The Price by Neil Gaiman, is a short story that may not include much detail but is certainly a

deep feature for analysis. Starting off with the fact that the story is written as if it was from
his perspective, the message he’s trying to captivate is quite dark. The story starts with him
describing how he and his family as a pure act of kindness rescue cats that are mostly
abandoned by people close to their house. They take care of them and keep them until the
cats decide to leave. Usually, they have lots of these felines around but there is one in
particular that the story centralizes on; the black cat. Seemingly well and a little old, the black
cat lurks the porch of the narrator’s house. At some point, the narrators leaves for a few
weeks as he was working on a book and when he comes back, he finds the black cat gravely
hurt. This keeps happening and he decides to take the cat into the house, as a way of
protecting him from whatever creature that is hurting him so bad. During those days, the
whole house suffered from very bad luck and terrible things happened around to the family.
This stops when the narrator decides to take the cat back outside and hunt for the beast
instead. What he stumbles upon is the Devil. The narrator says he was changing appearance
and had a very evil look. The cat fights the devil out of the house as his owner watches
everything. And is with this that he realizes that the Black Cat is the good omen that keeps
the Devil and the bad things away. He takes the pain for everyone else in the house.

What I personally perceive from the story is that Gaiman is trying to explain that on
everyone’s life (even for the ones who do nothing but good), the bad is always haunting and
lurking and there is always something or someone who was to pay the price and take all the
pain or else everyone else will. It could represent many things. It could be seen from a
religious perspective and the cat is portraying the savior of whatever religion since that’s the
principal of many. What I choose to adopt as my perception is that Gaiman’s intention with
the story is to use a simplistic setting to explain what different religions have made beyond
complicated.