I Am Legend (review)

On those cloudy days, Robert Neville was never sure when sunset came, and sometimes they were in the streets before he could get back.

• Title: I Am Legend
• Author: Richard Matheson
• Genre: Horror/Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
• Year: 1954

Richard Matheson’s name should be better known. I’m not making that claim out of some sort of fan loyalty or sense that he hasn’t gotten his just recognition, but purely as an observation of just how hugely influential his work has been. Though he can’t be pigeonholed into any one genre, he did write horror before that genre even had a name, and his style of looking rationally at the supernatural was a tremendous influence on how future writers would approach horror’s traditional tropes. But Matheson’s ideas have truly permeated mainstream culture, not only from the numerous film adaptations of his stories and his own work in television and movies, but through the work of those he has influenced. His classic work of a vampire apocalypse, I Am Legend, is one of the most influential novels of the 20th century — go ahead and flip through cable on any given weekend and you’ll get a look at the novel’s many descendants in the form of vampire and zombie movies and series in endless abundance.

I Am Legend, of course, has also been made into a film — three times. The adaptations range from the well-intentioned to the completely misguided, but they do at least convey the main premise of the book. I Am Legend is a last man on earth story, the account of Robert Neville, the apparently sole survivor of an apocalypse that has left him alone in a world of monsters.

Neville’s monsters are vampires — night-dwelling, garlic-averse, blood suckers that were once his friends and neighbors. By day, Neville prowls his town and stakes whatever sleeping vamps he can find, and attends to more mundane chores like gathering supplies and maintaining his car. By night he sits barricaded in his home — once shared with a wife and young daughter — and has a drink or two and turns his stereo up to drown out the challenges of the creatures that besiege him each evening. His routine is the only thing that keeps him sane, but even then he teeters on the precipice of madness.

And here is where I Am Legend truly lifts itself above just being an interesting concept into the category of a classic, for it is an intense psychological study of loneliness and obsession. Neville, as we encounter him, is convincingly cracking up, undergoing maddening pangs of isolation and sexual frustration. He begins to do stupid, impulsive, dangerous things such as racing off to visit his wife’s grave and staying out in the streets too long, or flinging open his door to shoot the vampires that taunt him. He is a man alone, with no future, and only his personal vendettas and scientific curiosity in the vampire phenomenon provide his motive force.

Matheson takes great pains to present scientific reasons for the vampire epidemic, and for the nature and behavior of the vamps themselves. As far as I know, this is the first time the vampire legend was dissected in such a way that vampirism is presented as a disease like any other — albeit one with some rather extreme symptoms — and this idea has become the cornerstone of the modern take on vampires. But Matheson’s vamps are not the angsty goth teenagers of modern vampire lore, but debased monsters that retain but a shred of their humanity. Here, then, is the genesis of the modern zombie tale as well — the world-spanning apocalypse that transforms people into monsters, confronting the sole survivor barricaded in his home.

But that’s not all his vampires turn out to be, but to talk about that — and the final scene that illuminates just what the title I Am Legend alludes to, would be to spoil the book. Suffice it to say that Neville, imperfectly adjusted as he may be to the new dead world around him, finds himself swept up in yet another transformation. He is a relic of another time, and the book’s real power comes out of making us feel the enormity of the change taking place — in that respect, and for its adherence to realism in explaining the vampire plague, I Am Legend more closely resembles science fiction than horror.

This short book — almost a novella — packs a considerable punch in it’s depiction of isolation, obsession, and radical change and for that reason, and for its clear place at the birth of so many of our dominant myths, I Am Legend is without a doubt a modern classic.

• I Am Legend at Amazon