Gabrielle (Reading Rampage)'s Reviews > I Am Legend

Let me being this review by saying that I never saw any of the movie adaptations of this book. I turned the first page of "I Am Legend" with zero knowledge of what Hollywood did to it because a friend of mine gave me an important warning. He said: "When it comes to this story, there is no movie; there is just the book".

The story is Robert Neville's, the last man on Earth after a strange plague has turned every other human being into a vampire. He lives in a carefully barricaded house, stuffed with canned and frozen food, books and records, as well as a hothouse full of garlic. He spends his days in the same monotonous way: making stakes and roping up garlic cloves on every possible entrance to his refuge. When he's not doing that, he's using up all his stakes to kill the sleeping vampires in their dens. His nights are spend listening to the vampires crawling around his house, fighting among each other and trying to lure him out. He's kind of on the edge of going insane when the book begins: this has been going on for 5 months, and he's fraying at the seams.

He manages to hang on to sanity when he decides to approach the vampire situation from a scientific point of view: catch one of them, get some of their blood, study it, try to find some sort of vaccine or antibiotic to cure the disease that took away everyone he loved. This goal carries him forward, until the day he finds himself face to face with someone else who can walk in the day time.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the prose: Matheson is succinct, but also very elegant, and he does built dramatic ramp ups of tension when you least expect it. "I Am Legend" is not the scariest book I've ever read, but I did make me turn the pages frantically because I had to know what was going to happen. He also conveys Neville's emotions very well: his paranoia, his heartbreak, his frustration...

I won't spoil anything, but there's an obvious lesson in this book: to the "monsters", the "good guy" is a murderer. But more than the simple morals message, the thing that really stuck with me was the atmosphere of decay, paranoia and white-knuckle resistance to madness. It would be so easy for Neville to give up: all he has to do is walk out of his house after sundown and his struggle is over. But he resists, he holes up, he fights back. The so-called twist can have more than one meaning: the importance of perspective, sure, but also the futility of fighting something so big it can never, ever be defeated. It made me think of all those atrocious zombie TV shows (yes, "Walking Dead", I mean you!) where it gets to a point where you just want the dumb characters to get caught and bitten already, because they have committed so many atrocities to stay alive that they can't really be referred to as protagonists anymore.

I also loved the way this book is a very self-aware vampire story. Neville gets to wondering what the deal is with the stakes and the garlic, and can't find any rational reason for their effectiveness. This little wink to the absurdity of the legends was a really nice touch of dark humor in what could have otherwise been a way too serious and depressing book.

If you like vampire stories, this is a classic that you shouldn't miss! A quick, but riveting read with a great ending.

(I still haven't watched any of the movies, and frankly, I don't intend to.)