I Am Legend

I Am Legend is one of the seminal works in horror/sci-fi literature. Written by Richard Matheson in 1954, it basically introduced the concept of "zombie" stories, although that word is never used in the book (nor is it used in the film that was inspired by it, Night of the Living Dead).

The slim book is the story of Robert Neville, who believes he is the last man on Earth. He lives in a heavily fortified house in Los Angeles. By day he is free to do anything, as long as he stays within drivable distance from his house to return by nightfall. At night is when "they" come out.

Neville refers to them as vampires, but in our parlance of today we'd call them zombies. They are victims of sort of plague that Neville is immune to--he thinks he's immune because he was once bitten by a vampire bat--but exhibit all the lore of vampires: they are resistant to garlic, die when exposed to sunlight, fear the cross, etc. What Matheson does in this book is have Neville research just what scientific reasons these old tropes may exist.

"Something black and of the night had come crawling out of the Middle Ages. Something with no framework or credulity, something that had been consigned, fact and figure, to the pages of imaginative literature. Vampires were passe, Summers' idylls or Stoker's melodramatics or a brief inclusion in the Britannica or grist for the pulp writer's mill or raw material for the B-film factories. A tenuous legend passed from century to century. Well, it was true." Matheson, in essence, tried to update the vampire based on modern science.

While the scenes of interaction with the vampires are hair-raising stuff--he goes to visit his wife's grave and finds that his watch has stopped, a bad thing since it's a cloudy day and he can't gauge when the sun is going down--what Neville mostly battles is loneliness. He drinks, he listens to classical music, he contemplates why he persists on staying alive. One section of the book concerns his efforts to befriend a dog, the only living thing he has seen in some time. Later, he will find another human, but can't be sure if she's one of them or not (she does not react well to garlic).

I Am Legend has been made into a movie three times. I have seen one of them: The Omega Man, which was very much of its time (1971). I'll take a look at the other two in the coming days.