickly became one of my favorite mid-century horror writers (a period I consider both my favorite period of horror literature, and one of the most underrated) alongside Charles Beaumont. This collection contains his most "hard" science fiction stories (and I say "hard" in quotes, because the techno stuff is really kept to an absolute minimum). You can tell he was still finding his bearings here, because there are some excellent stories, including the Kafkaesque F---, but there's also some that are dated and goofy. The title story still retains its power to creep and shock after all these decades. Suntup Editions set the book in ragged-right as opposed to justified text, which gives it the feel of picking up a journal of grotesqueries. The most powerful story for me was the final one, The Traveller, which tells of an atheist time traveler who goes to witness the crcufixition and comes back with a newfound faith, not in miracles, but in human resilience. As much as I love these fine press illustrated editions, they are rather pricey, and if you're squeezed, Tor has published all of Matheson's collected short stories over four volumes, and Valancourt has published all his finished Uncollected Stories in Offbeat. But it's always interesting to see how authors originally presented their work.

[Himanshu Modi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very short story. And the point of it misses me. As a weirdly insecure kid, I guess I sometimes did fantasise being the hapless, victimised kid whose parents treat him like prisoners. Having read more into it, apparently it’s a common interpretation by children. So, maybe narrating this from the perspective of the child who escalated the fantasy by a million would have been interesting. But the story is really too short to explore this. It also is too literal. As in the kid really seems to be a mutant monster. So what was the point, that parents ought to love the children regardless? The story doesn’t offer perspectives, so as a reader I do not intend to commit anymore. Bye

[Carxofeta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pequeño relato corto de Richard Matheson, escrito en primera persona, que relata cómo es la vida de una persona que permanece atada toda su vida en un sótano de una casa y que sus padres le impiden salir de ahí para evitar que lo vean, pues lo toman por un monstruo.
Lectura obligatoria para aficionados a los relatos, al terror, a la ciencia ficción o a todo a la vez.

[Chris Aldridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second 15min of this Mindwebs audiobook , the story was from taken from the book “Third from the Sun”. The stilted narrative style perfectly compliments this account from the abused entities perspective. A Horrible horror story of mans inhumanity that is nevertheless compelling listening as you wait to discover what you would see if it looked in the mirror. Awful but excellent.

[RobLovesBooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun reading Matheson's early work. I have the Suntup Press edition which I can't bring up because Goodreads needs Matheson's birthday divided by the square root of PI times the number of gallons of water in the Indian Ocean, his dentist's cousins first born suggested name, who was the best dressed in Sumbawanga when this book was published and the publisher's favorite hamburger.

[TQPS · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe I just had no clue what was happening, but I found that I didn’t like this one as much as the other short stories I’ve seen. It didn’t deliver the impact it was aiming to deliver, also being too short to truly do it for me. Idk.

[Sean Walczak · Rating 3 out of 5]

NOTE: This rating is solely for the short story of the title, not for the entire collection.

I'm sure this was quite shocking back when it was written; now, it would probably be considered rather tame. It is still an unsettling short story.

[Jonathan Wade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this twice over, at 16 pages it’s only short. Not sure what the green slime was, assumed it was blood (the child not knowing colours) then on second read I was trying to work out whether it was indeed a child? Can’t really find any reference to any other ideas?
Still, a very powerful read

[Robert Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Matheson is a master of genre fiction, short and otherwise. The title story is gleefully disturbing.

[Laur-Marian Mertea · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely creepy early short stories by Matheson.

[Emespre]

Very unsettling. Michael Hansen's narration had a creepy, otherworldly feel to it that really suited the atmosphere.

[Gr1972 · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 out of 5

[Aimee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really good, really haunting, but too sad for me.

[Sergii · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sad. Abstract. Not sure why it was classified as sci-fi though.

[Bradley Hill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Feb 26 2023

[Midge ☠ ★ 99% poison ★ ☠]

Read:
- Born of Man and Woman

[Sasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe Le Guin must've been influenced by this when she wrote her fabulous Omelas story. It is haunting and sad.

[Jimgosailing · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great 1950s SF story that’s remains timeless (with it interesting little twist at the end?)

Science Fiction Hall of Fame, vol 1