I Am Legend
Posted on August 16, 2005 in Books
I started reading I Am Legend on my last day at IGS and finally today I had time to finish it off and wow it’s just brilliant, definitely one of the better books I’ve read ever. The story is about Richard Neville who is the last human alive in a world were all the humans have turned into vampires. By day he seeks to destroy these fiends but during night he bars himself up in his house and hopes that the garlic and wooden planks he’s set up to protect himself will keep the children of the night away. The book itself is not just a horror filled thriller but also a examination of the nature of man and how extreme situations affect him. Richard Matheson wrote the book back in 1954 even though it takes place in the mid seventies and he pulls it of well. This a timeless classic and a must read for all, which shouldn’t be a problems since the paperback novel is only around 150 pages long and can be finished in a matter of hours.
Rating: 5/5
I Am Legend is a trailblazing and later much imitated story that reinvented the vampire myth as SF. Without losing the horror, it presents vampirism as a disease whose secrets can be unlocked by scientific tools. The hero Robert Neville, perhaps the last uninfected man on Earth, finds himself in a paranoid nightmare. By night, the bloodthirsty undead of small-town America besiege his barricaded house: their repeated cry “Come out, Neville!” is a famous SF catchphrase. By day, when they hide in shadow and become comatose, Neville gets out his wooden stakes for an orgy of slaughter. He also discovers pseudoscientific explanations, some rather strained, for vampires’ fear of light, vulnerability to stakes though not bullets, loathing of garlic, and so on. What gives the story its uneasy power is the gradual perspective shift which shows that by fighting monsters Neville is himself becoming monstrous–not a vampire but something to terrify vampires and haunt their dreams as a dreadful legend from the bad old days.
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