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I AM LEGEND By Richard Matheson
Life sucks for poor Robert Neville. He’s the last man alive on Earth. Everyone else has become a vampire. Every day, Neville goes out and kills as many as he can while they sleep. When darkness falls, he huddles in his house and waits out another long night, hoping his barricades hold. Don’t get the wrong idea. Neville isn’t Buffy, born to kick the ass of anything with fangs and a Transylvanian accent. He is a victim: one day, he’s an ordinary Joe; the next he’s an ordinary Joe who’s up shit creek without a paddle. Rather than giving us a one-dimensional tale about hunting vamps, Matheson puts us deep in the psyche of a man who refuses to succumb to Fate. Neville fights his predicament—and his own despair—every step of the way, right up until the last page. I Am Legend has been called “one of the top ten all-time best novels about vampirism” by Fangoria magazine. It hooks the reader right away with one of the best opening sentences of any story I have ever read, and only gets better from there: “On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when the sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.” It’s also the inspiration for such films as The Omega Man and Night of the Living Dead. But unlike the characters in these films, Robert Neville is a character you’ll actually care about as he tries to survive every night in Fangtown. We feel Neville’s pain and loss at the death of his wife, and his grief at what he had to do to ensure she stayed dead. We feel his stubborn defiance and will to live war with despair and futility in the face of overwhelming odds. We live his obsessions; first to kill the vampires, then to understand them; and finally— hope against hope—to possibly cure them. We feel the gut-punch when Neville realizes that has become the anomaly in a world in which vampirism is the norm: “Normalcy (is) a majority concept; the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.” Everyone’s a vampire, including his friends, neighbors and family. Everyone but Robert Neville. But then one day, after countless days spent hunting and researching and countless nights besieged by the undead, Neville makes a startling discovery: a woman. Outside. In the sunlight. Are there others like him? How long could you survive in a world full of vampires? How long would you want to?
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